Montana Poet Laureate Chris La Tray’s expansive memoir, Becoming Little Shell, places his personal history of joining the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians within a centuries-long history of his people and the lands they’ve inhabited.
He began investigating his family’s Indigenous roots after the death of his father, Sidney Robert La Tray. This was harder than it sounds because Sidney La Tray denied being a Native American at all and was disconnected from much of his family. Like many displaced people do now, Chris La Tray sought out his ancestors through a DNA database, which connected him to his extended family. He says his Indigenous heritage was always there, but it only became activated once he pursued it.
Interest in his relatives expanded to include stories from the past; through research and relationships with tribal members, Metis people, and their allies, he learned of his tribe’s westward migrations from the Turtle Mountains to the High Plains region, of the injuries inflicted on his people by the U.S. government’s policies of settler colonialism, and of the tribe’s ongoing struggle and ultimate triumph as they achieved restoration. With knowledge came enrollment in the tribe, engagement and service, and pride. An idea of language, threaded through these narrative elements, emerges as an essential part of identity. But the emotional center of the book is La Tray’s effort to understand his father.
La Tray’s memoir does not mine his family history to assign responsibility for trauma. The book expresses consistent reverence for the elder La Tray, who appears in few scenes despite his outsized influence on the story’s genesis. The narrative follows a pattern of looking toward him and then looking away that creates an aura of respect for the man’s privacy. Most scenes that reveal Sidney La Tray’s character are relevant only to the pertinent question of why he denied his heritage.
Of note are two incidents related by La Tray’s mother, Becky La Tray, that illustrate the shame her husband had internalized about being Indigenous. During their courtship, he had asked her, “Will you ever be ashamed of me because I’m dark?” And after their marriage, when the couple was headed to visit La Tray relatives, he said, “Now keep an eye on your wallet, we’re about to enter the tribe.”
La Tray’s parents married in 1964. The anxiety and racist statement in the aforementioned incidents were coincident and consistent with the Indian Termination policies of the time that the U.S. government enacted from the 1940’s through the 1960’s. Those were formative years for La Tray’s father: his childhood, teenage years, Navy enlistment, and marriage.
Using rhetoric about setting tribes “free” from federal supervision, the U.S. government aimed its termination policies at the tribes’ self-governing powers and their resources. The true intent of the policies was not about freedom but extinction, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates that between 1953 and 1970 “over 3 million acres of land were relinquished.”
The phrase “were relinquished” is, of course, an example of passive voice that does not identify an actor. Like many instances of passive voice used by governments, it is inaccurate propaganda. The federal government took those lands, just as it had been taking land from tribal nations for centuries.
The U.S. government had already made The Little Shell Tribe landless back in the 19th century. The tribe is named for the man Little Shell, a leader of the Pembina Chippewa who refused to sign a treaty; in retaliation, the U.S. government removed him and his followers from the Chippewa tribal roll. Little Shell resolved to never negotiate with the feds again. Rather than staying put, he and many of his band migrated west, often joining with existing populations of other tribes and Métis people in the High Plains regions and the Western mountain ranges. For over 150 years, the Little Shell tribe remained landless.
[Left — Chief Little Shell III] In October of 2024, President Biden offered a formal apology to all tribal nations for yet another 150-year wrong, the Federal Boarding School era. This era ran from the early 1800’s through the 1970’s, for the purpose, as President Biden put it, of “targeting children to cut their connection to their ancestors and their inheritance and their heritage.” The government’s goal for those schools was to completely assimilate Indigenous people into American culture, and they used methods including devaluing tribal languages, foods, clothing, history, and all cultural and spiritual practices. Many boarding school survivors report having been beaten for speaking their languages and even for saying their own names. Many survivors reported much worse.
La Tray’s father did not attend boarding school, but he grew up in the long shadow it cast over tribal peoples. Prior to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, spiritual ceremony was rarely conducted openly because participants feared discovery by government agents. Instead, ceremony happened in marginal spaces, like Hill 57, a place on the outskirts of Great Falls, Montana. Indigenous people gathered and lived here, close to where Sidney La Tray grew up, at least in Western conceptions of geographic distance. By the time he was an adult, the name “Hill 57” had become a derisive, racist byword for poverty, just as other American locations – Harlem and Roxbury come to mind for me because I’m an East Coast person – became racist bywords for poverty, or crime, or illegal drugs.
