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 20th 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 multi-layered approach that ultimately shows how Native people reinvented themselves in order to rebuild their nations.  

Fixico identifies the tools to this empowerment such as education, navigation within cultural systems, modern Indian leadership, and indigenized 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 Indian modern 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.

Donald L. Fixico is Distinguished Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies as well as Faculty Affiliate in American Indian Studies and Faculty Affiliate in ASU’s School of Public Affairs. He is the author and editor of a dozen books including The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: Tribal Natural Resources and American Capitalism (1998) and The Urban Indian Experience in America (2000). He has worked on twenty documentaries about American Indians.

“Fixico utilizes indigenous methodologies and, what Lumbee scholar Malinda Maynor Lowery calls, 'autoethnography' to reinterpret twentieth-century American Indian history.”—American Historical Review

“An impressive and compelling range of critical disciplines, spanning historical, sociological, economic, political, legal, and postcolonial studies.”—NAIS

"Fixico's book is a welcome addition to all Native Studies core curriculum as a perfect introduction to the past 200 years of history of the tribes of the United States. Students of history, Native history, and political science will enjoy the scholarship as they learn of this history from the perspective of a Native historian at the height of his scholarship.”—Oregon Historical Quarterly

“Several books on American Indian politics and activism have been published in recent years, but Fixico offers a wide-ranging narrative of post-Civil War American Indian history told from the analytical angle of an 'Indigenous paradigm.' It both synthesizes new scholarship and offers new coverage of important American Indian contexts such as relocation and repatriation, bringing the story of adaptation and cultural survival into the 21st century.” —Paul C. Rosier, author of Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century

"Despite lingering problems on Indian reservations, many tribes are showing strength and resilience as they rebuild their homelands and cultures. Author Donald Fixico is not only a scholar of the past but a visionary of the future."—Southwest Books of the Year

“Indian Resilience and Rebuilding is a significant contribution to the small but growing literature on the reconstruction of Native Nations in the 20th century.  Most of these focus narrowly on a specific Nation or on a single aspect of the rebuilding process such as education or economics.  This study, however, provides a broader context within which to explore the process and outcome, and this wider view takes the reader across Indian Country.” —Kathleen P. Chamberlain, author of Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief

“Fixico utilizes indigenous methodologies and, what Lumbee scholar Malinda Maynor Lowery calls, 'autoethnography' to reinterpret twentieth-century American Indian history.”—American Historical Review