NATIVE NATIONS

Incredible new work of narrative history by Kathleen DuVal. NATIVE NATIONS presents the history of Indigenous North America from ancient cities to fights for Indigenous sovereignty that continue today and charts broad historical patterns across the continent and significant interactions between Native nations that changed the course of global history.

This is not dry history reading, nor is it what you learned in school! Kathleen DuVal traces the power of Native nations from the rise of ancient cities more than 1000 years ago to the present. She reframes North American history, noting significantly that Indigenous civilizations did not come to a halt when a few wandering explorers or hungry settlers arrived, even when the strangers came well-armed.

A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size, but following a period of climate change and instability DuVal shows how numerous nations emerged from previously centralized civilizations. From this urban past, patterns of egalitarian government structures, complex economies and trade, and diplomacy spread across North America. And, when Europeans arrived in the 16th century, they encountered societies they did not understand and whose power they often underestimated. For centuries, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests.

DuVal includes incredible stories of the people on the ground: we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch--and influenced global trade patterns; how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. With the American Revolution, power dynamics shifted, but Indigenous people continued to control the majority of the continent. The Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa built alliances across the continent and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off US ambitions. The Cherokees created new institutions to assert their sovereignty to the US and on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their dominance of power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory.

The definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Indigenous nations has been a constant. Native Nations is an important addition to a new tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations. Before and during European colonization, Indigenous North Americans built diverse civilizations and lived in history, adapting to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally for at least twenty thousand years, continuing through today and into the future.

Kathleen DuVal is an award-winning 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 (Random House 2015), which won many accolades and awards, and was a finalist for the prestigious George Washington Prize, and THE NATIVE GROUND: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Univ of Pennsylvania 2006), winner of the J. G. Ragsdale Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association. She is also a coeditor of INTERPRETING A CONTINENT: Voices from Colonial America (2009).