--- title: Native Nations Won the 2025 Pulitzer for History by Starting North America's Story a Thousand Years Ago description: "Kathleen DuVal's Native Nations won the 2025 Pulitzer for History: a thousand years of Indigenous North America, from ancient cities to today." author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-03T12:43:09.057Z updated: 2026-11-03T12:43:31.374Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/native-nations-pulitzer-2025 image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-17182308.webp categories: Author Journeys content_type: Profile region: Americas publication: The Quantum of Light schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Kathleen DuVal description: "Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and American Indian history. Her book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America shared the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History and won the Bancroft Prize and the Cundill History Prize." jobTitle: Historian and author sameAs: - https://www.pulitzer.org/node/kathleen-duval --- You probably picture Native American history as a list of losses: the colonists, the wars, the Trail of Tears. Kathleen DuVal's *Native Nations: A Millennium in North America* starts five centuries before any of that. A thousand years ago, cities on the continent rivalled urban centres anywhere in the world. When Europeans finally arrived, they met nations they did not understand and consistently underestimated. ### Book: Native Nations *A Millennium in North America* By Kathleen DuVal Joint winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History and winner of the Bancroft Prize. Kathleen DuVal tells a thousand years of Indigenous North America, from cities that rivalled any in the world to nations that held the upper hand over European colonists for centuries, and shows how their sovereignty continues today. [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/book/native-nations/kathleen-duval/9781805226031) The book is joint winner of the [2025 Pulitzer Prize for History](https://www.pulitzer.org/node/kathleen-duval). The Pulitzer board called it a panoramic and accessible account of Native nations' 'endurance, ingenuity and achievement' in the face of conflict and dispossession. Random House published it in 2024, and it has also won the Bancroft Prize, the Cundill History Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. ## Cities first, then a turn away from them DuVal opens around the year 1000, when large cities stood in the heart of the continent. After a period of climate change and instability, many people left the cities and built smaller nations instead, with egalitarian forms of government, skilled diplomacy and trade networks that spread across North America. That choice shapes everything that follows. When the Spanish, French, Dutch and English arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries, they mistook these societies for weak ones. DuVal shows you how wrong that judgement was. ## Nations that used the Europeans for their own ends For centuries, Native nations held the upper hand across most of the continent. The Mohawks controlled trade with the Dutch and influenced markets across the Atlantic. The Quapaws played French colonists to their own advantage. After the American Revolution, the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa built new alliances to hold back the United States, the Cherokees created institutions to assert their sovereignty on the world stage and the Kiowas controlled the passage of white settlers across their lands in the west. The book runs to more than 700 pages, and it never reads like a textbook. DuVal moves through the centuries by following people, and each chapter shows you a different nation making choices on its own terms. The losses are all there, but they arrive inside a much longer story of power, adaptation and survival that continues today. ## A quarter of a century of listening DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and American Indian history. She grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and earned her doctorate at the University of California, Davis. Her earlier books include *Independence Lost*, a finalist for the George Washington Prize, which tells the American Revolution from the Gulf Coast, and *The Native Ground*. She has said that *Native Nations* drew on around 25 years of learning about Native American history. The book carries an idea she returns to often: Native Americans are not only a minority group within the United States. 'They are members, citizens, of their own nations,' she told the Chapel Hill radio station WCHL. ![The gold Pulitzer Prize medal, showing Benjamin Franklin in profile with the words Honoris Causa.](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pulitzer-medal-obverse-svg.webp) *Photo: Medal design by Daniel Chester French. Illustration: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 public domain* ## Two winners and one finalist The 2025 history prize was shared between two books: *Native Nations* and Edda L. Fields-Black's *Combee*, [the story of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/combee-pulitzer-2025). The third finalist was Seth Rockman, with *Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery*. All three books widen the cast of American history beyond the people who wrote its founding documents. ## A year later the prize went to the people who tried to change the Constitution The 2026 Pulitzer for History went to Jill Lepore for *We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution*. Rich Books Magazine covers it in its daily series on the 2026 winners: [We the People Won the 2026 Pulitzer for History With the Story of Americans Who Tried to Rewrite the Constitution](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/we-the-people-pulitzer-2026). DuVal's book starts long before 1787 and Lepore's starts with it, and together they give you a far larger picture of who has shaped the continent. ## What stays with you after the last chapter You will look at a map of North America differently. Many of its rivers, states and cities still carry names from the nations that lived there long before the colonies, and *Native Nations* leaves you with the sense that the continent's longest story is still being written by the nations DuVal describes. **Read it if** you want a history of America that starts at the beginning, you love big narrative histories that cover centuries, or you want to understand the sovereignty of Native nations today. ### Buy the book [Native Nations on Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/book/native-nations/kathleen-duval/9781805226031) / [Native Nations on Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/9780525511038) ### Also in this piece Combee on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/book/combee/edda-l-fields-black/9780197552797) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/combee+fields-black) Independence Lost on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/independence+lost+duval) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/independence+lost+duval) **About Kathleen DuVal** Historian and author Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and American Indian history. Her book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America shared the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History and won the Bancroft Prize and the Cundill History Prize. *Next in the series: Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.*