Reviewer Michele Sharpe Interviews Chris LaTray, Author of Becoming Little Shell–Foreword This Week
Chris La Tray is the Poet Laureate of Montana and the author Becoming Little Shell, a memoir of recovering his tribal identity in adulthood after growing up in diaspora with his father, who hid and denied his own Chippewa heritage. La Tray’s personal quest happened alongside the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians’ quest for restoration from the US government, whose policies had made and kept Little Shell people landless for over 150 years. The following conversation between reviewer Michele Sharpe—check out her starred Foreword review of Becoming Little Shell here—and Chris centered on identity and how it is influenced by ancestors, land, and politics. They also talked about how colonialism and capitalism continue to push people into houselessness and landlessness today.
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Enjoy the interview.
Let me say first, I really admire the way you threaded your father’s story through the book. It created suspense for me as a reader because I wanted to know what happened to him after learning at the beginning of the book that your father didn’t want to talk about his Chippewa heritage at all. He actually denied it, right?
Yes.
Wanting to know the reason for that really pulled me right through the book. It was a great craft decision on your part, as the writer, and I was also intrigued by the many ways you connected the historic oppression of your tribe and colonialism in general to examples of oppression and colonialism happening today. Several people in my family have been homeless and lived in homeless camps. Houseless, I guess is the better term, so your observations on the parallels between how the Little Shell tribe became landless in the 19th and 20th centuries and how people become houseless today are significant to me although we come from different cultures and geographies. Missoula was the houseless community you mentioned specifically in the book.
I mentioned Missoula because that’s where I live. I’m not in the east very much, but certainly out here in the West, it’s ubiquitous and I would say epidemic.
So why don’t you talk a little bit about the connections that you see between the two? They’re two historic events.
We have a crisis of epidemic proportions where we have all of these folks living on the fringes of communities for whatever reason. There’s mental health, there’s substance abuse, certainly, but that’s not the majority of people. One of the biggest changes I’ve seen where I live is the number of people. RV’s in various degrees of upkeep are parked alongside roads and people are living in them, especially in Bozeman, which is east of Missoula by about three hours and is a very fast-growing city, very wealthy, with very unaffordable housing. There, just like it is in Missoula, there are people who work, sometimes people with multiple jobs, who still can’t afford to live there.
If you look at our tribe historically, when we lost our land, we lost our homes, we lost any sense of community because of the fracturing that came from colonialism. We ended up living on fringes of communities through no fault of our own. We made none of the decisions involved with creating that situation. Our land was taken from us, and we see that happening in modern communities too. You have an industry collapse, and there’s no other jobs. You have people who come home from military service. And everybody crows about how important the troops are, but we don’t take care of them, not in mental health circumstances, physical health circumstances. Too many people fall through the cracks, and it creates this other class of people living on the fringes. Until we decide that our priority is going to be taking care of each other, it’s going to continue to cycle through history. Just go back a couple hundred years to our tribe’s situation. It just reverberates over and over when, as a culture, we don’t care about each other, or we care about just the limited few.
I think we only really care about people that have money.
We certainly have this cult around them, like somehow we can all reach that goal. And we won’t; the system will. It’s not like this is an anomaly. This is how America was designed from the beginning, to protect the wealthy, and until we decide that that is not how we want to live, it’s going to continue. So there are people in the middle class who thought these things, like being houseless, would never touch them then. Now, all of a sudden, they can’t afford to live here. Well, welcome to the last 500 years. It’s been happening to many other people. And you didn’t pay attention until it came for you. And you know, in my community we see that a lot.
Here in Florida, too. So, like the Dust Bowl situation, what was that the 1930s? That’s very similar in some ways. There’s an agricultural disaster and all these people are put out of work, and they start traveling, and they lose their homes.
There’s probably way more than that too that I can’t think about.
Do you see any solidarity emerging in any communities that you’re aware of, including the Little Shell, about bringing people in from the fringe or anything like that? Any positives or possibilities?
Well, there are small groups working to rectify the situation. You know how powerless we are even with our votes. We have to vote; the only thing more futile than voting is not voting. So we’re kind of stuck voting, especially in national politics. And I used to think that voting mattered locally, but just recently our community came out strongly against a measure in Missoula to enact rules that force houseless people out of the city, basically. There can’t be a camp set up from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 PM. There’s all these draconian measures. And despite a large showing against that by public commenters—the meeting went until 3:00 in the morning—our City Council still voted in favor of shutting people out. We’re supposedly this progressive community with a progressive mayor and it still comes down to capitalism and stores not wanting to have houseless people around.
