Native Nations
A Millennium in North America
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history” (The New York Review of Books), from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE, THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE, AND THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand—those having developed differently from their own—and whose power they often underestimated.
For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch—and influenced global markets—and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to command much of the continent’s land and resources. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory.
In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant—and will continue far into the future.
“An essential American history”—The Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This prodigiously researched and enlightening study from University of North Carolina historian DuVal (Independence Lost) recenters the past 1,000 years of Native North American history around the political power exercised by Indigenous governments. Beginning with the civilizations that established large cities a millennium ago in the Mississippi Valley—with pyramids, castles, and major road and river systems—she explains that agricultural instability during the Little Ice Age (c. 1250) prompted a turn away from urbanization. Native governments morphed into smaller-scale, more egalitarian organizations that encouraged "shared prosperity and shared decision making." These smaller states developed complex and advanced systems of diplomacy, economics, and governance that, DuVal argues, perplexed, intrigued, and often outmatched the first several centuries of European settlers. One fascinating example is the Mohawk government's regulation of trade with the Dutch in the 17th century. "Hardly the passive consumers the colonial planners hoped for," the Mohawks artificially inflated the price of furs so the Dutch could only turn a profit by paying with guns, the Mohawks' most sought after European good. Tracing numerous Native governments across the ensuing centuries—including the 19th century's Cherokee republic and alliance of Great Plains nations—DuVal provides a profoundly empowered history of Native America. This keen reframing will appeal to fans of David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the century in which the Cherokee republic existed.
