397 Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

You're listening to an AirWave media podcast. Native nations have always been and still are diverse and different from each other. But one of the things I really stress about that period a thousand or so years ago is the presence of very large-scale civilizations, large-scale, agriculture-based cities, feeding large numbers of people with pretty prominent religious and political leaders, quite comparable to other parts of the world at the same time, including Western Europe. Hello and welcome to episode 397 of Ben Franklin's World. The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present-day world we live in. And I'm your host, Liz Covard. The North American continent is approximately 160 million years old, and yet we Americans tend to focus on what amounts to 3,300 millions of that history, which is roughly the period between 1492 and the present. Now in her new book, Native Nations, a millennium in North America, Kathleen DuVal, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, asks us to widen our view of early North American history to at least 1000 years, because long before European colonists and enslaved Africans arrived on the eastern shores of North America, indigenous Americans had built vibrant cities and civilizations, and they adapted to a world that was changing even before colonists arrived. Kathleen believes that we can learn a lot by adding and centering indigenous peoples and histories into our understanding of early North America. So in today's episode, we're going to do just that. We're going to look at 1000 years of North American history. Now during our investigation of 1000 years of North American history, Kathleen reveals, what indigenous North America looked like 1000 years ago? How and why large indigenous cities like Cahokia experienced deep population and abandonment prior to the 16th century? And what the history of colonial North America looks like when we view it through Native American eyes. But first, Ben Franklin's world has a listener community, and you should join it. The Ben Franklin's World Facebook group is a place where you can connect and interact with fellow listeners, stay up to date on some of the latest history news and resources, and post your episode requests and interview questions for our guests. There are even some listeners who have formed a book club that you can join if you'd like to consider the books we discuss on this show more deeply, and read other books about early American history. The group is free to join. Just visit benfreightlensworld.com/facebook. That's benfreightlensworld.com/facebook, and I look forward to seeing and speaking with you there. All right, are you ready to travel back in time when 1000 years ago? Let's go meet our guests historian. Our guest is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research expertise is in how Native Americans, Europeans, Africans, and African Americans interacted in early America. She has authored and co-authored many books, including "Independence Lost," "Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution," which you may recall from episode 37, and, most recently, "Native Nations," a millennium of North America. Welcome back to benfreightlensworld, Kathleen DuVall. Thank you, Liz. I'm so excited to be back on benfreightlensworld. And we're really excited to have you back and to talk about 1000 years of Native American history. So speaking of this 1000 years, Kathleen, your latest book, "Native Nations," offers us a history of indigenous America over what historians call "The Long Derey," which is the fancy French term for a very long period of time. In the case of Native Nations, your history looks at over 1000 years of indigenous history. What made you want to explore indigenous history over 1000 years, and over the entire breadth of the North American continent? Well, I'm an early Americanist, as you know, and my previous work was centered on the sort of 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. But I teach a class called "Native North America" that begins tens of thousands of years ago, and goes to the present. And one of the things I've always loved about that class, about teaching that class, is that for most students, what they know about Native American history is something bad. It is usually the trail of tears, right? It's something in that century or two that is the hardest on Native Nations, that is the hardest for them to survive. And what I love about teaching that class is students get to see Native nations, Native Americans, before there were any Europeans or others in their continent. And they go into the late 20th century to the present, and they learn vividly that Native Nations survived all those worst decades. And that there are almost 600 federally recognized tribes today, just in the United States, not counting state recognized tribes, not counting tribes that still exist in Mexico and in Canada. And so they see that long-dare history, and those worst decades of European colonizers, and particularly the United States, really trying to destroy Native Nations, that's a pretty short period in the long, long history of Native Nations. And it didn't work, right? The Native Nations are still around today. And so I love students getting both ends of that history, and I thought maybe I can do that in the book, which the book doesn't start 10,000 years ago, but I settled on just 1,000 years, but I feel like I just choose that same purpose up. Here's a longer version of something you might note just a little bit about them. Might skew your impression of Native American history. Your book, Native Nations, also seems to be part of this emerging trend over the last couple of years to offer these big summary or synthesis books about Native American history. And you might have seen Pekahemilainen's book, Indigenous Continent, The Epic Contest for North America, or a book that came out last year by historian Ned Blackhawk and won the National Book Award, The Rediscovery of America, Native Peoples, and the Unmaking of U.S. history. And now of course, we have your book, Native Nations. So Kathleen, would you tell us about this emerging trend where scholars like yourself are trying to synthesize this very long history of Indigenous North America, and whether you purposely set out to be part of this trend? So it's not a surprise that we're seeing these synthesis books right now because what has happened in the last is really kind of two generations, if you're just looking at early American history. A couple of generations of historians writing Native Americans into the story. So writing Native American history, but also writing American history that takes Native history as a central part of it. And I think that's been a tremendously important part of early American historiography for a couple of generations. And then also, there's been a generation or so of scholars now looking at later in the 19th century and the 20th century. And so really only now could this kind of synthesis book be written. And I think it's so needed, all three books that you mentioned, including mine, they really seek not only to tell Native history on its own terms, but also to show how important Native American history is in US history in the sort of long history of this continent. And all of