An acclaimed UNC historian is winning national honors for her comprehensive study of Native American history – spanning a thousand years and crossing an entire continent to challenge old narratives and popular (but incorrect) beliefs.
Kathleen DuVal’s “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America” recently got named as a co-recipient of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History. It’s not the only honor DuVal has received: among other things, “Native Nations” also won the Bancroft Prize as the year’s best book on American history.
97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck recently welcomed Kathleen DuVal into the studio to discuss the book.
Click here to listen to their full conversation. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Aaron Keck: How long of a project was it for you? What was the starting point?
Kathleen DuVal: In some ways I’ve been working on it a long, long time – probably 25 years of learning about Native American history. It (had been) nine years since my previous book came out, and historians are always working on a book – so nine years of research and writing, particularly on this book.
Keck: It’s a new look at Native American history: most accounts of US history either don’t talk about Native Americans at all, or they’re (portrayed as) helpless victims, primitive, (and) white people show up and they just crumble into dust. And that’s not the case at all.
DuVal: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So what I wanted to do in this book is to tell millenniums’ worth of history, to show exactly what you just said. Native nations were here a long time ago. They survived through colonialism, and in fact had a tremendous amount of power over Europeans, and the people of the United States, for the first few centuries after Europeans arrived, and (they’re) still around today.
Keck: You’ve got so many stories in the book, covering the entire continent, (about) well-developed cities and organizations and structures (before 1492).
DuVal: Right – what a lot of people don’t know, and what generally doesn’t get taught, is that there were large cities, urban civilizations, (and) hierarchical social and political systems across much of North America a thousand years ago.
Keck: Including Cahokia – (which) I only recently read about for the first time. This is something that I knew nothing about until I was 45!
DuVal: It’s amazing, right? Americans know about the great ruins of Rome, but not about our own continent. Cahokia was what archeologists think was the biggest of these urban civilizations. It’s right across the Mississippi River from where St. Louis is today. And in the heart of Cahokia was a city of at least 20,000 people, and then it had suburbs with many, many more thousands of people, satellite cities that were also quite large. (It was) definitely on a scale that was similar to urban civilizations in Western Europe and other parts of the world at the time – and then Cahokia also influenced the rise of cities in other places all across the eastern two-thirds of what’s now the United States.
Keck: I also appreciate the portion of the book where you (point out) – also entirely true – that we celebrate the rise of cities, (but the) rise of cities also means centralization, oppression, economic stratification.
DuVal: Right. Bad sanitation, all kinds of things. Problems come with cities. Europeans come to the kind of thinking that cities are sort of the ultimate way civilizations should grow into, should progress into, and that’s not necessarily the case.
Keck: Not that I’m moving out, but –
DuVal: Right? As I was writing this, I was thinking, “but I do like cities!”
Photos via UNC/Random House.
Keck: What originally inspired you to sit down and say, “I want to do this big comprehensive project”?
DuVal: It actually was a class that I’ve been teaching at UNC for 22 years, called “Native North America.” It starts as far back in time as possible, and it goes to today – and the first time I taught it, I was overwhelmed with trying to fit that into a semester. But one of the things I’ve come to love about that class is: every student who comes in (will) know native nations have been here a long, long time, and every student who comes in (will) know native nations are still here. And I thought, “can I write a book that gives the reader a bit of that same experience?” (I want) the reader to go away knowing at least those two lessons – and maybe some other stuff along the way.
Keck: You traveled a lot to research this. What are some of the best places you went?
DuVal: For my other books, I went mostly to archives. That’s the kind of ‘travel’ that historians usually do. For this one, I went to tribes, to reservations, to tribal cultural centers, to meet with tribal historians. I called them my field trips. And on many of them, my colleagues from UNC who were members of those tribes went with me and showed me around…
The book covers a thousand years – but in every chapter, even the ones that happened long ago, I want the reader to have a sense that those people, the descendants of that time and place, are still here. And so I try to (incorporate) my travels through Indian country and the things I’ve learned from specific people, and hope that the reader sees me as a guide into those places. So I had a tremendous amount of fun going around the country.
Keck: It’s a book that takes you all over the U.S. – but it’s also very much a book written by someone who’s in Chapel Hill, because you’ve got references to the Saponi (and) the Occoneechee, you go to Hillsborough – so there’s a lot of local cool things as well.
DuVal: And I think that really reflects how much I have grown and learned as a historian by being right here. In one of the chapters, the Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery and I take our kids to the Lost Colony play, (which was) an older presentation of history that really made the Indians seem sort of simple and exotic. (But) then I also write about the changes that have happened more recently to the Lost Colony Play, where Lumbees and other natives have changed the script and the costumes and the dances and really made them much more authentic to what things might have actually been like on the coast of North Carolina in the late 1500s.
Keck: How should this research inform the conversations and the debates and the discussions that we’re having today, and our understanding of Native Americans in particular (and) America in general?
DuVal: I think one of the really important things for Americans to remember is that Native Americans are not just a minority group. They are members, citizens, of their own nations. Every Native American in the United States is a citizen of their own particular native nation, as well as a citizen of the United States. And that’s the kind of way that we, as individuals (and) as parts of institutions, need to interact with them. UNC is starting some initiatives to make those relationships more explicit and stronger and better moving forward. And I think that’s a good lesson for all of us.
Keck: Last question: since this book is out, and since every historian is always working on a book, that must mean you’re working on a new book now. What’s next?
DuVal: That’s exactly right. The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is coming up, and so I’m working on what I hope will be a shorter book, on Yorktown. The Battle of Yorktown is the last big mainland battle of the American Revolution, but I want to look at Coastal Virginia through the whole revolution, and how different sorts of people – Native Americans, enslaved and free Black Americans, women and men of various kinds – served in, reacted to, or were affected by the American Revolution.
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