Who We Are

Where we come from

Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. I’ve been wrestling with writing about a bunch of annoying encounters and the resulting copious indignation but I haven’t been keen to do so for some reason. Is my irritability waning? Hardly. I just haven’t wanted to devote extra time to such things even as I know I’ll get around to them eventually. So in the meantime, I’ll drop this very self-serving edition on you all instead. Because Becoming Little Shell’s release is imminent and I really haven’t talked about it for a while. That ends now….

Meanwhile, if you’ve been considering a paid subscription, now would be an excellent time to take the leap. My itinerary is filling up and it’s going to get spendy keeping this show on the road. As ever, I am so grateful for your time and attention no matter how you choose to engage here, paid or not.

---

Speaking of gratuitous, I swiped this collage from the Montana Public Radio site.

In about one month, maybe even less, I’ll hold a finished copy of Becoming Little Shell in my hands. That seems almost impossible and I don’t really think it will seem real until it actually happens. Tommy Orange told me that There, There didn’t seem a reality for him either until he first opened a printed galley and it all but blew his mind.¹ I felt a similar rush when I first held a galley of BLS in my hands; that happened in a little restaurant over breakfast at a booksellers conference in Cincinnati back in February. Since then it has all been a whirlwind of activity surrounding the book, amplified by this state of poet laureateness too. Having the two wonderful opportunities happen at the same time has been great but also a little exhausting.

Now, with a couple months to go before “official” publication on August 20, I’ve decided to make another big push for preorders. If you preorder you’ll have books before the official release, and it also helps booksellers immensely when it comes time to order them. It also gets you in on the ground floor in case the first print run is exhausted, which isn’t entirely impossible. There’s been a decent amount of buzz and favorable reviews so far. The very first one came from the lovely folks at Bisbing Books and I’ll admit that when it showed up, unexpectedly, I felt a sharp stab of both gratitude and “oh, shit, it’s starting.” The book has also received a lovely nod from Publishers Weekly and, in what I’m told is an official BIG DEAL, a starred review from Kirkus Reviews.

So please, consider a preorder wherever you buy books. Your local indie, for example. Or the usual online sources. In particular, if you want a signed and personalized copy, the only place to get that for certain² is from my homies at Fact & Fiction. You may do that HERE.

Finally, Milkweed asked that I write something up for booksellers and salespeople and etc. to help them understand the hows and whys of the genesis of this book. That’s what I’ll conclude this post with, followed by the blurbs I received from a small group of tremendous writers I admire very much who were generous with their time and kind words. How fortunate I am!

---

Why I Wrote This Book

Boozhoo, hello. I want to tell you why I wrote my new book, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home. I grew up in Western Montana, the heart of Indian Country, from the late 70s on, identifying as Chippewa, though I really didn’t know what that meant because there weren’t any other Chippewa people around that I knew of. My identity came from my paternal grandmother saying I was so, even as my father and his father denied any Native heritage. They went so far as to deny our relationship to any other La Trays scattered around the state, and there are many of us.

When my grandfather died in 1996 and I returned from my then-home in the greater Seattle area – where my friends and I had migrated to post-high school in an effort to become rock stars – to participate in carrying his casket to the gravesite, I was struck to find a church full of Indians. This was my first, strongest indication that the story of my life and where I came from was different from what I had largely been told, largely been living. It all came to a head in 2014, with the death of my father, and that is when my need to know overtook, and largely changed, my life. Becoming Little Shell is the story of how that unfolded.

I learned of my deep family connection to the people now federally recognized as the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and sought, and received, enrollment with them. Who are the Little Shell, and why were we known as the “Landless Indians” for more than 150 years? How did we finally come to be federally recognized by the feds in the first place? The book answers these questions. Who are the Métis, an Indigenous cultural group recognized in Canada but not the U.S., and a demographic largely comprising the Little Shell tribe? The book answers that question too.

Along the way I make an effort to draw parallels between what we have experienced in our Métis diaspora to events currently unfolding in the world around us. The houseless crisis. The draconian policies at our national borders that shatter families. The relentless tragedy of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The ongoing, slow genocide of Native people and the brutal, long game effort to eradicate us entirely through the erasure of culture, language, and forced dwindling populations.

I wrote this book mostly to tell the story of the Little Shell because few people have heard of us. I want to change that. I also want to provide information to people similar to who I was more than a decade ago on their own journey to rediscovering where they came from. Other Little Shell folks certainly, but everyone else too, as this is a story shared by many, many other people where colonialism has sought to disconnect Indigenous people from their networks of kinship. Those ties remain, if thin in spots. They are waiting for the strength our returning will provide them.

Most importantly, for all of this, in my book I do my absolute best to show the fierce pride I have to be who I am. To be in relationship to the wider world, of course, but especially to those of us who come from people who took the best shot the most powerful nation in the world could deliver in an effort to eliminate us, directly on the chin, and we are still here. We are still here.

Blurbs

"Chris La Tray is a powerful voice – a force of nature, really – to guide us through the swirling confluence of Native and white worlds, both past and present. BECOMING LITTLE SHELL is the American story of our era – tracing the arc of its author brought up in the white world before discovering his roots as an original inhabitant of this continent."

– Peter Stark, author of Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation

---

"I’m in awe of Chris LaTray’s storytelling. BECOMING LITTLE SHELL creates a multi-layered narrative from threads of personal, family, community, tribal and national histories. Together they make a story as strong and beautiful as a Métis sash, a story of identity, kinship and the journey toward justice."

– Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

---

"BECOMING LITTLE SHELL is a moving, deeply felt, and incredibly detailed account of Chris La Tray's search for his origins among the Metis, Pembina, and Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Combining memoir, history, interviews and travel, La Tray gives us nothing less than the history of a people in the form of an absorbing and emotionally searing memoir. This book will, without a doubt, become a classic in Native American literature. Must read."

– David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

---

"What I appreciate so much about Chris La Tray’s writing on Indigenous identity and history is the wit, clarity and integrity embodied in every word. BECOMING LITTLE SHELL beautifully encompasses a journey that we can all learn from, a journey toward asking better questions about land, belonging, and connection, and through this book La Tray epitomizes historian, poet and teacher. Full of Indigenous history, personal stories, and the complex dance between the two, La Tray reminds us that the journey of finding ourselves and making sense of the way colonialism plays out around us is an essential part of being human. Please read this book. You’ll be so glad you did."

– Kaitlin B. Curtice, author of Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day

---

"Indigenous identity can be complicated, and BECOMING LITTLE SHELL compels us into the thick of it—Native people dispossessed of not just land but recognition; blood quantum laws originally crafted to complete a genocide and still wreaking havoc in identity debates today; racism that drove many Native people to disassociate from their families; and descendants, like La Tray, who have found their way back, fighting for the reconnection of their communities and for the observance of their very existence. La Tray is a loving, discerning, curious, funny, and generous guide. This is a beautiful, big-hearted book."

– Sierra Crane Murdoch, author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

Miigwech for all of your support over these years, my friends. I am so grateful for every bit of it. I’m excited for people to get to read this book.

---

1. I think we can all agree things turned out pretty well and deservedly for Tommy after that.

2. Outside of live appearances, which are being scheduled as we speak….