American students are often first taught about Native Americans through the frame of European settlers, that native people were simply here when they arrived.
But UNC-Chapel Hill history professor Kathleen DuVal has long taught her students about Native Americans' presence on this continent long before then. Her book, "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America," traces Native people's history over the last 1,000 years and it won a Pulitzer Prize for history earlier this month.
WUNC's Will Michaels spoke with DuVal about the book and what she hopes it teaches readers.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
I wondered if you could first start off by describing the societies of Native people, the societies that they built in North America before European settlers arrived.
"Well, my book starts with societies here in North America about 1,000 years ago and shows that there were elaborate civilizations. There were great cities, there was large-scale agriculture, mostly corn based agriculture, and that if you walked around parts of North America, you would find cities, towns, fields that looked not all that different from what you would find in Western Europe at the time."
You've said before that you're fascinated by the way that different people try to make sense of one another. How badly did European settlers misjudge native people when they arrived?
"One of the major changes that had happened in North America in the couple of centuries before Europeans arrived was that these large urban civilizations, cities with very powerful leaders and hierarchical social systems, had fallen and so when Europeans saw pretty democratic, social and political systems where the people, men and women, had a lot of say in how their governments ran, they actually saw that as primitive. They didn't see democracies in the future of Europe the way they would develop. They thought the height of civilization was monarchy.
Sometimes we look back on this history and we sort of collapse it into having happening very quickly. The Europeans took over the continent very quickly. That isn't how it happened at all. It took centuries. By the time of the American Revolution, the European colonies are still really just huddled on the Atlantic coast and a few other places across the continent, and Native nations were still in power in almost all places, and still had probably the majority of the population in North America as well."
We have enough climate data to know that there were some very big upheavals during this millennium. How did that affect the way that cities rose and fell?
"The great cities of North America arose in a time when agriculture was expanding. The cities depended on large-scale agriculture, and that was in a period that climatologists call the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when it was easier to grow large amounts of corn across most of this continent.
But then the Little Ice Age came, it decreased the growing season. It made the winters colder, and it made it a lot harder to grow the mass amounts of corn and other crops that were necessary to sustain these large cities. So part of the reason for their decline and for people deciding not to live that way anymore was times of famine that came in the Little Ice Age when it was harder to feed the people."
What do you think Native Americans larger history can teach us about their presence and culture today?
"One of the big goals of the book is to show that Native nations not only have been here a long time, but are still here today. In some ways, the book is a survival story, a story of how Native nations lived through, over and over, efforts by Europeans, by the United States, to try to destroy them or to assimilate Native Americans completely into European and European American cultures. And it just didn't happen that way. Native Americans are still around today. There are still hundreds and hundreds of Native nations within the United States today, both federally recognized tribes and state recognized tribes. So yeah, in some ways it's a sort of hero story against all odds. Surviving."
