Gabriel Furshong
Little Shell Powwow, First People's Buffalo Jump State Park, Ulm, Montana, August 2019
On June 20, 1782, six years after the Declaration of Independence and six years before ratification of the Constitution, the Second Continental Congress approved an elegant mission statement for the 13 former British colonies: E Pluribus Unum (Of Many, One). Since then, communities of color in these United States have often wondered: Do we count among the many?
The award-winning historian Elliott West argues that our founding motto “has always been both an invitation and a threat.” For some, an invitation to support a republic framed in their image. For others, a threat of servitude and assimilation or deportation and death.
This brutally narrow vision of the national purpose, to improve the lives of white male citizens, is no longer relevant today because so many other people have fought to end the threat and expand the invitation, people like Montana’s Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
This month, the tribe is expected to gain federal recognition. If Congress passes the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians Restoration Act, which Montana’s Democratic Senator Jon Tester and Republican Senator Steve Daines have attached as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and if President Trump signs the measure, then the Little Shell will join 573 tribes currently recognized as sovereign nations. Members of these communities are allowed to exercise limited self-governance and access benefits, such as funding for health care and education, which the U.S. is obligated to provide them as compensation for appropriating their ancestral lands.
The Little Shell are a polyethnic people primarily of Chippewa, Cree, Assiniboine, and Métis descent, one of many related communities that formed the historic Nehiyaw Pwat, or Iron Alliance, that worked closely with European fur traders as far back as 1680 along what is today the U.S.-Canadian border between Minnesota and Montana. Over the last 130 years, despite having lost the lands that once belonged to them, the tribe has remained a highly organized community—holding council meetings, organizing native voters, and petitioning for federal recognition—despite shameful efforts to erase them from our country’s troubled history.
In 1892, Chief Little Shell rejected a federal offer of ten cents per acre for ten million acres of land
Charles Milton Bell/Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian
Chief Little Shell, circa 1880
and opposed ratification of the “ten cent” treaty, which eventually rendered Little Shell and his people landless. Four years later, Lieutenant John J. Pershing, who went on to achieve fame commanding American soldiers in World War I, led a troop of African American soldiers through Montana rounding up Indians who were living on the fringes of cities like Butte and Helena. (Known as the “Buffalo Soldiers,” black Army units were involved in Indian removal efforts in the West, a tragic way to prove their mettle in the wider fight for their own civil rights.)
Pershing forced hundreds of native people across the Canadian border on foot or by loading them on cattle cars. Most drifted back across the border and resettled across Central and Western Montana. After Chief Little Shell’s death in 1901, a young leader named Stone Child or “Rocky Boy” persuaded Congress to purchase land for the tribe. The Rocky Boy’s Reservation was created in 1916, but before the tribe was allowed to settle, a federal agent cut 233 so-called “half-breeds,” people perceived to have mixed European and American Indian heritage, from tribal enrollment lists.
Today, the Little Shell tribe, which was officially recognized by the State of Montana in 2000, includes thousands of people descended from the survivors of these and other transgressions. But over the last five years, as I’ve interviewed Little Shell citizens across the state, I’ve rarely heard them mention the payment of extraordinary debt or the long overdue conveyance of civil liberties as primary reasons for persisting in a fight that has spanned five generations. They prefer to talk about truth and reconciliation. They choose to emphasize identity and belonging. “We want Congress to recognize us so that they know we belong here too, just like they do,” says Phyllis McGillis, a Little Shell tribal elder from Great Falls.
Donald Davis, a tribal council member from Helena, told me he wants to say out loud, “I am Little Shell,” and have other Montanans know the history of his ancestors and what that means for tribal members today.
Federal recognition would actualize these aspirations by providing congressional confirmation of the tribe’s unique history, which has been meticulously documented by the late historian Nicholas Vrooman, legal experts at the Native American Rights Fund, and numerous academics in the U.S. and Canada. Congressional action would also mean that significant funding would be available to materially strengthen the tribe’s culture, which Tribal Chairman Gerald Gray hopes to preserve, in part, by expanding a cultural center on Hill 57, a historic Little Shell settlement in Great Falls.
It is not yet certain that the tribe will realize this goal. Congress has a dismal track record on tribal recognition: Lawmakers rarely pass American Indian bills because they are reluctant to prioritize the concerns of voters outside of their district or state and because American Indian issues are generally overlooked by the House, which has just two native members, and the Senate, which has none. There are hundreds of unrecognized tribes in the U.S., yet Congress passed just one tribal recognition bill between 1995 and 2017, while more than 80 other bills languished.
Last year, six Virginia-based tribes bucked this trend by securing passage of a long-standing bipartisan bill, and the Little Shell are now in a similar position. Senator Tester has introduced their recognition bill in seven consecutive sessions, and now the measure is attached to the NDAA, a bipartisan armed services appropriations bill that has passed annually for 58 years. A House-Senate conference committee cleared that legislative package last Monday with the Little Shell amendment included, and the House approved it by a large margin on December 11. Tester says he expects the Senate to vote within the week.
“For me, it’s been 12-plus years, but for the Little Shell it’s been 150-plus. They’ve been jacked around on this issue big-time,” Tester told the Prospect on Wednesday morning. But now, “we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, in fact, we can see the smoke coming out of the train.”
If Congress finishes the job, then they will have exercised a rarely used legislative power for the second time in two years: the power to decide that American Indians count legally, politically, and economically as self-governing communities. In doing so, lawmakers will not only strengthen a distinct indigenous community in Montana, they will strengthen the country. Cities, counties, and states will be legally required to treat the Little Shell as a sovereign power. Local and state officials will have to collaborate with them—and hopefully learn from them, and gain insights into what it means to be one of many parts that make up this diverse republic.
During periods of historic disunion, foundational questions about the republic must be asked, since the answers have the power to lead us toward common ground. If Americans want the country’s founding motto to mean more today than it did more than 200 years ago, it is imperative that Congress recognize the Little Shell people and restore their status as a sovereign nation.