those synthesis books are building on these generations of scholarship. And then particularly, I'm also relying on probably a generation now or so of tribal historians, people actually, for the most part, working for their own tribes on their own histories. And this is a movement that I mean, there have always been historians within tribes telling and passing on history within the tribe. But this is a generation of scholars in many cases made possible by tribal economic development in some cases, casinos, money that tribes have been able to put back into researching and writing about their own histories, making those histories available to outsiders as well as insiders. And so I really rely on that too. So that's another way in which my book couldn't have been written in an earlier era without the sort of access to quite publicly available information from tribes about their own long histories. So it sounds like all of these books that give us these histories of Indigenous peoples over very long periods of time and really center Indigenous peoples into these accounts of really North America. It sounds like these works have only been possible to research and write recently because of all of the previous work that historians and tribal historians have been doing for so many decades. Right. And you know, that's what a synthesis is, right? It builds on scholarship that's already out there. And I think these synthesis books now are also then pushing forward from that and forwarding new interpretations that bring together smaller scale scholarship, scholarship that's on smaller time periods, smaller numbers of peoples and really shows the central driving arguments in Native history, including particularly just the survival of Native nations, of Native peoples through all of this. Well, let's dig into your book, Native Nations. Now, we should probably begin our long and vast history of Indigenous and Native America. Bye. having you tell us what North America looked like 1,000 years ago? - It looks different in different places, right? But one of the things I really stress about that period, 1,000 or so years ago, is the presence of very large-scale civilizations, large-scale agriculture-based cities, feeding large numbers of people with pretty prominent religious and political leaders, quite comparable to other parts of the world at the same time, including Western Europe. So for example, to take sort of the biggest example, Cahokia, Cahokia was a city that was right across the Mississippi River from where St. Louis is today. And at its height, around 1,100, its main city had more than 10,000 people in it, putting it sort of a similar scale to Western European cities at the time. Its central plaza was, people say, the size of 30 football fields, and surrounding that central plaza were many pyramids or flat-top pyramids. Their purpose was to have buildings on top of them. So they're to raise temples and palaces and council halls and such above ground level. So in some cases, far above ground level, the central pyramid of Cahokia was 10 stories high. And then all these buildings are on top of that. And then all around in this central city, their neighborhoods of houses, places where people live, their farms or people are farm and corn and other products. And then there are many, many satellite cities and suburbs around Cahokia. So it's a much larger civilization than even just those 10,000 people that lived in Cahokia. So large, for example, that St. Louis in the 19th century, when it was part of the United States, its nickname was the mound city 'cause there were still so many of those pyramids left before the people of St. Louis raised them to build St. Louis. So there are cities like that in many parts of North America a thousand years ago, including all across the Southwest and all over the Mississippi Valley. On both sides of the Mississippi River Cahokia, it says the biggest, probably, but there are countless others across much of North America. And especially the parts of North America that agriculture had spread to during the medieval warm period. So agriculture came north from Central Mexico into what's now Northern Mexico and across much of what's now the United States and made this kind of large civilization agriculture-based cities possible. - It is so interesting that there were these huge indigenous cities because so much of the history that were taught about Native Americans is that they were hunters and gatherers who lived out on the great plains, hunting bison or in the Eastern Woodlands regions, trapping furs, whereas if you have a chance to visit the Southwest or places in Mexico and South America, you can see some of these cities like Mesa Verde or the civilization at Moctezuma Castle and very old Pueblo settlements. And because of the weather and the environment of such, you can see remnants of these large native cities and urban centers. And this just isn't the picture of indigenous America that were taught about in school. - Yeah, that's right. And one of the reasons you can see them in the Southwest and can't see them in the Southeast these days is because they were built out of different things. So there were great cities in the Southeast and up into the heavy corn growing areas of the Northern United States as well. But what they've left behind are these mounds, what became called mounds, these flat top pyramids and not all of the buildings that were on and around them. So the city itself is not there anymore to look at and say, oh look, there was an ancient city. It's much harder to look at what sort of looks like a hill basically. I mean, there was. Once there was an ancient city there but it doesn't look like ruins in the same way that things in the Southwest and other places where things were built out of stone and even Adobe, Adobe which lasts much longer than the kinds of wooden buildings that were built in other parts of the continent. - Do we have a sense of how these large indigenous cities operated? And I know this is a rather large question because as you pointed out, there's a great diversity of native peoples and you're saying these big cities were spread out all throughout North America. But I do wonder if there are any generalizations we can make about these ancient cities and how people lived in them. For example, we know in ancient Europe that cities usually had codes of laws or ordinances that were meant to keep people in line with the rule of order and the city in order. And we also know that there are different community gatherings, different places for people in these cities, in these European cities to intermix and socialize like in marketplaces. So have historians and archaeologists found similar structures or places and codes that would have allowed these indigenous cities to operate? - So one of the purposes of this book is to put native North America in global history. And really these cities of this era are really quite comparable with cities in other parts of the world. So the same kinds of things that you just said, a central marketplace, a place where goods were exchanged. There are some people whose job, whose work is producing food and there are other people whose job that isn't, right? That's one of the things that cities can do. It allows some people to not spend all their time producing food. So there are marketplaces where