Donald L. Fixico. Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West.

Extract

Last summer, I pulled into the gas station on northern California's Round Valley Indian Reservation. Barely a year old at the time, the facility sits on the reservation's northern boundary and shares space with a convenience store and the Hidden Oaks Casino. As I jockeyed for position with reservation residents, ranchers, and people who participate in northern California's marijuana industry at one of the station's four pumps, I contemplated how much this small parcel of land had changed since the small casino opened in 2007. For a long time, the land on which the gas station sat was a flat, gravel turnout where people pulled up their cars to chat with one another. The site possessed the potential for economic development but needed the spark provided by gaming. In his new book, historian Donald L. Fixico suggests that the changes I witnessed on the reservation are not exceptional; rather, they are examples of events that occurred across the American West in the 1900s. Fixico argues that during the first half of the twentieth century, American Indians demonstrated resilience in the face of federal assimilation policies and subsequently rebuilt their nations in the last half of the twentieth and first part of the twenty-first centuries. Fixico employs three methodologies in his book: ethnohistory, political economy theory and an “indigenous paradigm” (p. 5). In doing so he argues that constant rebuilding is part of the American Indian Circle of Life, in which Native people have been continually forced to adapt and reinterpret themselves.