Game Changer Event on Indian Termination with Professor, Author Donald Fixico

ABOUT THIS EVENT

Free or pay if you want, to help support our programming

Tuesday, April 25 at 7:00 PM CT

Indian Termination

During the nineteenth century, the U. S. government, determined to continue colonial expansion into Indian Country, created Indian reservations, often through solemn promises made in treaties, where Indians would remain “out of the way” of white settlement. Since that time reservations have been attacked a number of times with the hope of ending them.  One of the most devastating attacks was the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 that broke up reservations by allotting lands to individual tribal members then selling “surplus” lands to white settlers with a resulting loss of 90 million acres of Indian land. In the 1950s the government moved to end the reservations in a process called termination that was intended to put an end to Native sovereign nations and their reservations.  Professor Donald Fixico, Regents' and Distinguished Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University, wrote Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960 about this period. He will join Larry C. Skogen, president emeritus from Bismarck State College, to discuss this era and its ramifications in today’s political environment.

Scholar Donald L. Fixico (Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Muscogee and Seminole) is a Regents’ and Distinguished Foundation Professor of History; Distinguished Scholar of Sustainability in the Wrigley Global Institute; and Affiliate Faculty in American Indian Studies at Arizona State University.  He has had postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA and The Newberry Library in Chicago, plus 7 visiting professorships, including an Exchange Professorship at the University of Nottingham in England and a Visiting Professorship in the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie (Fry) University in Berlin, Germany.  He has written and edited 15 books on American Indians and the West, and has worked on more than 25 documentaries.  In 2018, he served as the President of the Western History Association, and was recently appointed by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to the Committee on Reconciliation for Place Names.

Moderator Larry Skogen:

After serving twenty-six-years in the U.S. Air Force, Larry C. Skogen began his work in higher education from which he retired on June 30, 2020. In the college world, he held positions as deputy superintendent for academics at New Mexico Military Institute, interim chancellor of the North Dakota University System, and president of Bismarck State College. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Dickinson State University, a master’s degree from the University of Central Missouri, and a Ph. D. in history from Arizona State University. He authored Indian Depredation Claims, 1796-1920, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1996, and edited To Educate American Indians: Selected Writings of the National Educational Association’s Department of Indian Education, 1900-1904 forthcoming fall 2023 from the University of Nebraska Press.  A resident of Mandan, North Dakota, he now avoids snow and ice by wintering in southern New Mexico with life partner Charlotte Olson.

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