Call for Change: The Medicine Way of American Indian History, Ethos, and Reality

by Donald L. Fixico

For too many years, the academic discipline of history has ignored American Indians or lacked the kind of open-minded thinking necessary to truly understand them. Most historians remain oriented toward the American experience at the expense of the Native experience. As a result, both the status and the quality of Native American history have suffered and remain marginalized within the discipline. In this impassioned work, noted historian Donald L. Fixico challenges academic historians—and everyone else—to change this way of thinking. Fixico argues that the current discipline and practice of American Indian history are insensitive to and inconsistent with Native people’s traditions, understandings, and ways of thinking about their own history. In Call for Change , Fixico suggests how the discipline of history can improve by reconsidering its approach to Native peoples. He offers the “Medicine Way” as a paradigm to see both history and the current world through a Native lens. This new approach paves the way for historians to better understand Native peoples and their communities through the eyes and experiences of Indians, thus reflecting an insightful indigenous historical ethos and reality.

264 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2013

Reviews

[Sam Orndorff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fixico provides a very readable and interesting critique of the way in which Indigenous peoples in North America have been misunderstood. This, he says, is because white historians focus on events, rather than experiences, and fail to understand inter-tribal relations and how tribal nations relate to the natural and metaphysical world. His narrative, while it is slightly repetitive, quite smoothly follows the argumentative form which he outlines in the beginning, where there are three "dimensions" - first white historians write about Natives, second is the encounter narratives which are actually histories of white-Native relations, and finally the third dimension is Native cultural beliefs situated in its own cultural context. In the Third Dimension, non-human plants and animals, as well as spiritual, mystical forces play a major role in the Indigenous conception of reality. Fixico uses precaution not to generalize every society, but carefully shows how certain groups blend their understandings of the real and the surreal into a coherent worldview. It's rare that you find a theory-heavy book that is as clear as this. He also uses historical turning points like the Vietnam War and occupation of Alcatraz to show how Natives engage in global history.