people exchange those things. These mountains are and there are parallel pyramids in the southwest as well. They at least over time became in most places where they existed the purview of the elites. So there was clearly, as clear as could be possible with kind of evidence we have, which is both oral history and archaeology. There were leaders that had quite a large amount of power and had the power to run and construct these civilizations. And it seems like in most places a perhaps hereditary elite class that lived more prosperously, maybe than the common people, certainly than some kinds of peoples like around Cahokia. It appears that maybe some peoples had been forced to come move there and farm for the elite of Cahokia. And it's hard to get exactly what was going on, but certainly oral history talks about the rise over time. And these are multiple oral histories from different places. The rise over time of leaders who, as their descendants tell it, took too much power and became authoritarian leaders. Would you tell us more about the oral histories you encountered and used, because one of the things that we talk about in early American history, and on this podcast, is that if you want to research and understand the histories of people of color and indigenous nations, then you need to use oral histories. Because a lot of these cultures did not have a tradition of writing down histories and stories and then keeping those stories for the future. Instead, they used oral traditions to do that work. So Kathleen, how do historians like yourself know what you know about Cahokia and these other cities? There's lots and lots that we don't know, right? But one of the things that I saw common across a pretty large number of cultures, oral histories, who descended from large cities of this era, was that they talked about this era as a time of, really, sort of not the way I expected to hear about them, but it's maybe a misguided time, a time of inequality, where leaders combined religious power and political power, and it really just put it simply too much power, and hoarded took the, so the prophets, you know, the extra of society, the surplus of a society to themselves, rather than sharing it with the people. And so some of the oral histories, for example, among the Ottoman, among the Cherokees, tell of this older period as a time when their ancestors took the wrong path, or perhaps a time when somebody took advantage of them and became their leaders, became the elite and had to be overthrown. So not necessarily a time of greatness that was lost later, but if something that was maybe corrected later. - Was it because of these social hierarchies and what we would now term as an over-accumulation of wealth among elites? Was this why we see these indigenous cities fall out of favor and depopulate as people went their own separate ways and formed their own distinct tribes? Because by the time European settler colonists arrive, many of these cities seem to largely be abandoned. - Yeah, that's exactly right. I should say that when the Spanish explorers go across, there are some late stages of this that they do see, and then some of our information comes from that. But I think that's exactly right. It's very easy to see this era of cities as a golden era of something that was lost when the cities fell, and that's exactly the opposite of what the oral histories tell. So one of the factors was the coming of the little ice age. So I mentioned the medieval warm period as being ideal time for farming in what's now the United States. That begins to end in the 1200s and the 1200s as sort of in the late stages of the medieval warm period, whether it becomes less predictable than it had been, there are a series of terrible droughts that hit the Southwest especially hard, and then the climate falls into the little ice age where growing seasons are shorter, temperatures are colder, it's just harder, in some cases impossible to sustain the numbers of population on the kind of centralized agriculture they had had in the earlier period we were just discussing. And so there are sort of climate-related reasons why these cities fall, but those choices I think that, [BLANK_AUDIO] under what must have been a terrible time and a traumatic time, the kinds of human choices that were made in that period, what you were just saying, the sort of people went their own way, they moved out of these cities, they formed smaller scale societies where a smaller number of people were reliant on agriculture in almost all cases, still they farmed, women of these societies continued to farm, but on a smaller scale. And they diversified their economies, they added in more hunting than their immediate ancestors had done, more gathering than their immediate ancestors had done, and there had been continent-wide trade before this, but there's a sort of deeper reliance on trading relationships as part of how you just make sure that if one year your crops fail, you have multiple other sources of sustenance, and all of those changes involved a spreading out, a decentralizing across the land, across river valleys, all across North America. When you were looking at the transcripts and listening to oral histories and reading all of the different research that you read to write native nations, did you see a process at play by which these big indigenous urban centers disbanded and native peoples went their own way and formed their own tribes, political bodies, and cultures? Do we know how these urban centers disbanded? Was it just friends and families coming together and saying, you know what? This isn't working out, so we're leaving. One of the things we can't know is the conversation, right? And how much duress it was under, but the archaeology absolutely shows that people spread out. And in some cases, I think, went back to where they lived before and maybe went back to ways a little closer to the way their older ancestors had lived, but the oral histories have variety of ways of talking about it. In some cases, it's really what we call a revolution. Author oral history talks about literally bringing down the cities, tearing them down, take out the rulers, and destroying their power that talk about sort of destroying particular sources of their supernatural power to make sure nobody ever gets that kind of power again. In other places, oral histories just talk about a group of people leaving. And so I think it probably was a little bit more like what you just described. You know, maybe a group of families get together and say, tomorrow night, we're leaving. And the oral history doesn't quite give those kinds of specifics, but they do say, you know, we decided to leave and try living differently and living somewhere else. You mentioned the "awthome." And I do wonder if we could talk about specific examples of Native peoples who decided to live separately and live a life that wasn't possible in these really big indigenous urban centers. So one of the people you discuss in Native nations is the Arizona-based, "awthome people." And these people are descendants of the Hohogam. So would you tell us about the "awthome," him dog, their way of life, and how their society formed outside of these big indigenous urban centers? Yeah. So the "awthomoral" history talks about the Hohogam, the people of the time of the great cities, and of turning