on the prairie diamond

• By way of the Library of Congress Blog comes word of the new thematic portal, “America’s Pastime,” that provides ready access to the Library’s extensive collection of baseball-related resources.

• The Boston Phoenix reviews books that plumb the seven deadly sins of baseball, including a capsule review of Tom Swift’s new biography of Charles Albert Bender:

In Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (University of Nebraska Press), journalist Tom Swift has crafted a substantial, vivid story of one of the best pitchers of the game’s early years. Charles Albert Bender was a member of the Ojibwa tribe. He was much loved by his Philadelphia Athletics teammates. But opponents, fans, and media were a different story. Newspapers portrayed him as a crude caricature. “I’m sorry, old Pitch-Em-Heap,” said dead-ball-era star “Turkey” Mike Donlin as he strode to the plate, “but here’s where you go back to the reservation.” At the Polo Grounds during the 1905 World Series, the cat calls shrieked: “Back to the teepee for you!”***

• A fantastic profile of Chickasaw composer, Jerod Tate, his work with the San Francisco Symphony, and latest CD from Thunderbird Records. Be sure not to miss the audio links.

• And at the Iroquois Indian Museum, only 40 miles from Cooperstown, a new exhibit, Baseball’s League of Nations: A Tribute to Native American Baseball Players, which opens April 1st and runs through the end of the year.

***Fun fact from the Baseball Almanac: “There are fourteen former ballplayers who were either commonly called ‘chief’ or simply nicknamed ‘chief’ and in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians they wrote, ‘It is worth pointing out that while American Indian ballplayers were nearly always called ‘Chief,’ this nickname was used much less often among Indians themselves. John ‘Chief’ Meyers, for example, a Mission Indian who played against Bender, referred to him as Charlie.’” (Our thanks to Allison for the link.)

If it’s Saturday, it must be Saint Paul! LeAnne will be reading from Miko Kings at Common Good Books at 7pm on Saturday, March 29th. For more information, click here.

And here too, is another echo from MSU. Asani, a First Nations recording group of three most talented and lovely native women leads participants at Returning the Gift in a group sing. If you’re looking for some incredible vocals, hot rhythms, and sounds, Asani’s for you! Check it out at: www.asani.org.

LeAnne will be reading from Miko Kings at Prairie Lights this Wednesday, March 26th, from 7-8pm. Contrary to popular belief, the land is not flat, the apples are plentiful, and the bookstores some of the best around. For more information, click here. Please join us if you’re in the area!

Between workshop sessions at Returning the Gift, Brenda Child (Ojibwe author of Boarding School Seasons) and Daniel Justice (Cherokee, author of Our Fire Survives the Storm) are caught on-camera talking about who they’re rooting for in this year’s tight race. I bet you thought I was going to say, Obama or Clinton. Nope, I meant Joba Chamberlain or Jacoby Ellsbury.

Related: Deadspin’s Baseball Season Previews of the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Do we look happy? I’ll tell you why. I’ve just been accepted into Richard’s SOS society! Next time you go to a Richard van Camp reading, ask him to tell a sacred organism story. You’ll die. You’ll just die. Well, you won’t actually die, but . . . . Better yet, ask him if you can join his Sacred Organism Society. These are stories written by Natives, IP’s, AI’s, [Indigenous Persons, American Indians] that are not about rage, not about remaining victims of oppression, but are stories about love! At the 2008 Returning the Gift Conference at Michigan State University, March 13-15, Richard van Camp enthralled us with his SOS stories. He also read from his newest book: Welcome Song for Baby: A Lullaby for Newborns. It’s a must have. I also highly recommend The Lesser Blessed. Get it. Read. Laugh. Cry. Love.

Bonus: Be sure to read Richard’s story, Show me Yours, in the November 2007 issue of The Walrus Magazine.

Pitching for UNK’s Native Literature classes: the famous-fab duo, Susanne Bloomfield and Allison Hedge Coke.

Second hour Native American Literature class at UNK. They had just finished reading Miko Kings in Susanne Bloomfield’s class, and wanted details of the love story, number theory, and whether Hope’s hands had indeed been cut off, since he was able to turn back time with his famous in-shoot!

I just returned from the University of Nebraska, Kearney, where Joba Chamberlain, Ho-Chunk, began his college studies. Poet Allison Hedge Coke (who brought me to UNK, a great poet and teacher and author of Dog Road Woman, Blood Run, and recent memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer) tells me that Joba was picked up by University of Nebraska, Lincoln because of his baseball prowess. From UNL, the Yankees snagged Chamberlain, and, as the old saying goes, the rest is history.

The Ho-chunk pitcher grew up in Nebraska where the Sandhill Cranes migration happens every year as it has for 44 million years. Incredible as it sounds that is what the scientists tell us about the cranes. The oldest bird species. Who can ponder 44 million years? Beginning around Feb 16, through April 15, the cranes fly in up and down the Platte River.

This is a picture of one of the Sandhill Crane blinds at the Rowe Sanctuary, just outside of Kearney Nebraska. We gathered at 5:30 in the morning and quietly walked out to one of this crane blind and witnessed the swarming of some 500,000 Sandhill cranes at sunrise. An incredible site, the sound is as loud as the loudest freight train.

