Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
Kathleen DuVal, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NHC Fellow 2008–09; 2025–26) in conversation with Brian DeLay, University of California, Berkeley (SHC Fellow 2019–20)
A new installment in the ongoing series “Need to Know: Conversations That Matter,” presented by the National Humanities Center and the Stanford Humanities Center.
Described in The New York Review of Books as a “magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history,” Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations: A Millennium in North America is the only book to ever win the Bancroft Prize, the Cundill History Prize, the Mark Lynton Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize in History.
DuVal’s remarkable book recenters familiar narratives about the last thousand years through the lens of the thriving, complex Indigenous Nations who had inhabited North America for millennia, developing egalitarian government structures and complex economies long before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. Their societies were deeply misunderstood and underestimated by those Europeans, and those misunderstandings have continued to the present day.
DuVal helps us see a different North American history, and shows that while definitions of Indigenous power and their means of exerting it have shifted over time, the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remain.
About the Participants
Kathleen DuVal
Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
A renowned historian of early America, Indigenous history, and borderlands, Kathleen DuVal is the author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House), which charts the enduring sovereignty and political power of Native nations across North America. Her previous works include Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent.
Brian DeLay
Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
Brian DeLay specializes in nineteenth-century preference in the Americas, international relations, and the borderlands between the United States, Mexico, and Indigenous nations. He is the author of the award-winning War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War, which reframed the history of the Southwest around Indigenous geopolitics. His research broadly explores arms trade, state power, and Native sovereignty in the nineteenth-century Americas.
About the Series
Behind the noise are stories. Stories that can change how we think about the world, as it has been and as it is right now, stories waiting to be heard.
Each event in the “Need To Know” series involves a dialogue between fellows from two of the most prominent research centers in the United States and beyond—the Stanford Humanities Center and the National Humanities Center. Join award-winning authors as they talk about their books and the urgent stories behind them.
Watch the first conversation in this series, with Princeton professor Rhae Lynn Barnes discussing her book, Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, with NHC President and Director Blair LM Kelley.
Share this page
Related Events
The Mending Sampler
The Inner Passage: Presidential Conversation and Artist Reception