away from that style of living into a smaller-scale style of living, but particularly of developing different groups of "awthome," having different him dog, having a different way of life, that then is reciprocal. So let me explain. There are River "awthome," who live in River valleys and farming in the Sonoran Desert using elaborate irrigation systems, but not on the scale of their Hohogam ancestors. So not giant cities with as large irrigation projects as they had had before. Just a little smaller scale than that. And then combining into their own economies, their own way of life, hunting, gathering, and sometimes when people picture gathering, they think women just go out and look for things that are edible, right? But gathering when it's a central part of your economy involves considerable cultivation. Seasonal knowing exactly where to go to collect different kinds of plants for eating, medicine, and such, different times of year, and then making sure that no other plants are growing around those that will crowd them out, and all the kinds of things that involve cultivating things that you go seasonally together. So that's the way the River "awthome," that's the him dog they were living in. But then part of that is a relationship with other groups of "awthome" who don't live on River. So Desert "awthome" live farther out in the desert. They don't farm or they farm. They farm only a certain time of year when the rains come during the raining season, but they don't live permanently near farms. That's just part of that time of farming as part of their seasonal migrations, most of the year of which is gathering in different places, and part of the year for the Desert "awthome," one of their seasonal migrations is to the rivers, and they go to the rivers at time of planting and certainly at harvest time to help the River "awthome" with their harvest, and in turn, of course, get some of that harvest. That pumps into their economy, and they trade to the River "awthome" things that they have gotten deeper out in the desert that the River "awthome" haven't gotten themselves. And so they have this sort of, my call, symbiotic. They would call reciprocal relationships of, again, getting back to that idea of not relying on one source of sustenance, having people as well as other kinds of foods that you can rely on if things go badly in one sector, one year. And you can just think about how that relates to the earlier era, for them, of the "hahugum," of a time of much more centralized dependence on centralized agriculture. It's a development of a way of life that is purposefully different and safer and more secure. When we look at the entire scope of Indigenous North America, how long was the urban period? Because it's striking to me that, as we talk about the "awthome" is one example of one group of people who left a major city, in this case "hahugum." It seems like the "awthome" people still had this knowledge of what it was like to live on the land outside of a city, and to know what plants were going to make them healthy, and what times of year they should grow different plants or visit a different area to gather plants that they needed. So it seems like there was this great knowledge of life before cities that became of use again as the cities declined. And it sounds like the cities declined many generations later. So I'm just curious how this knowledge was maintained over such a long period of time. Yeah, that's a really good point, Liz. And I think that's right because it is multiple, multiple generations. It's many generations of people living in these centralized cities. And so you have to think there were, you know, in the cases of plants or there were women still going out and gathering things as maybe to make sure their own families weren't as dependent on the great leaders, as we sort of might think they all were if we take those sort of wider scope. And yeah, just passing that information onto their kids. And maybe some things had to be relearned over the generations after the fall of cities to certainly the sort of patterns of where you go at different times of year for the people who are more mobile, who didn't live in just one place all year. And I should say even in the era of cities, there are some people who are not living in cities and who are not part of these large civilizations. And they could have, you know, continued the way that they lived before and just incorporated more of these sort of neighbors living in new ways into their economies and maybe taught them quite a bit along the way. Did you ever get a sense in the research that you did of how knowledge was kept and transferred between generations? Because today, if we want to know how our ancestors established a city, there are plenty of history books that our colleagues have researched and written over the years that we can use to find that knowledge. But as we've discussed, a lot of African and Indigenous cultures did not keep written histories. So what kinds of traditions did the author and other Indigenous cultures use to make sure that their knowledge continued to exist for future generations? You know, the way Native people talk about it today, I think it's probably the way it has always been and, you know, has been in many societies, which is just that mothers teach their daughters and fathers teach their sons. These are mostly pretty gendered societies and gets passed along that way. And then histories are kept by, you know, official historians who tell histories over and over many, many societies have sort of demonic devices, hides or calendar sticks, things like that to keep track of history. So you have people who know the history and tell it to the sort of next generation of historians, but they also have things they can look at and say, oh yeah, remember this year? This was the year of such and such. And your question also makes me realize, I have not come across any oral histories that say how to build a city. I think they probably thought that is useless knowledge. We don't want to pass that along. What we want to pass along is this lesson of how to unbuild a city and make sure you never build one again. I take a lot of comfort in the fact that there are historians in different eras and different cultures who just keep track of knowledge. I find that very comforting. Now, I'd like to turn back to something you mentioned a little earlier, which is this idea of reciprocity. But before we really dig in and investigate reciprocity, let's first take a moment to thank our episode sponsor. This year, as we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States is independence. I've noticed something about the episodes that you and I have explored together. Many of the best questions we've asked didn't come from me. They came from you. When you send me a question about the people and events of our early American past, I try to bring those to the historians we interview. It's your curiosity that helps decide where our conversations go. 