This story was first published on the Border Belt Independent website
Kathleen DuVal has a lot to say about early American history.
Her latest book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, spans more than 700 pages and walks readers through early civilizations to a rebirth of Indigenous culture and tradition. In May, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history.
DuVal, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who lives in Durham, also wrote Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, which was published a decade ago.
Born and raised in Arkansas, DuVal took a college history course that piqued her curiosity about interactions between Native Americans and people of European and African descent in early America. The more she studied, she said, “I came to learn over time that we can’t understand American history without Native American history.”
That’s certainly true in North Carolina, DuVal said, as Native Nations explores the complex history of the local tribes that built cities and farmed the land long before Europeans arrived.
The Assembly spoke to Duval about lessons from her book and how she reacted to winning a Pulitzer. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you decide to focus on such a long stretch of time?
I teach a class that tries to teach students the span of Native American history all in one semester. So we start at the beginning of time and go to today. I just love how every student in that class gets that whole time span and knows Native Americans have been here a long, long time and knows they’re still here today. I wanted to give that same sort of breadth to anybody who read the book.
Many history lessons portray Native Americans as uncivilized. In your book, you talk about how Native Americans lived in cities very early on. Why don’t schools teach that?
You’re exactly right: Even when it’s a positive portrayal, it’s that they were sort of simple, that they lived in fairly non-complicated societies. I think part of the reason is that the ruins of those cities are mostly earth. Their grand buildings were made out of wood and aren’t around anymore.
But I think the bigger reason is that in the 19th century, white Americans tried to forget the complexity and power of Native nations and started portraying them as people who didn’t really own the land—that they were primitive and therefore the coming of the United States was a good thing for the continent and that white Americans use the land better than Native Americans had.
One chapter of your book focuses on tribes in North Carolina, including the Lumbee. President Donald Trump ordered the Department of the Interior in January to come up with a plan for full federal recognition for the tribe. What are your thoughts on that?
It’s something for the federal government and the Lumbees to work out together. But to me, one of the most important things to understand from history is that the Lumbees, like most of North Carolina’s state-recognized tribes, are descended from people who faced colonialism very early. So the Lumbees are an amalgamation of several different peoples, even different language groups, that came together to survive the worst times of colonialism.
In some ways, the Lumbees remained Indian by amalgamating with different peoples and remembering their history that way. Which is quite different [from other tribes], but it’s certainly still Native.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
I want readers to learn that Native nations have been here for millennia. They have been complicated and powerful, and changing over time. And maybe even more importantly, I want readers to know that Native nations are still here today.
Sometimes people think of Native Americans as a minority group, a racial group. But primarily, they are citizens of their own tribes, whether those are state-recognized tribes or federally recognized tribes. I would like readers to understand the survival of Native nations over these centuries as a heroic story of survival against the odds—not only to survive as individuals, but as sovereign nations within the United States today.
You make it clear to readers early on that your book does not focus on Native Americans’ struggles. Why?
Americans have heard a few things about Native American history, Indian removal being probably the most commonly taught. And so we learn over and over the same tragedies that happened to Native Americans. And those are absolutely true. But I wanted to tell a longer story that starts long before those tragedies and continues to today, and the kind of renaissance that’s going on in Native nations today. That puts those tragedies in perspective to show that those are an important part of Native American history, but they’re only part of a long and complicated and proud history.
Tell me about the renaissance that’s happening now.
If you go around to various Native nations today, you can see linguistic revival, people reinvigorating their languages, relearning them, teaching them to their children, putting them into practice in places like coffee shops, and just trying to get people speaking the language again. You can see all kinds of cultural revival. There’s a new wave of Native Americans presenting their histories themselves.
So many Native nations today have their own tribal cultural centers and museums where you can see how they portray their own history. And then we just have lots of Native individuals out in the world, being in a television show or arguing before the Supreme Court, really showing the continuing importance of Native nations to contemporary America.
Is that because, for a long time, Native Americans felt tremendous pressure to assimilate?
That’s right, or to keep private the continuing Native traditions. In fact, there were eras in which the federal government outlawed ceremonies and dances. So people might have done some of those quietly indoors, but now there’s been a real move to not only practice them again and reinvigorate them, but also to make them public, to let outsiders see the continuing vibrancy of Native cultures.
What did you do when you found out you won a Pulitzer Prize?
They don’t tell you in advance. I was sitting at my desk, where I have two screens. I had the live stream going on one screen, and I was working on email and stuff on the other. When they got to the history category, I kind of looked over and saw my name and the name of my book. I was at work, so I ran down the hall and made my department chair give me a hug.
I hope you’ve had bigger celebrations since then.
I have, yes. I can’t count the number of neighbors who have brought over champagne. I think I was just slightly buzzed for a whole week.
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