Review: Call for Change

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

By Donald L. Fixico

University of Nebraska Press, 2013

Fixico, Donald L. Call for Change: The Medicine Way of American Indian History, Ethos, and Reality. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. ISBN 9781496245380.

Donald Fixico has spent forty years writing American Indian history from inside the discipline. Call for Change is the book that results when he turns around and asks whether the discipline can hold what he has been trying to put in it. His answer is no, not as currently practiced, and the book is his proposal for what would have to change. While I find the diagnosis bracing, I will argue that the book succeeds as manifesto and falls short as demonstration: the critique of the field is sharp and earned, while the constructive proposal (the Medicine Way) remains suggestive, underspecified, and more reliant on a generalized Native ethos than its own commitments should allow.

Fixico argues that frameworks never built for American Indian history have distorted it. Documentary evidence, linear causation, the sovereign individual, the human-centered event, the boundary between the natural and the supernatural: these are not neutral tools. They are culturally specific habits that produce a history in which Indians appear as objects of federal action and little else. Fixico wants a method that begins from Native ways of understanding relation, time, and reality, and he calls it the Medicine Way.

Natural Democracy and the three dimensions #

Two concepts carry the book. The first is Natural Democracy, which Fixico derives from the Muscogee Creek and Seminole idea of Ibofanga (the relation binding a person to the earth and to what is above it). In this frame the moral and political community does not stop at human beings; animals, plants, places, and spiritual beings participate with standing, and reciprocity rather than dominion organizes the whole. History written on this basis would treat a river or a bear as an actor rather than as setting. In short, Fixico asks the historian to work inside a cosmovision rather than to describe one from the outside.

The second is a tripartite model of Indian-white relations. The First Dimension is history written about Indians by outsiders, the archive as it stands. The Second Dimension is the zone of actual interaction where both parties are present and changed: war, treaty, trade, the boarding school. The Third Dimension is Native ethos itself, the physical and metaphysical reality in which Indigenous people have understood their own experience. Conventional history stops at the second dimension and mistakes it for the whole; Fixico argues that the third is not decoration on the historical record but the level at which Native experience becomes intelligible at all.

Nine chapters work outward from a critique of the field through chapters on "seeing," cross-cultural translation, oral tradition and language, and the role of earth and women in Native epistemology, before closing with "Coming Full Circle." The circular structure is deliberate and consistent with the argument.

Assertion in place of demonstration #

The book's weakness is the gap between the proposal and any showing that the proposal works. Fixico draws on his teaching career, on oral tradition, and on tribal cosmology from Creek, Seminole, Iroquois, Navajo, and Lakota sources, plus a wide reading of secondary historiography. What he does not do is take a contested historical episode and rewrite it under the Medicine Way to show what the method yields that conventional method does not. Given that Fixico himself produced the standard account of termination and relocation, the absence of such a demonstration is conspicuous; a reader convinced by the diagnosis leaves without a worked example. This lacuna between diagnosis and practice is the book's central frustration.

The pan-tribal reach compounds the problem. Ibofanga is Creek and Seminole; Fixico offers Natural Democracy as a general Native orientation, illustrating it with examples pulled from nations with distinct languages, cosmologies, and histories. He is careful to say that Native peoples differ, but the argument requires a shared ethos to function, and the shared ethos does most of the work. Critics have reasonably asked whether this move reproduces the essentialism that Indigenous Studies spent two decades dismantling. The chapters also repeat themselves; the three dimensions reappear in nearly every chapter, and the book would be stronger at two-thirds the length.

Where it sits #

Fixico writes as though he were alone in this argument, and he is not. Vine Deloria Jr. made a version of it in God Is Red forty years earlier; Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies had been reorganizing research ethics since 1999; Devon Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson had already gathered a generation of Native scholars around the problem of the academy itself. Call for Change engages this literature lightly, which makes its intervention feel more solitary than it is and misses a chance to say where Fixico's model differs from theirs.

Read against Fixico's own The American Indian Mind in a Linear World, though, the book is coherent and cumulative. It extends that earlier argument from cognition to method, and it does so in prose that is clear, unhedged, and free of theoretical apparatus. That accessibility matters; you can hand this book to a first-year graduate student who has never questioned why the seminar reads treaties and not stories.

Verdict #

Read it, with the understanding that Fixico has written a manifesto rather than a demonstration. The critique of the discipline is sharp and delivered with the authority of someone who built a career inside it; the constructive proposal is suggestive and underspecified, and it leans harder on generalization about Native thought than its own commitments should allow. Assign it in historiography and methods courses, where it will start good arguments, and pair it with Smith and with case studies that show Indigenous method actually applied to evidence. Historians of the American West who still treat Native people as a subplot are the intended targets; in my estimation they should read it first.