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Thank you, thank you, for helping to keep this work going. Kathleen, I'd like to turn back to reciprocity, because this is something that we see in a lot of different Native American cultures, and in our historical records and history books, because we see a lot of indigenous nations who traded with Europeans or American partners. And these settler colonists never seem to really understand indigenous ideas of reciprocity, which Native American nations count on, and that seems to be central to their societies. So I wonder if you would tell us about reciprocity and how it worked in the often culture? Yeah, this is a great example of a couple of generations of early American historians really figuring out some things that then help us not only to understand those centuries of early America, but also put it all in a longer context. So you might think of any sort of trade as reciprocal, right? In sort of classical economics, both sides should benefit from trade. But what's different about reciprocity is that each side is sort of, see if it is, each side is required to make sure the other side benefits. And in order to do that, this trade, whatever it is that's being exchanged, is part of a longer relationship than just the one exchange. And that means that in this particular exchange, maybe one side benefits a little bit more, but it'll either get evened out over time over the course of this long relationship, or as a relationship in which one side always has a little bit less and always will bring a little bit less to the table. And that's okay because there's generosity that's being given by one side and sort of gratitude and whatever they can provide in return by the other side. And so this is something I've come to understand as I worked on this book. This is something that is very, very, very old in Native America, and either comes out of this post-Cities period as a value that people sort of impose upon themselves to try to keep the mistakes of the past from happening again, or at least something that reciprocity maybe was a value in earlier eras. Maybe there's a historical memory of that and some continuity of that in the era of cities that gets renewed and sort of restated and re-emphasized in the centuries after the fall of cities. G reciprocity is something that it governs relationships between allies, between trading partners, but also within a society of sort of leaders to their people, one gender to the other. You know, I like to use the word value. We all have values, sometimes we live up to them, sometimes we don't, right? But reciprocity is something that people were supposed to live by. This is really fascinating, because again, in Native nations, you're covering 1,000 years of North American Indigenous history, and you cover so many different Indigenous peoples and cultures in your book, because there is such a great diversity of Indigenous peoples and nations in North America. And while we can't say that there is universal among all of these different peoples, it is amazing to me how widespread the value of reciprocity was and is among different Indigenous peoples. And yet, I can also tell from the language you use, you were very careful that we don't really know where this ideal or value came from, or when it really started to take hold in Indigenous communities and cultures. It's just, it seems like reciprocity is something that has always been in these cultures. Right, but I really do think it has something to do with making sure powerful extractive leaders don't come again, right? Don't take power again, because reciprocity is so key to understanding how leadership works across so many different Native nations that if you were a leader, that means you give more, right? You may be the conduit through which they external trade goods, whether they're native or European trade goods come into your society. And so you're sort of a diplomat and trader who has some power over that relationship. But then your obligation within your society is to distribute those goods wisely and to know who needs more, who needs more when, and it is never to keep it for yourself. You acquire power and prestige by giving away, and giving away wisely, providing wisely. So it's not that there's no sort of power differentials or leadership within Native societies, but it's that the purpose of it is different. And there's reciprocal relations that are not always equal. It's not that each side is supposed to provide exactly the same thing, but that if you are in an unequal reciprocal relationship in which you are, say a leader who's providing more, that's a good thing. You're not being cheated. You are building your own, maybe even your family's prestige and power by being more generous, by giving more away, by respecting reciprocity. Well, now that we've had this general discussion about reciprocity, is there an example of reciprocity at work within an Indigenous community that we could talk about? So when the French first came to the Quapas in the 18th century, so the Quapas lived in what's now Arkansas near the confluence of the Arkansas River and the Mississippi River, they're a fairly small people at the time compared to some much larger Native neighbors, such as the Osage, the Quapas had to sort of teach them. This happens over and over by Native nations. Had to teach the French how to obey reciprocity. So the French came in to trade, right, but the Quapas, they were saying this has to be part of a longer relationship. You have to become somebody that we trust, that we sort of understand what our different obligations are to each other. The French men would complain about having to sit through these long, long ceremonies and speeches that to the French had nothing to do with trade, but to the Quapas were part of establishing this relationship and frankly were sort of lectures like lectures to the French of like this is the way reciprocity works. Sometimes we sort of imagine Europeans going in and the way the French did having a fort on Native land and we think the French just sort of forced their way onto that and established a military post and made it French, right. But the Quapas explained to the French, this is a reciprocal relationship. We are letting you put basically a trading post here because then we know you will come back. This will be a yearly relationship where you come back with a large number of goods. The French think of it as sort of paying rent to be there. So there's trade like here we give you this and you give you that, but then there's this huge payment they have to make and the French may excuse it to themselves as being rent. But to the Quapas, they're like you have a lot of metal goods. Therefore you are supposed to provide a lot of those to us, your best allies. We in return will feed you while you're here. We have extra food. So to the Quapas and gradually to the French there as well, this is a long-term relationship, one in which each side has obligations to the other. What I really like about this example is that we can see both the Quapas and the French trying to make sense out of this relationship using their own cultural traditions. For example, the French saying, "Oh reciprocity, it's just like paying rent." Right. I think the Quapas are like, "Okay, you could think of it that way if you want." That's fine. Just keep doing it. But they do, I mean, boy, it's one of the wonderful things about colonial documents. As Europeans get so many lectures, they get lecture too so often and you get the feeling that they're these sort of native diplomats who feel like, "Okay, I'm going to explain it one more time." And the wonderful thing for historians is we get to