Becoming Little Shell by Chris La Tray.

By Montana Poet Laureate, a singular story of discovery and embrace of Indigenous identity.


Questions: 

Why is Little Shell differentiated for the Chippewa Indians?

Why is Indian still a relevant descriptor of Little Shell?

How do the buffalo connect Becoming Little Shell through As Long As Grass Grows, Butcher's Crossing, Braiding Sweetgrass, and Drawdown?

What is the relevance of home in the title?

Do we understand the relevance of home that should include Turtle Mountain?

What does it mean to be landless for Chester Arthur and the Metis?

How did propaganda create president's out of the military?

How are education and residential school related?

What impact do settlers have on the hunting and carbon sequestration? Why doesn't environmentalism address land use changes and the military?

What does it mean to assign a country to which the Metis can belong?

What does this paragraph mean- Central Montana is a revelation to me, and I long for the chance to spend weeks just poking around, seeing what I can pull free that’s relevant to me from the fog of history. After all, 150 years doesn’t look quite as distant out here as it does in a city that tends to puff up and expand every decade or so like Missoula.

Interview: By Milkweed, the publisher, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqSjBB904LU 

MICHELE SHARPE (September / October 2024)

The book’s singular achievement is in the throughlines drawn between past and present diverse communities who suffered under extractive policies. Connections are made, for example, between three separate events: the eighteenth-century Métis moving camp when the people were forced from their settlements; the Little Shell people being unenrolled from the Chippewa and made landless after La Tray’s ancestor didn’t sign onto a revised treaty; and the unhomed people setting up camps in contemporary Missoula.

Heartbreaking, infuriating, and remarkable, Becoming Little Shell is a memoir that’s packed with historical details, transcending and amplifying a personal quest to understand a family’s past.

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