“That’s What They Used to Say”: Reflections on American Indian Oral Traditions by Donald L. Fixico (review)

Donald L. Fixico’s “That’s What They Used to Say”: Reflections on American Indian Oral Traditions shows how Native stories both contextualize and sustain Indigenous communities. Fixico draws on his own tribal background—Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Mvskoke Creek, and Seminole—and personal stories to present a patchwork of Great Plains American Indian life. Fixico’s work makes explicit the power and resonance of the spoken word, orality, and spiritual energy of Native stories through analysis of famous speeches, creation myths, warrior stories, ghost tales, and family histories. Moreover, Fixico showcases Native storytellers’ ability to bridge the past with the present and even the future identities of their listeners with the myriad of applications and interpretations derived from Indigenous narratives. While the nonlinear structure of the book might read as fractured snippets of stories, this seems an intentional move by Fixico to mimic the circular nature of an Indigenous worldview. Within the Great Plains context, Fixico’s work advances the use of place within creation myths amid the realities of forced migration, highlights Native women’s roles as respected storytellers and keepers of ceremonial knowledge, and illuminates the narrative bending of time-space that connects the warrior spirits from nineteenth-century heroes with World War II veterans.

Fixico’s methodological intervention rests in his distinction between oral tradition and oral history. Where academia tends to subsume American Indian oral traditions under the canopy of oral history, Fixico argues that, for Native communities, stories are more than a recounting of events. Instead, American Indian oral traditions capture an Indigenous worldview, join communities, and contextualize spiritual experiences. The various threads of Fixico’s argument come together most effectively in his framing of Native stories along the Moccasin Trail and his analysis of Indian humor. Through stories his mother told him, Fixico demonstrates how one can culturally graft everyday memories and stories onto a greater Indigenous contextual map of westward expansion, allotment, the Great Depression, reorganization, loss, and relocation experienced along the Moccasin Trail that runs through Indian country. Furthermore, utilizing the optic of Indian humor, Fixico illustrates how funny stories not only ease the traumas of federal Indian policy, but they also serve as tools for survival, ways to exercise power, and means to recreate communities particularly within the context of urbanization. For Fixico, to understand Native communities is to not only know their stories, but to also understand them from the perspective of “inside the lodge,” or the internal reality of Native communities.