read these accounts that these Europeans write down of, "Okay, so and so said this and this and described it this way." Oh, okay. This is like the third time this guy has explained it to the French guy. And so I think I'm starting to get it too as a historian that this is a different kind of relationship from what even the Frenchman understands it to be. Now, one of the things that I really enjoyed about Native Nations is that when you center Indigenous peoples in this story, you really start to understand that the Quapas have to lecture the French on reciprocity a lot before the French even sort of get it. And if we take this example apart, We can see that the Kwapa had a lot of power. in this relationship. It was really the Quapa who held most of the power in this uneven relationship because the French, like many Europeans, claimed these huge swaths of geographic territory on maps. They never had enough people to actually claim and hold the territory that they said they claimed on the map. And the Quapa and other indigenous peoples, well, they were the powerful peoples in North America during this early colonial period. And even into the late colonial period, they held the most power. Yeah, that's right. And you can see very parallel things in a completely different part of the continent between, say, the Mohaks and the Dutch. The Mohaks will just say over and over to the Dutch. This is the way you're supposed to act. This is what you're supposed to do. And you can see the Dutch doing that. The Dutch have horrible wars against other native people. But the Mohaks are so powerful that in Mohak country, the Dutch do what the Mohaks say. So we've investigated reciprocity and what that looked like in different indigenous cultures. And another shared value that we should investigate because it was so widespread among different indigenous cultures. And really, all of human civilizations is this idea of gender roles. Kathleen, would you tell us about the gender roles that you saw at work in different indigenous cultures? And maybe you could focus on what the historical records have to say between the 16th and 17th centuries so that we can view this before Europeans really start to arrive in North America. Generals are a really key part of both reciprocity and this sort of post-urban diversification of the economy. So native nations in this era for the most part are pretty gendered, work is pretty gendered. Women tend to be the farmers and the gatherers. And often are in charge of the towns. They build the houses for the most part. Often it's, you know, to generalize it. Women's councils might be in charge not only of farming and decisions that have to do with farming, but also many of the decisions that happen in the town, like sort of relationships between different families and space and where houses can be. And then men are in charge of hunting and fishing. And often seem to be the most public diplomats. Women have a role in diplomacy, but at least with Europeans. And it's hard to know how much of this has changed because of interactions with European diplomats who are all men, but at least by the time they're dealing with lots of Europeans, external diplomats, sort of outward facing diplomats are mostly men in native society. And then trade, it depends on the product, like whether it's a men's product or women's product in charge of trading that. And certainly see in native nations people who crossover genders who may be born into one and end up in the other because it fits them better. But for the most part, people do male roles, do male work or do female work in what they define as female work. But these are equal and reciprocal, right? Different, but seen as equally important. It's not a gender hierarchy of work or in most cases of politics. I think Europeans tend to see only male politics. And for example, not notice a women's council that might be in charge of things that are a little more local, a little more domestic, maybe, and not just seen by Europeans. It's not as important to Europeans who are not insiders to that society, they're outsiders. We're trying to cover 1,000 years of history in our conversation. So once again, we need to move a bit forward in time because I think we should talk about the change in population centers. And I think we're all familiar with this story of how a lot of Englishmen and Britons cross the Atlantic Ocean and settled on indigenous lands along the North American East coast. But around the time of the American Revolution, these British colonists began making a concerted effort to push inland beyond the Appalachian Mountains, which as of 1763 was a no-go zone. There was a formal treaty line that the British proposed that was trying to keep British settlement east of the Appalachian Mountains because the British government recognized that indigenous peoples needed their own land and that the colonists, if they were to move beyond the Appalachian Mountains, they would be really hard to govern and control. But the colonists had different ideas and they continued to push beyond the Appalachian Mountains and further encroached on native lands, including the lands of peoples who had already had to move from the North American East coast because of English and British encroachment on their lands and because of their dispossession from their lands to accommodate English colonists. So Kathleen, would you tell us about this story of English, British encroachment, and movement westward? And what this story looks like if we investigate it not through a British lens, but through the lens of indigenous history, what does this early westward movement of white colonists look like if we look at it through indigenous eyes? So there are people who face English colonization very early, right? As you say, right on the coast. So some of the peoples I follow in the book are the descendants of North Carolina coast who end up surrounded by English settlers quite early on and they have to figure out how do you live with English settlers very early long before there's a United States. But for peoples like the Shawnees and the Cherokees who don't live on the coast who are a little farther west, they have known about and been trading with and had diplomatic relationships with Europeans for centuries by the time that by colonists really start to invade their lands in and across the Appalachian Mountains. And as you say, it's the time of the revolution where that really starts to change. These combined factors of one, the British colonial population is growing like nobody has grown before probably on the continent. The population of the British colonies is doubling every generation. And from the beginning of English colonization and then sort of doubled down on by the American revolution, these are colonies that depend on farming and particularly on individuals owning their own farms. And so there are generations and generations of British settlers come Americans who believe their future, their own family independence rests on owning their own farm. And by the time of the American revolution, most arable land has been taken up by colonists. And so young men who want to own their own farms see their future west of the Appalachian Mountains. So they start to cross illegally when they're colonists and then legally according to the United States for the most part into