BIA rejects Little Shells’ bid for tribal recognition

BILLINGS – After a 31-year wait, the U.S. Department of Interior said Tuesday it will not recognize Montana’s Little Shell Tribe, a group of landless Indians who have struggled to stay together through more than a century of poverty and dislocation.

The tribe’s long campaign for acknowledgment now turns to Congress. Members of Montana’s delegation said they would push to circumvent the executive branch decision.

“It kind of hurts, naturally, but it’s not the end of the line,” said Little Shell elder Roger Salois, 72, after learning of the government’s denial.

“It’s really hard to describe a feeling like this,” Salois added. “You have your community and your place to go. We don’t have that. But we’re still together, and we’re still Little Shell.”

The three-decade delay in answering the tribe’s application was chalked up in part to “departures from precedent” – a reference to the Little Shell’s scattered membership and its history of intermarriage with non-Indians and members of other tribes.

Critics, including U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, blamed the delay on the “broken” bureaucracy that oversees Indian recognition requests.

Tester and fellow Montana Democrat Sen. Max Baucus said they introduced legislation Tuesday to override the Interior Department’s decision. U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, a Republican, earlier introduced a similar measure in the House.

Federal recognition would bring housing grants and other assistance to the tribe’s 4,300 members, who are spread across Montana and neighboring states and provinces.

Members of the tribe are candid about their mixed ancestry: Many also call themselves Metis, a Canadian people with European and Native American roots.

But while their lineage is mixed, they say their identity is not.

“They’ve got their rules, and you’ve got to fit into the slot. But we know who we are,” Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians Chairman John Sinclair said.

Nedra Darling of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs said officials had to make their decision based on a strict set of criteria that allowed little flexibility.

The agency’s 242-page rejection decision said the Little Shell had failed to show enough “cohesion” during the early 1900s, after many of the tribe’s members had been uprooted and were wandering northern Montana and southern Canada.

Members of the group who ended up in Montana lived primarily in “already existing, largely multiethnic settlements,” the decision stated.

“In none of these multiethnic settlements did the petitioner’s ancestors constitute a majority or even a significant percentage of the population,” it said.

The tribe has not had a place of its own since the late 1860s, when Chief Little Shell and his band were excluded from a federal treaty signed with related tribes.