Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

Kathleen DuVal tells a thousand year history of Indigenous nations across North America, beginning well before European contact with cities like Cahokia, the Mississippian settlement across the river from present day St. Louis that, by some estimates, may have housed tens of thousands of people at its height around 1100, a population some scholars place higher than any American city would hold again until the late eighteenth century. DuVal follows Native nations through centuries of their own political development, trade, diplomacy and conflict, treating that deep history as the necessary foundation for understanding everything that came after rather than as a prelude that ends the moment Europeans arrive.

DuVal carries the story through the centuries of contact, alliance and dispossession that followed, showing Native nations as active participants who negotiated, adapted and rebuilt themselves in response to colonization rather than simply receding before it. She draws on written colonial records alongside Native oral history and archaeology to reconstruct decisions and strategies from the Native side of encounters usually told only from the European one, carrying the account to the present, where she reads the continuing political and cultural resurgence of Native nations as the direct continuation of a millennium of adaptation rather than as a recent development.

DuVal writes sweeping synthetic history built to hold a thousand years and a continent's worth of distinct nations in a single coherent narrative. Reading the book means encountering North America's past with Native nations at its center throughout, and it suits a reader who wants the standard timeline of American history reordered around the people who were already here.