Native Nations

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America  

By Kathleen DuVal  

Random House, 2024 

Genre: Nonfiction, Indigenous History  

Reviewed by Philip J. Carr 

The existence of a sovereign nation of Muscogee (Creek) today in Alabama comes, in my experience, as a surprise to many. General recollections of the War of 1812, signed treaties, the Trail of Tears, and Manifest Destiny combine to create the notion that no Native nations continue to exist, and certainly not east of the Mississippi River. The Poarch Creek Indians, the only federally recognized Native nation in Alabama, have a reservation in the southwest part of the state, providing evidence that contradicts their extinction, assimilation, and disappearance. 

The recognition of an additional 573 Native nations in the United States causes not only surprise but outright skepticism. For comparison, there are 193 United Nations member states and two non-member observer states. So, how did the events of the past lead to almost three times as many sovereign Native nations within the United States as countries across the globe? Traditional histories ranging in scale from the world to individual states, including Alabama, fail to answer this question and, more often, obfuscate. Along with the goal to “reinsert Native American history into world history” (xxii), explaining the continued existence and number of Native nations serve as the major impetus for Professor Kathleen DuVal’s lucid and compelling Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.  

This book, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winner in History, represents 25 years of scholarship based on “…written documents, archaeology, oral-history keeping traditions, visual art, and the language and customs that Native Americans have today, whose roots stretch deep into the past” (xxvii). This wealth of evidence and Professor DuVal’s personal experiences with living members of Native nations at the places they commemorate and share their history, including the thirtieth annual Native American Festival at Moundville Archaeological Park, Alabama, are expertly tied together and make for an engaging read. 

Informed by the work of Indigenous Studies scholars, especially the University of North Carolina American Indian and Indigenous Studies students to whom the book is dedicated, we learn of Mohawk, O’odham, Quapaw, Shawnee, and other Native nations’ lifeways, governance, resistance, survival, and continuities. Professor DuVal not only challenges but deftly counters simplified and generalized histories of American Indians that overemphasize disease and violence, allude to disappearance, and support the idea of manifest destiny. Such histories sever the ties of Indigenous peoples to their homelands and provide no means to understand the continued existence and number of sovereign Native nations today. In contrast, the nuanced and detailed writing of Native Nations brings us to an understanding of the present that makes sense. 

As an archaeologist, I particularly enjoyed Chapter 1, “Ancient Cities in Arizona, Illinois, and Alabama,” which exemplifies DuVal’s approach of providing detail when sampling breadth in geography and history, as well as moving between past and present. Using the spring of 1006 as the temporal touchstone when the brightest supernova ever recorded blazed in the sky, we learn of a day-in-the-life of a child a millennium ago who lived just south of present-day Phoenix based on archaeological evidence and O’odham oral history. We also learn of cultural and environmental dynamics over the centuries leading to dramatic landscape change, including the construction of massive dome-shaped dirt edifices (mounds) and the establishment of well-populated cities. Concluding with her visit to Moundville, DuVal shows us how the present demystifies the past in that the Alabama-Coushatta, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Houma, Muscogee (Creek) “performers, living history presenters, and craftspeople” (pg. 39) dispel the myth of Vikings and/or others as the ones who built the mounds and constructed the city.  

Fascinatingly, we learn that a typical, linear understanding of human history as progress from small to large, rural to urban, and egalitarian to hierarchical does not fit Native nations. “All across North America, the process of decentralization continued over several centuries…The first European explorers who crossed North America got a glimpse of this changing world“(pg. 53). This “fall of cities and rise of a more egalitarian order” (Chapter 2) in Native North America partly explains the number of distinct Native nations today. By focusing on times when Native nations were not subject to overwhelming numbers of Europeans and Americans and their power, Professor DuVal provides us with an understanding of the variation and nuance of the complex interactions and experiences of Native peoples through time as they caused and witnessed change in their nation, other nations, and the world. 

Not only should you read this insightful book to understand our modern world, but I also encourage you to revisit or visit for the first time the cultural heritage centers and sites of Native nations and especially interact with living Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and others. Like Professor DuVal, you will see that “Despite the tremendous losses of the past two centuries, Native nations have survived, not only as descendants of once powerful peoples but as nations within the nation-states of the United States, Mexico, and Canada” (pg. 544). Their “survivance” can inspire us all in our changing world. 

Philip J. Carr (Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Tennessee, 1995), a transdisciplinary scholar who serves as a Professor of Anthropology and Chief Calvin McGhee Professor of Native American Studies at the University of South Alabama, investigates the human past to inform the present, and to build a better future.  His research publications span the entirety of human history from three million years ago to the 20th century. His current work centers on the People of Mobile Bay, combining artifacts, accounts, and archives to reconstruct past lifeways and to inspire retellings of our shared history from distinct perspectives through collaborations and involving local communities through outreach and engagement.