The man behind the Native Hall of Fame
Leslie Logan
Special to ICT
James Parker Shield, Little Shell Chippewa, has gone from being expelled in the ninth grade and sleeping in the streets of Oklahoma City to rubbing shoulders with some of the most famous, powerful and accomplished Native people in contemporary times.
At the 2022 National Native American Hall of Fame induction ceremony, he presented former U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell and former first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, W. Richard West, with the signature crystal arrowhead-shaped Native American Hall of Fame award.
He has honored a Who’s Who of Indian Country, including nearly 50 of the greatest Native thinkers, writers, artists, activists, athletes, actors, business people, leaders, performers and trailblazers in modern history. He has bestowed honoring blankets upon Menominee leader Ada Deer, first woman Cherokee Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller, actor Wes Studi, Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday, three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, scholar and writer Vine Deloria Jr., sculptor and painter Alan Houser/Haozous, environmental and Indigenous rights activist and lacrosse legend Oren Lyons, and many more.
As the CEO and founder of the Hall of Fame, Shield and the all-Native board members have posthumously recognized ballet dancer Maria Tallchief, Olympian Jim Thorpe, civil rights activist Elizabeth Peratrovich, and singer Joanne Shenandoah and others.
The path to building the National Native American Hall of Fame that recognizes the best, brightest Native movers and shakers who have made a difference in Indian Country may have started unwittingly when he was a young boy.
As a child, Shield got shipped off to the state orphanage in Montana and bounced around foster homes. There wasn’t stability, support systems or a whole lot of love and supervision. Sometimes there wasn’t food, and he had to resort to scrounging around dumpsters for scraps. There were few people along the way encouraging him to do well and dream big.
“I played a lot by myself, didn’t have any toys,” Shield recalled. “I used to break up little sticks and make them into my own army men. I was the leader of my pretend army. Looking back, I guess I wanted to be something of a leader.”
Shield said he had a bit of an attitude – a broken foster care system will do that to a kid – and mostly didn’t do well in school, but he read a lot and gravitated toward biographical books about Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Osceola, Quannah Parker. “Those were the historical figures that were my childhood heroes; I wanted to be like them,” said Shield.
In the middle of winter in 1970, he hitchhiked from Montana to Washington, D.C., by way of Oklahoma. “I wanted to see the world, so I thumbed my way in a southerly direction. One day I climbed off a semi-truck in Oklahoma City and for the first few days I walked around in my cowboy boots with a little tin suitcase. I slept in the streets and worked in bars and kitchens,” said Shield.
Eventually he got hooked up with a six-month training program and learned to do medical transcription. He meandered a bit more, got his GED and driver’s license, was on a boxing team and fought in matches throughout Montana.
For a time, he couch-surfed and was “mostly up to no good.” He went back to Oklahoma and hung out with some Kiowas who were attending college. He survived by doing day labor and when that dried up, he’d go to the blood bank and sell his blood.
Then one day a friend was going to visit relatives in Washington, D.C., who were working at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He tagged along and ended up staying in Washington for two-and-a-half years. His world had suddenly changed and opened up unimagined possibilities. Tribal delegations were coming through Washington all the time, including Alaskan Natives working on the Native Alaska Claims Act. The American Indian Movement was at its peak, and he met founders Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, and Vernon Bellecourt, who would later become a leader of AIM.
“I got to meet different people from other tribes working in various organizations including Chuck Trimble, the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, and all these other people involved in advocacy,” he said. “Ultimately, I met the most influential person in my life: Ernie Stevens Sr., who was a bigshot at the Indian Bureau.”
“Ernie told Joe Vasquez at the ‘Indian Desk’ that I had potential. It was the first time I’d heard anyone say that about me,” Shield said. Joe “Lone Eagle” Vasquez, a non-Native, was the Indian Affairs director in the Commerce Department’s minority enterprise office and served on the National Council on Indian Opportunity.
“I decided that if I wanted to be around all these movers and shakers, I had to straighten up. So, I went home and went to college. I wanted to hang out with the smart Indians and do stuff,” he said.
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Shield went on to become the first Native person to work on Montana Governor Ted Schwinden’s staff. He was appointed state coordinator of Indian affairs and worked in the thick of tribal relations. He worked on several campaigns and served on Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg’s staff.
He delved into journalism, published Native Montana, a statewide magazine, served as the co-host of Montana’s first Native television program “Indian Country,” and was the first Native to write a regular column that was carried across the Big Sky state.
“One of my columns was about Squaw Island. I pointed out that it was a derogatory term toward women and suggested the city change the name to Sacajawea,” said Shield. Ultimately the change was made and there is a plaque in Great Falls today. “I look back on that as one of my proudest moments, having been the catalyst to make that change. In my own small way, I was trying to do on a local level what I saw Native people doing in D.C.”