lands of the Shawnees and Cherokees and others west of the Appalachian Mountains and really shift to the balance of power in that part of the con between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. I have a related question. When we look at our textbooks, the books we use in school to learn about history, we find that they state that the end of the colonial American period came in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, wearing Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States. And from there we have the start of the early American Republic period. So Kathleen, what happens when we center indigenous perspectives to this aspect of history? When do indigenous peoples think the colonial period of North American history ended or do they think it ended? Yeah, well, I think many Native Americans today would say we're still in the colonial period. And it's very geographically dependent. For Shawnees and Cherokees, it's in some ways just beginning in the late 18th century for the Kiwis who live on the plains. It won't really begin in earnest until after the Civil War. Kathleen, your book Native Nations is a wonderful resource that we can use to rethink the history of North America so that we include and make central to this history the many indigenous peoples who lived and live on this continent. And a few listeners have some questions for you about how we might teach US history to better center indigenous peoples into our tellings of the story. First, Beth would like to know how historians, museums, and historic sites can honor Native American history as we think about the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. That's a great question. And I would say one place to start are the many many places where Native Nations are telling their own histories these days. And those are a resource no matter what your sort of purposes are from individuals who want to learn those of us who want to incorporate it into the way it was we're telling histories go see how they're telling their histories, you know, have partners within the tribes who can help with that. But another thing I think maybe just on the simplest level is never to give the impression that Native American history Native Americans are something of just the past. Even if you're talking about events of the American Revolution that happened 250 years ago, just sort of almost looking at verb tense even. I would say if you go to almost any Native American cultural center museum these days, their central thesis maybe at least the one that's to outsiders is we are still here. They just say it over and over and over. And I think if that's a message you can incorporate into how you portray Native American history in whatever era just making sure that nobody leaves your museum leaves them and exhibit without realizing that these are people's who still are here today in nation, you know, not just Native Americans, but Native Nations are still around today and we'll be here in the future. I think that's the really important message to give anybody who's learning about Native history. You mentioned that one way we can better understand indigenous history is for us to go to indigenous history and cultural centers. For those of us who are not keyed into where those centers of knowledge are, can you tell us a little bit about where we should go if we want to seek out more information directly from indigenous tribes and peoples? - So if you happen to be in or near Washington DC or New York City, the National Museum of the American Indian, it has branches in both places and it's a terrific place to see the native past and present told by native peoples themselves. But they're also countless smaller ones. So wherever you live, you sort of Google native cultural center near me, you might be able to find something. They're just so many. And also many, many of them have good websites. So wherever you live, you can look at, say, one of the Shawnee Nations website to see a little bit about the kind of learning that you would do if you were in person in their cultural center. And in fact, just doing it through websites, you can get even more. 'Cause you can get ones from all across the continent. And I just think they're a terrific way to see, okay, when native people tell their own history, how do they tell it? What do they choose to emphasize? How does it connect to today and the distant past? - Rosemary wonders how you think school teachers can incorporate more indigenous histories about pre-colonial colonial in the US history periods into their lesson plans and classrooms. - Well, I think first I would just say, I know K through 12 teachers have so much pressure to do everything the last thing I would want is to put on the whole new thing they have to incorporate. But I think maybe one of the easiest ways might just be to do a little bit of learning about the people's right near where you teach. And just sort of trying to get that into how you talk about the past. So say you're teaching about the American Revolution, here in North Carolina, for example, it's pretty easy to figure out what native nations that we're here, we're doing in the American Revolution and fit that into a few sentences into how you're teaching about the American Revolution. Of course, if you can get some other local tribe to come talk to a group of students, that's amazing. But they have so many requests to do these things. I also wouldn't want to add to their work. But if it's with older students, this is going to seem counterintuitive and different from sort of putting information into how you teach history, which I think is really, really important. But pulling up the website of a tribe, you'll find history there. But one of the things students will notice very quickly is that most of what the website does is tell people about social services and childcare and the health clinic, right? And it's such a powerful reminder that native nations are functioning governments today. It's just one way to get, I think, students or anybody to just sort of make that little shift into realizing Native Americans aren't just a minority group. They aren't just people of the past. They are people living in sovereign nations within the United States today, and that that might almost turn just a little bit the way you understand even the past. So then when you're talking about relationships between, say, the Mohawks and the Dutch or the English, like, oh, right, they're a government. They're a country. And this is why this is like this. One of the really refreshing aspects of Kathleen's book, Native Nations, is that it really makes clear to readers what history can look like when we center indigenous Americans into our understandings of really North America and even present day in North America. And if we read enough history books, we do get the idea that historians are trained to look at past people, places and events from multiple angles and voices. So Kathleen, now that you've written Native Nations and you have the lessons that you've gleaned from your work on it, why do you think we Americans should recenter our retelling of United States history and in particular the origins of the United States with histories of indigenous peoples? How do you think indigenous histories can help us better understand early American history and the history of