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An Unfolding Story: A Review of Chris La Tray’s Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home

By Jessica Gigot

 
Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home
Chris La Tray
Milkweed Editions | 2024 | 320 pages

   
Recently, I found myself going down a genealogy wormhole, trying to find out how and why my paternal ancestors arrived in the Midwest in the late 1800s. My father’s parents didn’t divulge many family stories, if there were many to share. Opposed to paying for an actual DNA test, I started scrolling through the numerous free ancestry websites. However, by midnight I had to push back from the screen and check in with myself. What was I so desperate to figure out about myself that I didn’t already know? What would this chromosomal insight change about my current reality?

Becoming Little Shell, by Chris La TrayFor Chris La Tray, the answer is everything. With a notion of his Native American ancestry and some memory of meeting various extended family members in his youth, La Tray took on a decade-long investigation—which included blood work and a chance encounter with the late state folklorist Nicholas Vrooman—that began in earnest after his father’s death in 2014. This investigation comes to an important culmination with Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, published by Milkweed Editions.

La Tray knew that both sides of his father’s family may have been Chippewa or Métis, or both. Métis is defined by the University of British Columbia’s Indigenous Foundations as “a collective of cultures and ethnic identities that resulted from unions between Aboriginal and European people in what is now Canada.” La Tray dedicates several parts of his book to describing this complicated history of the Métis in Montana and points out that métis is “French for mixed, or mixed blood.” However, he follows a winding path back to the Little Shell Tribe.

“The makeup of the Little Shell Tribe is much more complex than the name might suggest,” he writes. “Chippewa is a good place to start when identifying the people, but the tribe is really a polyethnic amalgamation of what occurred culturally on the northern plains over three centuries, beginning with the seventeenth.” He later clarifies, “This vicinity, this Red River Valley on either side of the U.S./Canada border, is the region I’m writing from. Not because that’s where ‘real’ Métis come from—that’s not for me to say—but because my people, my family, and my Little Shell relatives are generally recognized as having originated from there.”

Throughout the book, La Tray shares the story of the complicated life of Chief Little Shell and the treaties that whittled away the already meager reservation land they were allotted, rendering them landless. He writes, “Little Shell would spend the rest of his life trying to preserve a people and culture that was threatened on all sides.”

In 2026, the United States will celebrate its 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Commemoration of this milestone, I believe, should include continued confrontation with intergenerational trauma caused by colonization and the wildly extractive and inequitable way this country formed and expanded westward. In Becoming Little Shell, La Tray does not shy away from retelling this complicated history and acknowledging current day impacts.

Serendipitously, La Tray’s journey toward becoming an official member of the Little Shell Tribe coincided with the Little Shell Tribe’s goal to gain federal recognition. As reported in High Country News, “In December 2019, the Little Shell became the 574th federally recognized tribe in the United States, and on January 25 [2020], tribal citizens celebrated their victory and remembered those who helped pave the way for it. Federal recognition will give Little Shell members access to healthcare and social services.” La Tray’s personal discoveries mirror the Little Shell Tribe’s reclamation journey—a shared narrative that is vital to rewriting American history and, ideally, a commitment to sovereignty going forward.          

In trying to relate to Becoming Little Shell, I thought about the common impulse we have to understand our ancestors as extensions of ourselves. In that pursuit, there can be moments of clarity when we see them as human beings versus elusive legends. What also gets illuminated is how personal and societal forces influence a generation. La Tray gains further insight into his father’s life and experience throughout the book. Several people whom he encounters and seeks out, including a distant cousin and tribal elder, guide him along in his search. Although La Tray can’t fully understand why his father and grandfather denied their Indigenous heritage, a mix of forgiveness, compassion, humor, and self-discovery have allowed La Tray to forge his own identity.

As a poet myself, I appreciate La Tray’s curious and associative mind. He is the author of two books of poetry and is the 2023-2025 Poet Laureate of Montana. I am always eager to see what poets will do in a longer form; the result is usually inventive and deeply piercing. In Becoming Little Shell, La Tray’s storytelling is not quite memoir, but feels more intimate than most nonfiction works. The timeline is clear while not being strictly linear. While I struggled at times with casual, personal commentary muddying historical content, the dialogue with experts and tribal elders as well as La Tray’s descriptions of his visits to historical museums and sites add a unique charisma to this book while also dispelling dishonest accounts that have been taken as fact. An example is his discussion of Hill 57, a place with a confusing history but of great significance to the Little Shell Tribe:

In researching and writing this book, I’ve become more involved with the tribe than I imagined I would when all this started. I’ve learned much of our history and met some wonderful people.

This book reminded me that truth takes time. Start where you are, pay attention to signs, and be ready to let go of what you thought you knew.

I hope to read more books like this in the future. As La Tray writes in his introduction, “It is a story still unfolding.”

  

 

Jessica GigotJessica Gigot is a poet, farmer, and writing coach. She lives on a little sheep farm in the Skagit Valley. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour (Wandering Aengus Press, 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award. Jessica’s writing and reviews appear in several publications, such as OrionEcotone, and Poetry Northwest. She is currently a poetry editor for The Hopper. Her award-winning memoir, A Little Bit of Land, was published by Oregon State University Press in September 2022.

Read “Moon,” an excerpt of Jessica Gigot’s memoir A Little Bit of Land, appearing in Terrain.org.

Header image of Montana landscape by Simmons Buntin.