And so, while there are pockets of people resisting this, overall, I don’t think communities care enough and I am not very hopeful that the average Missoulian is willing to do the things it takes to reconcile how most of us live with what that does to so many other people. There’s plenty of money to go to war and invade people and for corporate tax breaks, but there’s not enough for education and healthcare and housing, and all those things are related. That’s all political violence. People say “oh, we can’t have political violence,” but political violence is written into how we work. Not having healthcare for everybody is political violence. Indian reservations are political violence. Places like Flint, MI, going years and years and years without clean water is political violence.
I’m a little fired up today if you can’t tell.
That’s great. I agree with you. If you define violence as something that kills or harms people, then certainly lack of healthcare or lack of housing is a very accurate definition of what political violence is. So how about the Little Shell tribe? I read in your book that the tribe built a community center and a healthcare center after receiving funds from the federal government. How do those things relate to bringing people back from the fringe and into community?
The hard part we’ve struggled with is moving that stuff forward. But yes, we have a housing department within the tribe now to provide housing, and the Cares Act money that we got because of COVID allowed us to make the healthcare center and a food sovereignty program and vehicles to deliver food and medicine out to elders living in far-flung communities. And you know, most people in America would look at how people live out here and think everything is on the fringes. We just barely have a million people in Montana. The geography of it and the distances that one travels to deliver food and medicine to people within our community are vast, and we struggle with that.
And you know what? We also struggle with being a diaspora. We have people flung all over the western part of the country. The entire country, but most of us are centered in the West. And we have folks in Idaho who say, you know, well, why do I care about there being a healthcare facility in Great Falls? Well, we won’t see the benefits of our federal recognition in my generation. The next generation might, but it’s the long game. You don’t recover from 150 years of landlessness and diaspora overnight, and giving everybody checks, which wouldn’t be legal anyway, is no part of solving that crisis. We are still in the very, very early stages of the long game of rebuilding what we used to have.
So tell me a little bit more about that, please. The long game.
Well, just what I said, it takes time to recover from what we have endured. So by long game, I just mean years, years of people working together to create opportunities for our subsequent generations. This federal recognition isn’t about us, it’s about our ancestors. And if we want to be good ancestors and Anishinaabe people, that is a guiding principle for our lives, and we need to look at these decisions that we make as to how that affects our descendants, not us. And the only benefit we can have from this is the recognition from our descendants that we did the right things on their behalf. And I would urge anybody, in any culture, to start considering that. It’s something that is part of human culture, always has been, something we have lost the humility to recognize.
Do you have another book in the works?
I do. I mean, there’s not a lot of words written because I’m so busy going around and doing the poet laureate stuff. But, you know, I’ve got a poetry manuscript, and then my plan for what my next book is going to be.
Is that something you’re willing to talk about, or would you rather not?
It’s the continuation of where I arrived through the course of writing Becoming Little Shell because that’s a book that I could have rewritten every six weeks. It wasn’t like a beginning and an end, and now what am I going to do? Well, I have arrived at this point, and I can reinforce all this other stuff I’ve experienced with what I think now, but the narrative continues. I think it will be more on the Anishinaabe worldview and how that has played out in my life. That’s the very nebulous view of what this next one is going to be.
Thank you, sounds great! So, let’s talk about naming and recognition in Becoming Little Shell. You name yourself as a member of the Little Shell Tribe. And the tribe works to get federal recognition. So how important, if at all, is that idea of naming—which is something you can do yourself—and recognition which comes from other people? How does that affect your identity?
Now, we don’t call it recognition so much as restoration, and I’ve learned this from friends on the tribal council who always refer to it as federal restoration. I try to use that word because words are important, and naming is very important. One of the big conflicts in native communities is how you can be recognized or enrolled in a tribe, and blood quantum plays a part in that. And there’s nothing worse than blood quantum as a determination for whether you can be enrolled in a tribe. I like being enrolled because it gives me the power to say “Yeah, I’m enrolled, and the way it works sucks and needs to change.” It gives me the authority as an enrolled person to say, “Yeah, that’s how I feel about it.” Whereas if I wasn’t enrolled, it could just sound like sour grapes because I can’t be.
I recognize how important tribal citizenship is to our identities. It’s a powerful thing if it’s something that you’ve been separated from through no choices of your own, and you want to reconnect to it. It was a big deal to me. It was a big deal to my son, who was recently enrolled. It’s a big deal to many, many people that I encounter. Naming and words are important, and sadly we are shackled with a language of colonizers, which is English, which isn’t very subtle. Our indigenous languages do a much better job of identifying how identity is tied to the land. It’s important to me to go out and represent that there are Little Shell people out doing things because nobody knows who we are, and I hope to participate in changing that.
Oh, thank you. That’s a good thing for me to know about restoration as a more accurate term and thanks for everything else too. So, blood quantum rules are controversial?
Yes.
And as you mention in the book, at some point in the future, it may end up depleting the number of tribal people?
