Read an Excerpt
2022 WESTERN MONTANA
It’s a midsummer morning in 2022 in Western Montana, and dark clouds boil and roil and threaten thunderstorms. After days of swelter the precipitation is welcome, but the threat of wildfire by lightning is real.
I’m driving my gray 1999 Nissan Frontier pickup. I merge onto Interstate 90 westbound where it intersects with Montana Highway 93, at the western edge of Missoula. These two routes—I-90 east-west, 93 north-south—are swarmed with tourist traffic every summer. These yearly visitors are here because this place is beautiful. The valley, formed by the confluence of the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and Clark Fork Rivers, is bordered by rolling mountains. Below the conifer-covered tree line, despite summer settling in with a vengeance, their slopes still show a hint of spring’s green where they aren’t patched in yellow arrowleaf balsamroot. Looming over the valley to the west, the bare, conical peak of the highest point of this segment of the Rocky Mountains is just visible beneath the ceiling of clouds: Ch-paa-qn, her name a Salish word that means “shining mountain” or, depending on who you ask, “gray, treeless mountaintop.”
Other Indigenous words are on my mind today. There are countless shiny cars, hulking SUVs, and gigantic pickups pulling trailers loaded with canoes and kayaks and bicycles. I note names like “Tacoma” and “Denali” on their bumpers, same with RVs called “Yukon” and “Winnebago.” There are others too, Indian names all, in a place not that many Indians remain.
I’ve thought about Indians my entire life. I grew up with the vague knowledge my father’s side of the family was Indian (Chippewa, specifically) as my grandmother would speak of it at times. I have a dim memory of being four years old and sitting on the faded linoleum kitchen floor of our little farmhouse in Huson, assaulting a coloring book with crayons. When asked why I depict a pair of children with red skin, I say it’s because they’re Indians. My visiting grandmother, Ruby Katherine (Doney) La Tray, sitting at the table, asks, “Is my skin red? No? But I am an Indian. And so are you.”
I was very young and now I’m not, but the memory has stuck with me.
It wasn’t until my grandfather, Leo Stanley La Tray, died just shy of eighty-three years of age in late September 1996 that pieces started falling into place. I was twenty-nine years old. A decade earlier, fresh out of high school, two friends and I headed west on the same Interstate 90 I’m traversing today, on our way to Seattle to become rock stars. I hadn’t seen my grand- parents since making the move. By 1996 I was married with a three-year-old son who would never meet his great-grandfather, living closer to Tacoma than Seattle, and working a job that required a long, traffic-infested commute that was slowly killing my will to live. The dreams of rock ’n’ roll glory were over. I like to tell people my bandmates and I arrived in Seattle with bags full of spandex and leather when the city was on the cusp of dressing all their musical heroes in flannel and ripped jeans.
My friends and I didn’t fit that bill. It’s likely we weren’t all that good either, but I’ll never admit to that.
In 1996 I made the drive to Plains, Montana, for the funeral; it was the first one of a family member I’d ever attended. Though I barely knew my grandfather, I was one of the pallbearers. It was a beautiful fall day in early October. I left my Washington home in the wee hours of morning, crossed Snoqualmie Pass eastbound through the jagged and magnificent coastal Cascade Mountains at sunrise, then blew through the croplands of Eastern Washington as the day expanded in my windshield. The sun was bright, the foliage was changing to vivid reds and yellows, and the air was crisp and clean the entire way. It was a perfect day to travel. I loved to take long drives then and I still do now, especially alone.
Arriving at the small Catholic church in Plains—St. James Catholic Church, a structure with white siding trimmed in pale greenish blue that was built in 1919, six years after my grandpa was born—I was amazed to find the nave crowded with Indians. I took my seat in the front row, beside my dad, and stared around in a state of puzzled awe. During the service, which I barely remember—it seemed to be more about Jesus than my grandfather— Dad kept poking me in the ribs and trying to make me laugh. When we exited the church and prepared to join the procession to the cemetery, Dad leaned in and asked, “So, what did you think about all those Indians?”
“There were a lot of them,” I said, for lack of a better answer. What I didn’t say was how astounded I was.
Dad didn’t talk about my grandfather very much, and when he did it wasn’t flattering. For example, Dad had two baseball mitts he’d saved from his childhood. Oversized, shapeless hunks of leather sewn together like artifacts from another era, they seemed useless compared to the streamlined, shiny gloves I used during my Little League career. I remember Dad holding one of those old mitts one time, thumping his fist into its center, a slight smile on his face. “Your grandpa gave me this,” he said. “It’s the only goddamn thing he ever gave me.”
After the service, while everyone else proceeded immediately to the cemetery, Dad and I stopped at the VFW bar just up the block from the church—VFW Post No. 3596, where my WWII veteran grandfather’s lifetime membership had finally ended. Inside, Dad told me over a couple quick beers, “I’m not sad. Not even a little bit. That sonofabitch never did a thing for me.”
Something my dad and his father had in common was the denial of any Indigenous heritage. Suggesting my dad was Native made him angry. I could never understand why. I was the opposite. I wanted to be Indian. I wanted that identity and I took it for myself, even if it had to be largely locked up. To me it was cool. Who wouldn’t want to be an Indian? Who wouldn’t want to be Chippewa? Growing up, if there was anything I knew about the answers to those questions, it was this: don’t ask Dad for them.
My grandfather’s funeral was a turning point in my curiosity about my family history. Here was a collection of people I’d never known but was clearly connected to. Who were they? Why didn’t I know them? Why was I never allowed to know them? What was our family’s story? I went home with more questions, only now I could see much more clearly where I came from, even if nobody in my family talked about it.
Whenever anyone asked my dad about other La Trays in Montana—there are many of us, particularly in northern border-hugging, Hi-Line towns like Havre and Great Falls, or even Deer Lodge, where Montana State Prison is—he would deny any relation. I never heard him utter the words “Little Shell,” “Rocky Boy,” “Turtle Mountain,” or even “Chippewa,” that I can recall, nor “Métis” [pronounced MAY-tee], all words for people and places critical to my life now. My dad spent his life denying his Indigenous heritage and, through his choice, mine as well, sometimes vehemently.
Referring to my dad as Indian in any way, in most contexts, bordered on fighting words. If pressed, his calmest response was to refer to the entire idea of “Indian-ness” as complete bullshit. When he passed away in 2014, Dad left me with a lifetime of questions about who he was and where he came from. No, who we are, where we come from. I’m certain he had the answers to many of these questions, but he chose to take them with him to his grave. I decided I would do what I could to find them on my own. If not from him, then through people who lived a similar experience. Through the story of our people.
This book is an attempt to answer some of those questions, to tell the story of my own family heritage, certainly, and why my dad felt the way he did about his heritage. If I’ve learned anything at all, it’s that I’m not the only one to grow up in these kinds of circumstances. I’m also not alone in trying to find my way back to who I was all along: a proud Indian.
I’m not a scholar. I’m not a historian. I don’t have an academic bone in my body. I’m a storyteller, and this is a story that needs telling. I feel compelled to share the story of the Métis people of Montana with the world, to tell the story of the Little Shell Tribe, the longtime landless Indians of Montana. Because it’s clear we’re largely unknown, not just to the wider world, but even in Montana, the first state to recognize us as a legitimate tribe, despite our centuries-old association with a larger Indigenous family. Like the stories of all Indigenous tribes of the Americas, it’s a sad story. Yet it’s a story brimming with grit and determination, a story full of facts and dates shared as best as I’ve come to learn them; other storytellers may unearth different versions.
This version of the story is mine. It is a story still unfolding.
