Indian resilience and rebuilding: indigenous nations in the modern American West

Abstract

Indian Resilience and Rebuilding provides an Indigenous view of the last one-hundred years of Native history and guides readers through a century of achievements. It examines the progress that Indians have accomplished in rebuilding their nations in the twentieth century, revealing how Native communities adapted to the cultural and economic pressures in modern America. Donald Fixico examines issues like land allotment, the Indian New Deal, termination and relocation, Red Power and self-determination, casino gaming, and repatriation. He applies ethnohistorical analysis and political economic theory to provide a multilayered approach that ultimately shows how Native people reinvented themselves in order to rebuild their nations. Fixico identifies the tools to this empowerment, including education, navigation within cultural systems, modern Indian leadership, and indigenised political economy. He explains how these tools helped Indian communities to rebuild their nations. Fixico constructs an Indigenous paradigm of Native ethos and reality that drives modern Indian political economies heading into the twenty-first century. This illuminating and comprehensive analysis of Native nation's resilience in the twentieth century demonstrates how Native Americans reinvented themselves, rebuilt their nations, and ultimately became major forces in the United States. Indian Resilience and Rebuilding, redefines how modern American history can and should be told.