The journey of a tribe, and an individual, seeking recognition and identity
Book Review
Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian's Journey Home
By Chris La Tray
Milkweed: 320 pages, $28
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What does it mean to “belong”? And how do we know when we feel it?
Chris La Tray, a storyteller and a member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, sets out in “Becoming Little Shell” to explore the meanings of belonging in a country where many of the things that once created a sense of belonging — ties to the land, knowing one’s heritage — have been replaced by “history.”
La Tray acknowledges that not all Americans feel this loss so acutely. “Much of this seems like ancient history to many people, the ‘olden days’ as we used to call them as kids when we chased each other around with toy pistols and rifles,” he writes. “The reality is that it’s a living, ongoing history that deeply affects the lives of many people every day.”
The degradation of two powerful, independent Muslim women — one historical, one fictional — echoes 500 years later in the name of our state.
Even within his own family, La Tray was cut off from his ancestry. His father was Métis and Chippewa, his mother white, but his dad refused any acknowledgment of his heritage. It wasn’t until 1996 — when the younger La Tray was 29 — at his grandfather’s funeral, the pews packed with Native Americans, that it hit him that he didn’t know what tied him to this community of mourners.
La Tray summarizes the years between his grandfather’s death and one particular weekend in October 2013. “Overcoming a Western Legacy,” a talk given by historian Nicholas Vrooman at the Montana Festival of the Book, galvanized La Tray. Learning about the Little Shell, a landless tribal nation in Montana that includes European-Native Métis people, revealed missing pieces of who he was and moved him to action.
Deborah Jackson Taffa’s memoir “Whiskey Tender” explores complexities of her family history and her own life as the child of a Quechan (Yuma) and Laguna Pueblo father and a Catholic Latina.
La Tray’s memoir is not only about his ties to a people; it’s also an expansive and poignant memoir of the land and the Indigenous people who lived in Montana for 3,000 to 5,000 years before the westward expansion of European settlers.
Seventeenth-century French explorers and the Indigenous peoples of what are now Canada and the U.S. formed trading cooperatives often cemented through marriage. The Métis, their descendants and the diaspora of the dispossessed Pembina Chippewa dwelled on land that stretched from Coeur d’Alene to Fargo, and from Saskatoon to Sioux Falls.
La Tray’s journey to discover his own identity is paralleled by an undertaking of the Little Shell nation over recent decades to gain federal recognition. Because a chief in the late 19th century refused to sign treaties with a government that ignored the agreements it forced upon tribes, the Little Shell were pushed from their homes and denied recognition as a tribe.
La Tray’s travels are chronicled in a series of beautifully rendered chapters in which personal experiences become both a telescope into the past and a microscope on current realities. In one chapter, he and his wife offer a distressed young woman a ride, a tale that turns into a history of the role that Métis women played as marriage partners, keepers of traditions and as objects of derision by settlers. Racism and misogyny worked in tandem. “The clergy identified all Indigenous women as inherently promiscuous and blamed them for the immorality that was taking place,” La Tray writes, adding that this thinking “remains in many modern communities all across the west.” History has contributed to the continuing genocide of Indigenous women.
In another chapter, in which La Tray details the steps to become an enrolled member of a specific tribe, he links the current obsession with DNA ancestry tests to the highly divisive concept of “blood quantum,” the measure of “blood” imposed by white settlers to determine whom they categorized as white. The modern and historical versions cause deep rifts among Native communities. Tracing biological ancestry has exposed “pretendians” — those who falsely claim to be Native American — but, La Tray says, also could erase entire peoples with narrow definitions of who belongs.
One of the most remarkable revelations in the memoir is how the process of establishing his identity expanded his understanding that any identity is intersectional. It shows up in various ways, but it comes into sharpest relief in coming to terms with his father’s denial of La Tray’s ties to the Métis. Acknowledging the various identities he contains leads him to recognize that being part of a “landless” people ties him to unhoused people everywhere, in history and today.
“Becoming Little Shell” provides readers with a detailed history and a close examination of American society, which can make for a daunting start. The opening chapters, recounting La Tray’s slow process of understanding, feel scattered and disengaged. But the tentative beginning turns into a memoir of deep joy. In reckoning with his and his tribe’s history of repeated trauma, La Tray finds new beauty, like the green shoots and wildflowers that grow in the wake of a forest inferno. In La Tray’s understanding, trauma is not the end so much as part of a cycle of destruction and renewal.
After formally establishing his membership in the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, La Tray captures one such moment of that joy.
“I take a breath. I’m part of this, part of them. I wipe the sweat from my brow and take a quick look around me for snakes. Then I follow the trail down the slope, across time, through genocide and diaspora, and fear and death and now rebirth, to food, to companionship, and increasingly, to community.”
Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic who lives on Kalapooia land in Oregon. Threads: Lorraine2536
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