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Donald Fixico is a Native American American writer and intellectual. He is a Distinguished Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. Previously, he was the Thomas Bowlus Distinguished Professor of American Indian History, CLAS Scholar and the founding Director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas.

He is a policy historian and ethno-historian.

Background

Fixico is an enrolled member of the Sac & Fox Nation^[1] and descendant of the Shawnee, Muscogee, and Seminole people.^[2]

Education

Postdoctoral Fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago, 1981-1982^[3]

Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of California-Los Angeles, 1980-1981^[4]

Ph.D. History, University of Oklahoma, 1980. Dissertation: “Termination and Relocation, Federal Indian Policy in the 1950s”^[5]

M.A. History, University of Oklahoma, Norman 1976. Thesis: “The Seminole Wars: A Study of Indian Nationalism”^[6]

B.A. History, University of Oklahoma, Norman 1974^[7]

Bacone Junior College, Muskogee, Oklahoma, 1969-1970 ^[8]

Career

In 2000, President Bill Clinton appointed him to the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2002 he was the John Rhodes Visiting Professor of Public Policy in the Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University. In 2006, the Organization of American Historians awarded a short-term residency award to Fixico to give lectures for two weeks in Japan. Fixico has given lectures nationally and internationally and works with tribes and indigenous organizations. In 2012, he lectured at Sichuan University in China and University of Auckland in New Zealand in 2013.^[2] Fixico has been a visiting lecturer and visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego State University, and University of Michigan. He was an exchange professor at University of Nottingham, England and visiting professor in the F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin.

Works

Themes

Fixico writes most on the Native American experience and history, especially in oral history and the U.S. West.

He writes in depth and often about urbanization, particularly in conjunction with termination narratives and the American Indian diaspora. In his book Urban Indian Experience in America, Fixico discusses prior negative stereotypes about adjustment:

This downtrodden image does not accurately portray urban Indians, particularly in the 1990s when at least three generations have survived the relocation years of the 1950s and 1960s. The early image misrepresents the urban Indian population to an unfortunate degree, since many Indian citizens in cities hold professional positions and are members of the middle class in America." (p. 27).

Said of Fixico:

Donald Fixico challenges scholars of American and Indian history to revise their thinking, enlarge their ‘seeing,’ and engage in an effort to understand Native people and their communities. He constructs a convincing argument about the uniqueness of Indian history and his explanation for seeing the world through Indian lenses leads Fixico to craft a terminology that makes a great deal of sense. — Margaret Connell Szasz, Regents Professor of Native American and Celtic History at the University of New Mexico and author of Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World^[9]

Books and contributions

He has published a dozen books:

• American Indians in a Modern World (2008)
• Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts and Sovereignty, 3 volumes, ed, (2007)
• Daily Life of Native Americans in the Twentieth Century (2006)
• The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge (2003)
• The Urban Indian Experience in America (2000)
• The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: Tribal Natural Resources and American Capitalism (1998), 2nd ed., 2011
• Rethinking American Indian History, ed. (1997)
• Urban Indians (1991); An Anthology of Western Great Lakes Indian History, ed. (1988)
• Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960 (1986)
• Call for Change: The Medicine Way of American Indian History, Ethos and Reality (June 2013)
• Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West (October 2013).

He also has contributed to a number of publications, including "Removal of the Western Southeast Indians". Handbook of North American Indians: Southeast, Volume 14. U.S. Government Printing (2004); Witness of Change Over Fifty Years of Indian Activism and Tribal Politics. BEYOND RED POWER: TRIBAL POLITICS IN THE 1960S. School for Advanced Research Press (2007); The Federal Indian Relocation Programme of the 1950s and the Urbanization of Indian Identity. Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World. Oxford University Press (2009); The Literature of American Indian History. A Century of American Historiography. Bedford St. Martins Press(2009); "From Tribal to Indian: American Indian Identity in the Twentieth Century". Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas. University of Nebraska Press (2014).

Film

Professor Fixico has worked on nearly 20 historical documentaries, including Texas Ranch House (2006), Freedom Riders (2009) and American Experience (1988).

See also

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
• Native American Renaissance
• Native American studies

References

External links and further reading

• Donald Fixico at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Interviews: Interview: Native Americans | American Experience | PBS