In 1996 he was elected tribal chairman of the Little Shell Chippewa, who were known as the “landless Indians” since 1892. While chairman, he continued the decades-long fight for federal recognition that hit nothing but dead ends for more than a century. The Little Shell finally celebrated federal recognition in 2019 after 125 years of struggle.
Shield’s tribe earned its name after Chief Little Shell rejected the 1893 McCumber Agreement that took 10 million acres from the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation of North Dakota for some 10 cents an acre. The agreement established the Turtle Mountain reservation but left the Little Shell band of Chippewa with nothing. Some Little Shell people went further north and west into Saskatchewan and Alberta, and then later settled in Montana.
Today, most of the roughly 5,300 citizens of the tribe live in north-central Montana, and the tribe maintains an office in Great Falls, where Shield lives today. Many tribal members suffered during the tribe’s long struggle for recognition and lack of homelands. Without a place to call theirs, some Little Shell squatted in three shanty towns, one on two acres of land known as “Hill 57” on the outskirts of Great Falls. There, the Little Shell scraped by in a state of destitution, sleeping in abandoned cars, barely surviving.
Shield’s childhood wasn’t far from that experience. Moved by the life of Quannah Parker, Shield legally changed his name and adopted Parker as his middle name after being orphaned and not knowing his family.
Shield retired from his work in Montana in 2012. He had long thought there should be a Native hall of fame and figured that over the years someone would get it going. No one did.
“I was retired and building a barn at the time. I kept coming back to the number of people that I looked up to and who brought about progress for Indian Country. I thought 20 years from now young people won’t know about the contributions contemporary Natives made and how they changed things for Native America,” Shield recalled. “So I came out of retirement to do it myself.”
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Shield’s whole career had been in Montana and he considered himself relatively unknown nationally. He started reaching out to the people who were better connected throughout Indian Country and first recruited the president of Stone Child Tribal College, Nate St. Pierre, to be on his board. He then brought on Harlan McKosato, then host of Native America Calling, the nationally syndicated radio talk show on Native issues.
He started small with a grant of $3,300 from the First Generation Fund in California. Undeterred, he created a brochure, cards and a small display and took it on the road, setting up at various Native events, powwows and art shows.
Shield started to make connections with people who had also long harbored the idea of a hall of fame – one of them was Walt Lamar, Blackfeet, who joined the board and served as chairman for several years.
The road to growing the Hall of Fame has not always been smooth. Board member Walt Lamar said, “From the very beginning James has had a strong vision of what this National Hall of Fame should be, could be, and would be. He has never wavered from that vision or flinched at obstacles. He’s incredibly persistent and committed to what benefits the Hall of Fame brings to our communities – by recognizing those trailblazers that brought us to this place.”
In 2021, the National Native Hall of Fame partnered with the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City and signed a memorandum of understanding to lease space for a temporary home. It is fundraising to build a new wing onto the existing building, a permanent home that will showcase exhibits on the lives and contributions of inductees.
This year’s class includes journalist, author and Indian Country Today editor-at-large Mark Trahant, Shoshone-Bannock; acclaimed novelist, poet and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo; Richard Trudell, Santee Sioux, an attorney who developed innovative programs and helped shape a legislative agenda for Indian Country; and LaNada War Jack, Shoshone-Bannock, a leader in the occupation of Alcatraz who has devoted her life to defending treaty rights. Posthumous honors go to Quinault Nation President Joe De La Cruz, who led his nation for 22 years and tackled natural resource management, and Will Sampson, Muscogee Creek actor, artist and rodeo competitor.
Back row left to right: Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Joy Harjo, Ernie Stevens Jr. (accepting for his father), Dave Anderson, Emil Notti and Richard West were inducted into the National Native American Hall of Fame in 2021, along with Marcella Lebeau (front row). (Photo by Cheryl Anquoe, National Native American Hall of Fame)
Shield is quick to note that while those who are inducted are indeed noteworthy, they are not all household names, even in Indian Country. At the 2021 induction ceremony, the show stealer was a not-widely-known registered nurse: Marcella LeBeau, a 102-year-old Cheyenne River Sioux woman who served in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps during World War II. She was recognized in 2004, at the 60th anniversary of D-Day, with six highly distinguished medals including the French Legion Medal of Honor.