As the story moves from personal discoveries to engagement with tribal affairs, La Tray interrogates “the shame that was imposed on people who live in poverty, and how that affected my father and his view of his family.” Historians, anthropologists, and psychologists have long posited that shame is an evolutionary adaptation in response to human reliance on mutual aid, and that we feel shame when we are “devalued – disliked, excluded, tortured, oppressed,” even when we’ve done nothing wrong. Those adjectives, in their verb forms, match the U.S. government’s appalling treatment of Indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their languages.
When language is suppressed, far more than words is lost. A language’s grammar can be a key to its culture’s values. I was surprised, for example, while visiting Japan a few times around the turn of the 21st century to learn there are no pronouns (as an English-speaking person understands them) in Japanese. It was a difficult concept for me. How can conversation take place without pronouns separating me from you, and you from them? Eventually, it occurred to me that the lack of separation by pronouns was congruent with Japanese culture’s values, as expressed in sayings that promote collective good over individual good, like omoiyari, “Notice and think of others!”
The language of the Little Shell, which La Tray is learning, is Ojibwe. What is its grammar and what does that grammar say about Chippewa values? One thing I’ve learned is that instead of grammatically gendering people, animals, and objects as male and female as in French and Spanish, Ojibwe separates the world into two grammatical genders: animate and inanimate.
Think of the consequences for culture, politics, and all sorts of relationships if human beings are classified by their foundational grammar with all animate beings. I’d love to know more, and perhaps this is something La Tray will explore in his next book.
In a conversation with La Tray in July 2024, he discussed how Indigenous languages reflect tribal world views about relationships and land. He mentioned the work of Robin Kimmerer on the value of reciprocity, especially the responsibility of people to give back to the earth, which provides all. “Everything in the room that you’re in,” he said, “everything in the room that I’m in, the components of that came from the earth, and it’s an illusion to think otherwise. To take these things involves some kind of a giving back.”
Kimmerer’s 2015 nonfiction book, Braiding Sweetgrass, refers to this as “the moral covenant of reciprocity.” She is an Indigenous botanist who also studies (among many things) Indigenous languages. There’s a chapter in her book titled “Learning the Grammar of Animacy.” She writes that Pupowee, a Potawatomi word, was “her first taste of the missing language.” Like the Ojibwe language, Potawatomi also divides the world into animate and inanimate through its grammar. The word Pupowee was defined for her by an Anishinaabe ethnobotanist as “The force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” An animated force.
I can’t think of a similarly complex and specific word in English, one that simultaneously defines a mysterious force as a place, an organism without language, and an astronomical time period. Maybe I lack imagination. Or maybe it’s because English, my language, focuses on agents: the Jacks, the Jills, the he, she, they, and I. English grammar makes me think how I think: my brain wants to simplify the mysterious force with a name and a pronoun, instead of describing it in complex terms of where, when, and what it does. Perhaps my way of thinking also compels me to be suspicious of the passive voice, and to take up habits of blame and reward rather than habits of acceptance and reverence.
His immersion in the history of his tribe and its struggles helped La Tray understand his father’s rejection of heritage as a self-protective strategy, a shame response, and a way of protecting his children. As with most of the realizations he comes to, this one expands beyond the personal. Toward the end of Becoming Little Shell, La Tray concludes that when prior generations “chose to disavow where they came from,” it was “so future generations wouldn’t have to endure what they did.”
The reverential treatment of his father in Becoming Little Shell is a step beyond even this level of understanding. Is it part of La Tray’s growing identity as Little Shell, his involvement in Little Shell culture and language? In our conversation, La Tray mentioned that the way he uses his first language, English, is changing. Since he began writing Becoming Little Shell, he’s moved away from the colonist-centric term “federal recognition,” to the Indigenous-centered term “restoration,” which is preferred by tribal elders. In “federal recognition,” it’s the U.S. government that’s elevated: only the government has the power to recognize the tribe. “Restoration” is the opposite, elevating the significance of the tribe’s uncolonized state.
Languages change, and as they do, they change human expectations, human understandings, and human relationships. Maybe that means the gift of reverence is within everyone’s reach.
[Published by Milkweed Editions on August 20, 2024, 320 pages, $28.00 hardcover]