Miko Kings

Content Warning: This section discusses racism and intense violence and includes brief mentions of sexual violence (including acts with children and animals). Outdated and offensive terms referring to Indigenous Americans are included only in quotations.

The Prelude takes place on the set of the film about the talented Choctaw baseball team: the Miko Kings. Carl Laemmle, a film producer from Chicago, has come to Oklahoma to make the movie, hiring the local Choctaw population. They begrudgingly take on a new look: “Their long hair shorn and their faces scrubbed clean, the Choctaws wear clothes cut from modern textiles, the same as any Broadway clerk. They represent savagery gone civilized” (7). Other Choctaws are put into stereotypical, racist clothing (such as fringed shirts, leggings, and braided wigs with the wrong type of plait) to distinguish them as the Choctaw team.

Hope Little Leader, the pitcher for the real-life Miko Kings, takes his place on the ballfield set for filming. He is one of the players in the stereotypical Choctaw clothing, and his teammates tease him for it. He remembers how the film came about. It started with a “semi-fictitious story about the team that ‘pitted the white man against the red man’” (9), which was based on the Miko Kings’ incredible defeat against a top-tier white baseball team from Chicago.