Today's Featured Book:
Native Nations:
A Millennium in North America
by Kathleen DuVal
Genre: History
Published: April 9, 2024
Page Count: 735 pages
Summary:
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.
Native North Americans made history for tens of thousands of years before 1492.
DuVal, Kathleen. Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, p. 1. Kindle Edition.
THE FRIDAY 56 is hosted by Anne of Head Full of Books. To play, open a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% on your e-reader). Find a sentence or two and post them, along with the book title and author. Then link up on Head Full of Books and visit others in the linky.
For the O’odham, it is their himdag, their way of life. Himdag “involves relations between people, the land, and all creation.” People are supposed to share with one another according to what they have, especially the necessities of food and water. Giving away a surplus is an investment. As the Tohono O’odham history textbook Sharing the Desert explains, “This sharing of goods and food then created a debt that was expected to be repaid whenever the others had a surplus….When one family or village helped another, they did so knowing that when they needed help, they would receive it from their neighbors.”[
DuVal, Kathleen. Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, p. 56. Kindle Edition.
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I've always been curious about Native Americans since I learned little about them when I was in school. Native Nations won a Pulitzer Prize in 2025. It's a big book of 725 pages, so I will be reading it for a while, but, though I'm just a few chapters in, I've already learned a lot.
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