on the prairie diamond

Since the intrepid world traveler and blogger Dean Rader of The Weekly Rader has been posting “Southwest Semiotics” on his site, I brought back some pictures from my latest escapades “back east”: Pictured here are American Indian headstones from the graveyard at Hampton University, when it was called Hampton’s Normal School for Blacks and Indians. [I was recently giving a reading from MK at William and Mary University in Williamsburg Virgina, not far from Hampton.] John Miller, a PhD candidate in American Studies was kind enough to drive us to the area, and we read aloud the names of the American Indian students buried at the cemetery. I don’t think there is an Indian family in America that hasn’t been affected by the boarding school experience.

My uncles were at Jones Academy, a boarding school now operated by the Choctaw Nation. It is also the school mentioned in Miko Kings when in 1896 Hope Little Leader learns he can throw an in-down fastball.

LeAnne will be reading and signing copies of Miko Kings at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in Evanston, IL on Sunday, May 4th, 1-2pm. For more information and directions to the museum, click here.

LeAnne reading from Miko Kings at the University of Georgia, April 11, 2008.

* Hobart’s Annual Baseball Web Issue. An excess of sentiment and perhaps better judgment leaves me helpless to the charms of Andrew Ervin’s “The Phillie Phanatic,” who is rather certainly related to the Snuffleupaggi of Hawai‘i. (The Phanatic, not Ervin, though one can never assume.)

* A excellent article about how the Suquamish are using their history and love of baseball as a way to strengthen cultural and community ties (via):

In terms of the Suquamish Tribe’s 10,000 year history, the sports are a footnote. But in terms of baseball’s relatively short history, the tribe has been part of the story almost since the game’s start in the early 1800s.

It’s believed that when white settlers landed on what are now Kitsap County shores in the 1850s in search of timber, they brought with them a game that natives took to quickly. Two photographs from the late 1800s — one in Tribal Council member Chuck Deam’s office, the other hanging in the tribe’s museum — show men holding what appear to be baseball bats.

Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman, who played on a famed Suquamish softball team in 1984, said an early native game played on tide flats in areas like Indianola was probably similar to baseball or lacrosse.

“Baseball wasn’t a big jump for them,” he said.

* A review of Peter Morris’s new history of the early organized game, But Didn’t We Have Fun?, found here.

* The philosopher John Rawls understood baseball to be in perfect geometric equilibrium, though commenters disagree. Or as Alex Beam says, “When the goalie comes out of the crease, he’s fair game. And when the philosophy professor emerges from Emerson Hall heading for Fenway, we can argue back.”

* Then again, maybe not: Heller’s “Joe” Baseball Glove Sofa.

For all you baseball fans out there who wonder: Could Indians have possibly, in their wildest dreams, invented the root game of baseball? Answer: Yes. Stay tuned and I’ll begin to blog about this, play by play!

LeAnne will be in Rochester, NY on Sunday, April 6, 2pm to screen Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire at the 2008 Rochester Native American Film Festival.  She will also be reading from Miko Kings on Monday April 7, 7pm at Barnes & Noble Pittsford, 3349 Monroe Ave.

LeAnne will be reading from Miko Kings and lecturing about the invention of baseball at the University of Chicago on April 3, from 6 to 7pm, International House, National Room 1414 E. 59th Street, Chicago. A reception will begin at 5:30pm.

Noted without comment for the moment, a profile of Jacoby Ellsbury in this Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine that begins with a curious (or is it all too familiar?) take on The Warrior Tradition:

As a Native American warrior, your ultimate triumph in battle was not to kill your enemy. It was to use your speed and your smarts and your wiles to get close enough to touch him, and then to slip away. The message was irrefutable: There was still breath in his chest only because you allowed it. Talk about power. Talk about speed. Talk about pride. Native Americans had a term for their definition of victory. They called it counting coup. When Billy Mills was 8, his mother died. His father, a member of the Lakota nation in South Dakota, stroked the boy’s arms and told him, “You have broken wings.” He used a stick to draw a circle in the dirt. “Step inside your soul,” he said. “It is the pursuit of the dream that will heal you.”

He encouraged his son to find his dream in sports, which were providing the Indian with a new way to compete against the white man after centuries of slaughter and treacherous treaties. Native Americans could play by the white man’s rules, but leverage the quickness, endurance, and cunning that had always been central to their ancestors’ hunter-gatherer ways.

Read the rest of it here.

Tags: baseball, jacoby ellsbury, billy mills, counting coup