Montana News

Author recounts history of Little Shell Tribe in new book

Posted: Feb 2, 2013 9:49 PM by Beth Beechie - MTN News
Updated: Feb 2, 2013 9:50 PM

Dozens of people gathered in Black Eagle on Saturday to meet author Nicholas Vrooman, who spent years writing a book about the history and struggles of the Little Shell Tribe.

Vrooman calls his book a serious story that he hopes can be used recreationally and scholastically.

The book, titled, "The Whole Country was... One Robe: The Little Shell Tribe's America," took Vrooman two years to research and put together.

Vrooman hopes that his book gives readers more knowledge about the Little Shell's past, and said, "That they're reaffirmed in who they are and where they come from, and in their rightness of their petition to the federal government for recognizing who they are and their distinctive aboriginal rights."

Vrooman says in the book readers will find long quotes from tribal documents.

He says that contrary to what editors told him, he kept those passages in the book, unabridged, so that people of the Little Shell Tribe would have those words documented forever.

Click here to learn more about the book at the publisher's website, which includes the following description:

In twenty-nine meticulously researched chapters, Dr. Vrooman provides the full context for the Little Shell's present-day circumstance in Montana, from origins in the Upper Midwest to their role as successful traders, buffalo hunters, guides, and scouts in North Dakota and Montana (on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border), to their struggle for survival on the margins of Montana towns through the 1950s.

Vrooman writes: "Because of intense historical prejudice, the members of the Little Shell Tribe of Montana live today in a very distinctive and critical conundrum within the greater society. . . . The grand narrative of the Little Shell is . . . one of immense courage, fortitude, resilience, perseverance, hope, and love. It is a story that comprises the deeper, truer telling of our continent's history."