Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations: A Millennium in North America is a masterpiece. It contains twelve chapters that join “the Native past with the Native present” (xx) to demonstrate both Native agency in North American history and Native survival into the present. The six chapters in part 1 (“The Indigenous Peoples of North America, 1000 to 1750”) show Native people firmly in control of their destinies, while the remaining six chapters in part 2 (“Confronting Settler Power, 1750 and Beyond”) strike a balance between the “seemingly contradictory themes of genocide and survival” after the United States’ rise (xx).Each chapter is a case study of a Native nation, ranging from the O’odham peoples in the Southwest to the Algonquian peoples of Ossomocomuck. Based on historical records, oral histories, secondary literature, and contemporary Native insights, Native Nations contributes to several fields and methods. It is both a continental and a global history of Native North America, it offers new perspectives on Euro-American empire-building, it considers Native viewpoints with the eye of an ethnohistorian, and it is a fine example of Native–non-Native scholarly collaboration.DuVal contends that Native peoples’ “decisions and actions” kept European colonists to the coast and blunted US colonialism into the twentieth century (xviii). This idea emerges in older syntheses, including Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country, as well as newer ones like Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent and Ned Blackhawk’s Rediscovery of America. Yet while most of these syntheses provide linear narratives across time, DuVal moves seamlessly between past and present. She is able to frame the past with descendant communities’ insights and interpret the past using historical records and interdisciplinary scholarship.The book also delivers an original interpretation of Indigenous power, a popular theme in current ethnohistorical literature. For DuVal, power is less a political or military reality than a quotidian fact of life. Native demography, knowledge of the environment, and lifeways, such as O’odham himdag, hindered Euro-American aims. Native people go about their own business, while colonists react. This upends the entrenched historiographical dichotomy of accommodation or resistance to Europe’s presence. In the Northeast, colonization was a mere “sideshow in the real drama” scripted and directed by the Haudenosaunee (127). Similarly, Kiowa and other Native peoples’ strength meant that the “vast middle of North America” was virtually uncolonized for most of the nineteenth century (428).Moreover, DuVal takes time to explain why Native peoples have endured. Although the “ways U.S. history has usually been told make it hard to understand how more than five hundred Native nations still exist” (xvi), she shows that the “long history of Native women and men protecting and promoting” tribal sovereignty aided descendant communities (xxx). When Native peoples rejected coercive power and “took a shortcut to democracy” in the pre-Columbian era, they developed political and cultural flexibility to thwart colonization attempts (44). Plus, many Great Lakes communities “exist today” because they rejected US civilization policy and “efforts like those of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa to persuade them to identify and act as a unified race” (344). In the same vein, nineteenth-century Cherokee nation-builders “laid the groundwork for the Cherokee Nation to survive the era of Indian Removal” (349).Native Nations exemplifies calls to collaborate “with not on indigenous communities” (xxvii). This makes for a unique writing style in which DuVal jumps between first-, second-, and third-person voice. She shares instructive anecdotes about her time with descendant peoples and generates space for them to narrate histories that inform scholarly accounts like her own. Chapter 7, on Shawnee towns, heeds the Shawnee Tribal Cultural Center’s call to minimize the “tragedy” of Tecumseh by illuminating the Ohio Valley’s vibrant world of towns, intertribal politicking, and agricultural bounty (272). Likewise, her chapter on the Kiowas is partially organized around modern Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday’s storytelling, which aligns with primary evidence.DuVal also plugs into growing work on intertribal alliance-building as a source of Native power. Until the nineteenth century, she argues, Native “alliances and wars with one another took up much more of their collective time . . . than anything Europeans did” (xviii). Eighteenth-century Shawnee alliance nodes, nineteenth-century Kiowa relationships with other Plains peoples, and twentieth-century Women of All Red Nations (WARN) demonstrate that Native people have always leaned on one another to combat settlers. These alliances meant that the “colonization of North America was far from finished” in the aftermath of America’s War for Independence (266).While the penultimate chapter unmasks the violence of US expulsion policy, the final chapter and poignant afterword conclude Native Nations with a focus on “transformation and survival,” not mere victimhood (505). Based on historical records and conversations with Indigenous scholars, she asserts that Native people made reservations “autonomous communities” that preserve (and continue to preserve) “a land base” for ongoing sovereignty (507). In short, DuVal bridges traditional chronological endpoints by stopping at the present day, carefully weighs change with continuity, and illustrates how scholars can balance a rich archive with modern Indigenous points of view. General audiences and college students at all levels will be reading and digesting this book’s revelations for years to come.
Steven Peach (Wed,) studied this question.