Another connection for me is that my colleague, Richard Powers, won the 2006 National Book Award for The Echomaker, and it’s set in Kearney, Nebraska. Powers teaches the graduate fiction workshop in the MFA program at Illinois:

Again there is only here, now, the river’s braid, a feast of waste grain that will carry these flocks north, beyond the Arctic Circle. As first light breaks, the fossils return to life, testing their legs, tasting the frozen air, leaping free, bills skyward and throats open. And then, as if the night took nothing, forgetting everything but this moment, the dawn sandhills start to dance. Dances as they have since before this river started.

Credit: Allison Hedge Coke

Depending upon your perspective, it’s rather opportune or an irony that A. G. Spalding’s middle name was, indeed, ‘Goodwill.’ Mastermind of the 1888 baseball world tour that showcased star players from the National league, including his own Chicago White Stockings, Spalding conceived of his players as “baseball missionaries,” traveling to Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, Egypt, and much of Europe, to proselytize both the greatness of the game as well as that of the US. Depending upon your perspective.

So newspaper reports that a letter was awaiting the team when they arrived in San Francisco–from a King, no less–inviting them to play in Honolulu seven days later, seem as much 19th century PR slug as genuine news item. Or as it appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on November 17, 1888:

Manager Anson, who is taking two American baseball nines to Australia, found a letter from King Kalakaua of the Sandwich Islands awaiting him in San Francisco. Kalakaua requested Anson to bring his players to Honolulu if possible. The dusky island potentate felt certain, he said, that the Sandwich Islanders would be delighted with the game.

Sounds quite impromptu and impressive, no? Minus the bit about the “dusky island potentate”…

In truth, the team’s exhibition in Honolulu had been in the works for weeks, enough time to build a grandstand for 800 at Makiki Field and plan an elaborate celebration led by the Royal Hawaiian Band. Spalding’s cousin, a Honolulu businessman, chaired the welcoming committee. As it happens, the ship that the team was on would arrive a day later than scheduled, and the games would not be played because of the blue laws at the time. (The team arrived on a Sunday.) Baseball by this point in Hawaii’s history was not some miraculous western invention but part of the rhythm of the islands, played by the sons of missionaries as early as the 1840s. Mark Twain too is known to have watched games while he was there in the 1860s, though his commentary after was disparaging.

By way of our correspondent, Lara Mann, comes this find:

This must be a pretty wild picture. From The Milwaukee Sentinel, July 30, 1892.

A Cleveland, O., engraver, under the auspices of the baseball league, has just published a picture representing the Indians playing baseball when Columbus discovered America. And the Indian spectators are so absorbingly interested in the game that the sudden appearance of Columbus and his Spanish companions from another world does not evidently divert their attention from the game until finished, although the Indians don’t know but that they were from the moon or the celestial regions.

Much has been said of the species of insanity that reveals itself in the mind of the baseball devotee of to-day during the progress of a game or pending the report of one, but it wasn’t supposed the noble red man was affected by a similar weakness. During the Minneapolis convention, when President-making for the greatest Republic on earth was supposed to interest the average mind, the baseball fanatic, when the most exciting scene of the convention was on, would come into the Times’ telegraph room and breathlessly inquire for the latest news from the plains of Bitter creek, where the club from Podunk Center was contesting a game of ball with the amateur nine from Litchfield Corners.

It looks, too, from casual study of this reminiscent picture from the special artist of Mr. Christopher Columbus, that the Indians, in 1492, had the same rules and code of procedure that the American league has adopted just 400 years later, for 1892. It has been supposed that the great American game of baseball was progressive, like everything else, but probably the Indians had it then reduced down to perfection so that progress was impossible. Some of the literary cranks, who hate baseball on account of its monopolizing so much space in the newspapers, have told us it was a barbarous game; and perhaps they knew all the time that it originated and was perfected by the barbarians of North America, since it is native-born. No naturalization papers have been necessary, and outside of any legal procedure, it would seem that under the refining influences of civilization it has surprisingly preserved its native purity.

What interests me is that the picture was patronized by the Baseball League, depicting Indians as the originators of baseball. I assume that they were trying to show that baseball is wholly America’s sport because nothing can be more indigenous to America than Indigenous Americans. The whole thing’s kind of back handed though: in once instance we invented baseball, but in another we didn’t care that a whole mess of people were arriving on our shores. I don’t know where else they were thinking baseball came from, but the tone of the article makes this proposition sound like the latest, wildest scientific theory: that Indians could have invented baseball. And of course the article ends with the disclaimer that if Indians did in fact invent baseball, then it must have been “barbarous” and “reduced down to perfection,” a phrase I find to be both hilarious and two-faced: “reduced” as in “boiled down to, purified” or “reduced” as in “simplified, dumbed-down?” Not quite the unambiguous journalistic style people seem to shoot for these days.

[ed. The description of this etching reminds us a lot of this one in which Alaskan natives are depicted playing baseball in the dead of winter, while wearing seal skin parkas and mittens, naturally. But we've yet to track down the etching described in the article above. Anyone?]