Shield said LeBeau was one of the most inspiring honorees at the center of one of the most memorable induction ceremonies. “We have honored some really great and remarkable people, but Marcella had such determination and fortitude. She was in a wheelchair and in poor health, but she was bound and determined to make it to the ceremony,” Shield said. “She was the star of the show. She was an Army nurse at the Battle of the Bulge in Normandy, in field hospitals close to the front lines and shared amazing stories. She passed on three weeks after the honoring.”
Shield explained that LeBeau is a case in point underscoring the mission of the Hall of Fame. “We don’t induct people based on popularity or notoriety, although many people are well known in certain circles, but we honor people who have done significant work whose stories need to be told. Marcella nursed soldiers on the battle lines and worked for years in Indian Health. Her personal story was one that a lot of people could identify with – of Natives in the services and their lifelong dedication to their field.”
The first induction ceremony was held in 2018 at the site of the Phoenix Indian School. Shield selected the site, which is now a city park, to pay homage to the many inductees who survived the residential school experience. This year will be the fifth induction ceremony. In 2019, the ceremony was held in Tulsa at the Hardrock Casino. In 2020, COVID canceled the ceremony like many other events around the world. In 2021, the Hall of Fame got back on track and held its awards ceremony at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City; it was held there in 2022 and will be held there again this Saturday, Oct. 14th.
In addition to honoring great Indigenous leaders in their field, the Hall of Fame has developed a curriculum with lesson plans. The curriculum has been tested and tweaked and is being adopted primarily in schools serving Native students.
Shield promotes the curriculum at the National Indian Education Association and meets with Native educators. “I’ve always felt that our curriculum will be our biggest impact,” Shield said. “Getting in the schools is critical – 80 percent of schools don’t teach about Native people; those that do only cover long-ago history. Our curriculum teaches that we’re still here, our inductees are not confined to the past; they are relatable and we continue to make a difference today.”
The Hall of Fame seeks to help people understand the eras and periods in modern times, such as relocation and termination, that were the historical backdrop in which many inductees’ accomplishments were made. Lessons focus on what life was like for Olympian Jim Thorpe when he was competing and the external obstacles he faced off the track and field.
Shield explains that inductees’ achievements didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Hall of Fame curriculum teaches that long before the birth of civil rights in the south, Elizabeth Peratrovich, Tlingit, pushed for civil rights legislation in the face of racist attitudes in Alaska and effected change.
“I want students to come away saying I didn’t know that my people or my territory would have been wiped off the map if it wasn’t for inductees Lucy Covington or Ada Deer,” Shield said. “The Indian Country that kids know today wasn’t this way years ago, or even in my lifetime. Youth need to realize that Indian Country was very different and that our inductees made huge strides to make their lives and the path for others a lot better.”
Along with expanding the curriculum and getting in more schools, Shield said there is no shortage of things he has yet to do. “I want to do a monuments project, a TV program on a significant platform like the History or Discovery channel. During Native American Heritage month, I want to do 30-second historical moments. We have the content, but we need resources,” Shield said. “Some of these things I won’t live to see happen, but someone will help make them happen.”
“James has had a short-term and long-range vision and we’re still in the nascent stages of the organization. James’ vision is yet to be fully realized,” said Walt Lamar. “It’s been a struggle, but we continue to make steps forward.”
In many respects, James Parker Shield’s own rebranding – an assertive move to reject the sharp edges of his difficult beginnings – is indicative of his drive to establish the National Native Hall of Fame, tell the inspirational stories of Native people, and to realize the full potential of his vision.
“James renaming himself is so central to who he is,” said Walt Lamar. And some would say central to his commitment to the Hall of Fame. “He idolized Quannah Parker and has sought to keep the memories of those who came before, to make sure that we keep them in our collective Native consciousness is so vital. His tough upbringing made him the warrior that he is.”
Shield doesn’t see his role as CEO as a job; it’s a calling. The Hall of Fame seeks to educate non-Natives, but more importantly, it seeks to educate and inspire Indigenous youth.
“I want our stories to be examples of what can be and impact Native youth that may be marginalized or at risk. One of our stories may be the spark that gives an Indian kid hope – because I was one of those kids,” said Shield. “I always try to remember my background and how I felt. When you feel like no one believes in you and you’re told you’ll never amount to anything, you need something that is a counterweight to that.”
Shield hopes the Hall of Fame stories are life changing.
“We have a sacred responsibility to tell the stories of our inductees, their accomplishments and contributions to Indian Country,” said Shield. “We are preserving the legacies of inductees.”
As the National Native Hall of Fame celebrates six new inductees this week, Indian Country should also take a moment to recognize the man whose vision and persistence brought the Hall of Fame into existence: a man determined to tell the uplifting stories of Indian Country’s luminaries. James Parker Shield’s story, too, is one worth telling.
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