Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

Join us on Tuesday, October 7, to hear Kathleen DuVal discuss her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. 

In this impressive history, DuVal, author of Independence Lost and The Native Ground, offers a long-term view of how Indigenous peoples in North America flourished both before and long after the arrival of Europeans, leveraging their power and negotiating their place alongside or within settler culture amid increasing existential threats. The author covers the last 1,000 years, sketching a trajectory of resistance, adaptability, and endurance and countering other historians who emphasize the victimization and steady disappearance of Indigenous peoples. Focusing on decisive periods involving individual nations, DuVal presents a selection of “examples and trends of Native North American sovereignty, politics, economics, diplo­macy, and war.” In doing so, she provides a compelling record of Indigenous agency and provides a rich context for understanding the survival of—and the political challenges still faced by—hundreds of Native nations today. The colonization of the continent, she demonstrates, was neither rapid nor fated, and alternative historical outcomes in which Native America maintained control of large territories are plausible. “Nothing was inevitable,” writes DuVal, “about the rise of the United States.” A highlight of this work is the author’s revision of conventional understandings of the scale of pre-contact Indigenous communities. DuVal points out the sophistication and vitality of urban centers, which resembled their European counterparts in size and population density a millennium ago, before gradually dissolving in response to climatic and political shifts. 

Kathleen DuVal is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and American Indian history. Her previous work includes Independence Lost, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. She is a coauthor of Give Me Liberty! and coeditor of Interpreting a Continent: Voices from Colonial America. In October 2024, Ms. DuVal won the Cundill History Prize, given annually to a book “that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal,” for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.