The search for origins and identity
Having grown up in proximity to a Cherokee community (Little Snowbird in Graham County), I’m familiar with and sensitive to the history and the psychology of Native peoples who have been marginalized and worse from their cultural roots and their homelands.
Chris La Tray’s new book “Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home,” (Milkweed Editions, 2024) is an Indigenous telling of one man’s life and journey to find his true Native American roots and ancestry. Having grown up in a family where his father refused to identify with his Native American origins and lineage, in midlife La Tray becomes focused on his own heredity and tribal identity, feeling instinctively that he wants to be Indian and knowing that he is Indian despite the refutation of his father.
In a book that reads like a travel journal that takes us throughout the state of Montana, we start out and travel with La Tray seeking living ancestors and the tracing of the history of his Native family name. Through diligent research and sought-out conversations with authors, activists, elders and historians, what he learns leads him to further implications as to his tribal heritage and eventually to the fact that he is certain that his bloodlines go back to the Little Shell Tribe which is a part of the larger Chippewa Nation based in Montana and beyond.
“I have no record of my father ever identifying as anything but white. My dad never wanted to be viewed as Indian. I’m the opposite,” writes La Tray.
Also, as an avid nature lover, he shares with us his love of the natural world, which would prove to be essential to his identifying with his Indian identity.
“Ever since I was young, one of my favorite things to do has been rambling around outdoors. Part of this is the result of being a child of the seventies in a household with essentially no television, living in a landscape nothing indoors could ever match,” he writes about his youth. But the search for self goes on: “A nondescript office building in Great Falls, Montana, is the tribal headquarters of the Little Shell Chippewa tribe. By now I’m pretty confident I’m Little Shell. The purpose of my visit is the first step in attempting to prove it,” he writes as he continues his travels around the state.
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But this is early on and the journey and the search progresses.
“I’m committed to uncovering the culture of my people. I’m committed to learning as much of the language as I can. I’ve always loved this land, and I’ve always loved Indian people. The more I dig into it, the more I interact with my Indian relatives, the more it blooms in my heart. The more it blooms in my spirit. Focusing on this rhetoric over blood and race is a smoke screen to mask the slow roll of continued genocide,” he writes about the whole issue of DNA testing, tribal membership and blood quantum. La Tray goes on to talk about connection and kinship “... and not just between human tribes, but with the buffalo and everyone else who shared this Montana landscape.”
As his tribal ancestry is revealed and when he is accepted as a member of the Little Shell tribe and community, he writes: “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.”
Now, we are Kerouac-like on the road with La Tray. “Driving, I stop and squint and imagine these plains crowded with immense herds of buffalo. Of elk, antelope, and wolves and grizzly bears. Rivers and creeks and all the birds that would gather there. A magnificently wild Missouri River, free of dams. And the people who crossed over and back across them for decades, even centuries,” he ponders and then reveals in the present tense: “In the distance I hear magpies rasping out their greeting to the morning. In my mind’s eye I imagine people queued up here, laughing and cursing, urging their animals and two-wheeled carts across the river. I take some photos and wipe tears from the corner of my eye.”
The second half of the book goes into the planned and protracted colonization, reservations and would-be termination of the Indian culture by the American government. But then he leaps to a more positive and heartfelt and long-winded conversation about women and says: “This is a subject I’ve spent considerable time reflecting on — women — and the largely unsung role they played in maintaining who we are as a culture over the centuries.”
He goes on to talk about the role of women in modern-day tribal culture and the huge numbers of women who have “mysteriously disappeared.” He ends the chapter with the cheerfully pleasant story of picking up a female hitchhiker in Canada who is also Indigenous and who shares with him a similar story to his own.
Without giving too much away, the rest of the book deals with the discovery and meeting of family and ancestral ties (“... for those of us with even the slightest knowledge of our family trees it’s usually only a generation of two before we find a common ancestor”); the Catholic religion related to removal and conversion (“to erase Indigenous spiritual practices and livelihoods”); BIA Indian Schools and Boarding Schools; the landscape of various parts of Montana and southern Canada and various settlements and town histories. All of this is described in detail in La Tray’s congenial, conversational voice until the book’s end with the epiphanous statement “I set out to write this book as a Little Shell person in service to my Little Shell people, but now I find myself a Little Shell person in service to the world.”
(Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to The Smoky Mountain News and is the author of the award-winning memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods” and is publisher of New Native Press.)
