Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home by Chris La Tray

Author:Chris La Tray [Tray, Chris La]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, Indigenous, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Native American Studies, History, Indigenous Peoples in the Americas
ISBN: 9781571313980
Google: ZqZi0AEACAAJ
Amazon: 1571313982
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2024-08-15T09:12:08.298540+00:00

I never had any connection to Great Falls before I started digging around in the Little Shell community. Over the years my rock band has played a handful of shows here; one at the fairgrounds, a few at a now-closed dive bar off Highway 87 headed toward Malmstrom Air Force Base, and another preposterously unattended free-for-all well over a decade ago outside at the Harley-Davidson dealer in early fall that was cancelled due to a hailstorm and noise complaints. The last time we were slated to play there, in 2019, we cancelled the morning of the show because we determined it wouldn’t be safe to make the round trip due to a winter storm warning. The warning was prescient: the storm unloaded almost two feet of snow on the city by nightfall, essentially shutting it down. In mid-September.

From its headwaters far to the south, the Missouri River flows north through the heart of the city, absorbing the Sun River coming from the west along the way before curling off to the east and then northward toward Fort Benton. The bulk of the city sprawls eastward from that crook in a mostly reliable grid. There are plenty of tree-lined streets and park spaces—magnificent in spring and fall—and several lovely museums. The Charles M. Russell Museum is particularly beautiful, as much to see the display of Russell’s Métis sash as his art, and though I get a little hot under the saddle over all the Lewis and Clark worship in this region, the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center, a beautiful museum built right into the cliffs above the Missouri river, is always an interesting visit.

I don’t want to dump on it, but I have to admit Great Falls is a difficult city to love. I try to find reasons to warm up to it but it’s a tough go. It’s in a beautiful part of the state but the weather is unpredictable and often brutal. In most parts of downtown the city itself runs a little dilapidated and has a hard-luck vibe, and no one I know ever says good things about it. A friend once quipped that every time she’s in Great Falls on a weekend the downtown at night is like a ghost town, except maybe one distant figure staggering down the middle of the street yelling things. It’s a sad, not inaccurate description of my experience of the city too. All that long-gone industry once made it a strong union town. Now, like so many other parts of Montana, it’s more a hotbed of far-right reactionary politics than ever before, and that hangs like a cloud over the entire city.

For all its troubles I maintain a soft spot for Great Falls and don’t mind visiting. In fact, it was at a reading at Cassiopeia Books for One-Sentence Journal that I met and became friends with my first known Little Shell relative. Cassiopeia at the time was a little hole-in-the-wall shop just off the edge of the Great Falls downtown, in a ramshackle building shared with a store selling music gear.

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