Yes, it’s genocide because it’s a numbers game that will ultimately eliminate tribes. There’s not enough of us to be able to keep tribal memberships viable. Blood quantum eliminates people; it’s not going to be ten years, but if we continue to practice blood quantum, it ultimately makes it so that nobody qualifies for tribal enrollment, and that elimination of people will be genocide.
Tribal enrollment lists were part of the United States’ efforts to continue genocide when it became, you know, no longer fashionable to do it with bullets. One of the big lists for us is called the Roe Cloud role, which was a list of people who were related to the folks who were disenrolled.
Disenrolled people, like your ancestor who refused to sign the Treaty?
Yes. But even that’s just a tiny piece of the picture, because plenty of people wouldn’t show up for these rolls. Every roll of every native nation on this continent is incomplete, and therefore pointless, because folks just wouldn’t show up. There are many, many people who are just as Indian as anybody else who can’t be enrolled because their ancestors said, “I don’t want to be on some list.” Many of those lists were administered by the federal government, so I can imagine why people would not want to get involved with that.
We didn’t keep the lists of who was enrolled and who wasn’t. You know, enrollment wasn’t even a thing. That’s all a colonial construct. People were disconnected through no choice of their own, and there needs to be room for their descendants to find a home back where they belong. I don’t live in a Little Shell community, but I’m doing the work to know what it means to be a Little Shell and I am 100 percent invested in it despite growing up as part of the diaspora, despite growing up in a family that chose not to recognize their ancestry, and I am a champion for all those people like me who want to find their place back where they came from.
So blood quantum isn’t the end all and be all.
Well, it’s not anything because it’s fake. It’s nothing. It’s not based on anything that’s even real.
Can you talk a little bit more about that? Why? Why is it fake?
Well, because your blood is no different than mine, there’s nothing in your blood that makes you identifiable as different from me, despite us coming from totally different places. Now there’s genetics, but genetics has nothing to do with blood. Blood quantum is this idea that a specific tribe has a different kind of blood than some other tribe or from a non-Indigenous person, and it doesn’t. And to use it at all is buying into an idea that Hitler used. Hitler based his plans for exterminating the Jews on what the United States was doing to Indian people. So it’s horrific to even consider. It is antithetical to anything related to how tribes interacted with each other and within their own communities for the eternity of our existence.
Why do you think there are tribes that hang on to blood quantum rules? Is it just inertia and that’s the way it’s always been done?
Well, membership. Let’s say you have a resource that you can make money from, and you have per capita which is like profit-sharing. If your resource makes a certain amount of money and you’re going to divide your profits among your members, the fewer members you have, the more money each one gets. Now most tribes don’t have a per capita. We don’t have a per capita. None of the tribes in Montana have a per capita. Only a tiny fraction of tribes has a resource, like a casino, that’s tied to a per capita. It comes down to money and things like that.
There are plenty of lawyers who will tell tribal leadership that the fewer members, the bigger the pieces of the pie. I know that’s what we’re in the middle of right now is arguing for blood quantum. And I refuse to live a life that is defined by “Well, if we do this then we’re not going to get as much money.” That is the sort of thinking pushing us to the brink of the entire world being on fire, so we need to make change, and this is a good place to start, at least for tribal communities.
Yes, it’s a way of thinking that’s pushed us all. It’s an extractive idea.
It’s non-reciprocal.
Yes. And do you think reciprocity is an important part of culture?
It is the key to how we lived on this world for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and as soon as we abandoned it, that is when things started to go sour in a very short amount of time, if you consider the length of time that people have been on the planet.
Reciprocity is everything. It’s recognition that everything we need comes from the earth and we need to act accordingly, in reciprocal relationship with the earth, to make sure we give back so that Earth can continue to provide for us.
That’s a very pithy statement.
Well, it’s not mine. It’s from people like Robin Wall Kimmerer and folks like that that; it’s an Indigenous worldview. And I’m just another person who feels compelled to trumpet it. But it’s not my original statement.
No, but it’s a pithy representation.
It is and it’s simple. So why is it so hard, right?
Let’s wrap up by talking about land and identity. Montana has a very dramatic landscape as I recall from passing through there.
Multiple dramatic landscapes. Land is critical; we are of the land. We are we. You know our bodies are composed of the same things that the land is composed of, so we are connected at a cellular level to where we live. Everything in the room that you’re in, everything in the room that I’m in, the components of that came from the earth. And as humans, we figured out interesting ways to reconstitute those components to make plastic and glass and paper and whatever, but the components still came from the earth. We are as connected now as we ever have been, and it’s an illusion to think otherwise. It comes back to that reciprocal nature that we need to reconnect to by recognizing that taking involves some giving back to make sure the earth is still here to help us in the future.
Michele Sharpe
