Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home

Montana poet laureate La Tray (One-Sentence Journal) combines personal reflection and cultural history in his gripping debut memoir. La Tray grew up near Missoula in the 1970s and ’80s with “vague knowledge my father’s side of the family was Indian.” He loved imagining himself as Tonto from The Lone Ranger, but both La Tray’s father and his grandfather often denied their Indigenous heritage. After both men died, La Tray’s curiosity about his roots deepened, leading him to dig into his family history. Eventually, he learned that he was descended from Montana’s Métis people. In 2017, he enrolled in the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians with the intention of becoming “someone people come to with questions about where they come from.” As he outlines that process, La Tray constructs an engrossing history of the Little Shell Tribe, including their pioneering use of wheeled carts for transport at the turn of the 19th century, their label as “landless Indians” after white settlers divided their traditional lands into separate countries as the U.S. began enforcing its border with Canada in the 1870s, and their designation, in 2020, as a federally recognized tribe. La Tray’s crystalline prose and palpable passion for spreading Indigenous history bolster his account. Readers will be fascinated. (Aug.)