North America's history of thriving civilizations extends back well before Europeans' arrival. Kathleen DuVal's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, delivers insight into the North American cities that existed as many as 1,000 years ago. DuVal, a Fayetteville native and Fayetteville High School graduate, is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's returning to her hometown for a public conversation with Kellams about her book Sunday afternoon at the Fayetteville Public Library, beginning at 2 p.m. This week, they connected for a preview chat about Native Nations. Kellams asked her how she managed to put together a book covering a millennium in a narrative that captured readers' attention and a Pulitzer.
Kathleen DuVal: I almost don't know the answer to that question. I sometimes feel as soon as I've written something, I forget how to write at all. But I know that I put a lot of information and sources and quotations together, and the first draft is just a disaster and nobody could make any sense of it but myself. And then I read it again and again and again, and each time I think it gets a little bit better. It's really in the editing process that it goes from being just a big mess to something that, ideally, somebody actually wants to read and can understand while they're reading it.
Kyle Kellams: This really shakes what is sort of a lazy narrative that many of us might fall into — that colonization happened, Indigenous people are either thwarted or stopped, they didn't have a thriving civilization to begin with. What inspired you to put together the book?
DuVal: I think one of the things was just hearing from tribal scholars and others, over and over, who said, you know, it's great that you work on Native American history, but we want everybody to know that we're still around. And I think that finally sunk into me. And I thought, I need to write a book that shows the survival of native nations. And that really takes as a central question: How on earth did native nations survive all this turmoil and disaster to still be around today?
Kellams: The challenge, of course, with any book that's history is sources. And I imagine that challenge can multiply depending on how many years previous the subject matter is — then take into account that if you weren't a white male, it's harder to have your story down. So what was the research like getting some of the history of Native nations into the book?
DuVal: Well, what I really tried to do is take every kind of source I could possibly find — written documents by other people who maybe understood the people they were writing about, and in some cases maybe didn't understand them very well; oral histories; archaeology; material culture, the kinds of things that people had and kept. And then also just the tribal knowledge that many tribes have these days, where they're putting out into the public the kinds of history and linguistic work and all kinds of other sorts of reinvigoration that they're doing, that I think brought life to not only the present but also the past.
Kellams: And something we'll talk more about, I think, Sunday at the Fayetteville Public Library. But there were these thriving nations throughout the continent centuries ago, weren't there?
DuVal: Right. At Cahokia, which is right across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, there was a giant urban civilization. But there were also many, many other places, including several places in Arkansas and in Oklahoma — these very large cities, thriving civilizations built off of large-scale agriculture.
Kellams: What do we know about the relationships between some of these nations and some of the colonizers who came over?
DuVal: One thing that I think really surprises people is that the British and French and Spanish and Dutch people who came to the Americas from Europe often didn't have much power over the places that they came to. And that's especially true the further into the continent that you get. So in a place like Arkansas, for example, it seems there were very few Europeans for the first couple of centuries of European presence in the Americas. And so one of the things that the book tries to do is slow down those centuries and give readers some time to learn about times when, for example, the Quapaws around here in Arkansas had most of the population, most of the power over the few Europeans who came and really controlled relations with them and had really quite fruitful trading and relations with them, and military alliances. When we tell what you call the lazy version, going very quickly to the sort of decline of native nations, we miss a lot of these really important stories.
Kellams: Did these trades and liaisons have an impact beyond North America?
DuVal: They really did. Local trade between a native nation and Europeans shaped both production and consumption in Europe. For example, there was a big demand in North America for beads to use in trading and in various kinds of diplomacy. And that demand then shapes production in Europe. There become these huge industries of making glass beads to send to the Americas, to sell to Native Americans in return for furs and skins and food and other things that are being produced here.
Kellams: How valuable are the oral histories that help tell the stories in the history of the previous millennium?
DuVal: Oral history is incredibly important. One of the things I found out as I was researching this book is that there are quite a few oral histories across the continent, told by very different peoples from one another, about these ancient cities — and also what happened after those cities, the kinds of societies that were built afterward. So oral history is incredibly important in understanding that. There are also other kinds of tribal knowledge that were important to sorts of — like, for example, linguistic work that tribes are doing today to bring back languages, or to bring languages into the present that were spoken in the past. And so there's just a variety of different kinds of indigenous knowledge and oral history that is really illuminating for understanding both today and history.
Kellams: There is Cahokia, which was this major city center that's near current St. Louis. But there are other places around the Midwest that we know have at least some sort of physical remnant of these indigenous nations. Is there much that a layperson can learn by going to a place in 2026 that was once a big center, maybe 500 or 600 years ago?
DuVal: Yeah, absolutely. Cahokia has a great visitor center, and you can also climb to the top of the biggest mound, which is still incredibly impressive. But there are also other places. There's Spiro in eastern Oklahoma. There's Parkin in eastern Arkansas. Those are also parks you can go to, and they have visitor centers, and you can learn a huge amount and see artifacts and pictures of artifacts. And also, there's something magical about being in a place and imagining, OK, now it is these large earthen mounds, but it would have been a city built on top of and around those mounds. And you really can stand there and sort of think about, OK, this is what it might have felt like to be in this ancient city. That's part of the ancient history of this place.
Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's also a Fayetteville native and Fayetteville High School graduate. Her book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Kellams and DuVal will talk much more about the book and her work during a public conversation taking place Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. at the Fayetteville Public Library. The event is free and open to the public.
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