the early United States? - I think that looking at this longer period helps us put the United States in perspective. The United States is a pretty small part of the history on this continent. And Native Nations have been here a long, long time. They survived through those worst areas of colonialism and they're still around today. And I think if that's sort of stepping back to a longer period, not only is it deeply important to integrate Native Americans into history because they're here, right? But also it puts the presence, you know, our present struggles in the United States into a longer perspective. People in the past have changed, have made decisions, have reacted to dramatic changes from the inside and the outside in a variety of ways and that most of the times those have been Native Americans because that's who's been here most of the time. And so if the past has something to do with the kinds of decisions we make in the present, then I think it's this long, long, mostly native past that should be something that we're looking to. - And now we should move into the time work. This is a fun segment of the show where we ask you, a hypothetical history question about what might have happened if something had occurred differently or if someone had acted differently. (audience applauding) (triumphant music) Now during the colonial period of North American history and into the early days of the early American Republic, indigenous nations were often more powerful than European and American colonists. But something seemed to shift and subvert that power after the American Revolution. So Kathleen, in your opinion, what would indigenous nations across North America look like today if the American revolutionaries had lost the American Revolution? - I think it's more likely that we would have a continent that split into more countries than it is today. I think it's quite possible. There would be some native nations that are completely their own countries, that have their own land, their own complete sovereignty today. There also might have been parts that are Spanish-speaking, part of what's now the United States, that were Spanish for longer or that remained a part of Mexico. But I do think that the sort of population numbers of the British colonies were gonna make some kind of difference. I think history's pernative nations between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River might still have been quite similar. The British crown was for pragmatic reasons, protecting native nations from British settlers, but there's no reason to think they would have done that in the long run. I would say the history for far Western peoples, including for the author and the coyotes who were both in my book, my think, those are likely to have been quite different. And then I think how things played out in the East would have a lot to do with what actually happens with slavery and the absence of the United States and other things when we go into a 19th century without a United States or a US Civil War. But yeah, I would say that the West End almost certainly have remained more a place of native sovereignty. - Sometimes changing just the smallest details of the past can have such ripple effects. I started to worry about that as I was talking, "Oh no, I don't know that." - Well, Kathleen, your last book took us into a different area of the American Revolution than we normally study, the Gulf Coast. And now you've supplied us with this continental indigenous history over a thousand years. So what can we look forward to next from you? - I hope this doesn't sound counterintuitive. I hope it sounds like it makes sense with those two projects, but I'm going to write a history of Yorktown during the American Revolution. So not just the siege of Yorktown, but through the whole revolution. And I want to tell it in a multi-perspectival way in the same way that I did in Independence Lost and talk about native nations that are right close to Yorktown in Eastern Virginia. Women and men and large numbers of enslaved people who escaped during the Revolution and ended up around Yorktown. And look at what happens when warfare is in a place with a large number of different peoples just right nearby them on their homeland and in the waterways near them. But yeah, back to the American Revolution in time for the 250th anniversary. - Yeah, I was just thinking that this project is probably going to come to us in 2031 for the 250th anniversary of Yorktown. - That's right, that's right. My editor would like to have it a little bit before that just to give herself some cushion. But yes, it will be out by 2031, I promise. (laughing) - If we have more questions about native nations or this long history of indigenous North America, where can we reach you to ask them? - Well, I'm super easy to find. You can Google me, my email address, if you can remember it is just [email protected]. I have a couple of websites you can look at. And I especially encourage you ask a couple teaching questions. If there are any teachers out there who would like any primary documents to use, I can send those or translations of those if they would be useful. - Kathleen Duval, thank you for visiting with us again. And for helping us better understand the long history of indigenous North America. - Thank you, Liz. It's a great pleasure to be on again. You do such great work for history and for the public. It's a great joy to talk to you. - When we read study and teach United States history, we're really looking at one of the smallest blips of time in the history of the North American continent. Even our study of early America represents only 3,300 millionths of the total history of the North American continent. And this is some part why Kathleen has asked us to adopt a long-dare view when it comes to our study of early North America. Long before the United States became an interest, dependent nation, Native Americans occupied and thrived on the continent. They built native nations that were larger and often more cosmopolitan and complex than the small colonial cities and settlements Europeans established between the 16th and 18th centuries. Investigating the history of Native America and expanding our view of the early American past to incorporate it, allows us to see how peoples living in North America handled similar issues to the ones that we face today, like a growing wealth gap between rich and poor, or religious strife, or periods of climate change, such as when the medieval warm period gave way to the little ice age. Plus, expanding our view also helps us see the early American period, which we historians date to somewhere between the late 15th and early 19th centuries. Expanding our view also helps us see how indigenous peoples have contributed and do contribute to our shared histories in North Americans. Without Native American assistance, many European colonies and settlements would have faltered. As Kathleen related, indigenous peoples like the Awthomne, new Native American plants, soil and growing patterns, better than Europeans did. Without Wampanoag, Haudenosaunee or Cherokee corn and growing techniques, many early colonial settlers would have starved to death. Without Native American knowledge of North American geography and prairies warriors, the English, French, Dutch and Spanish would have lost valuable allies and the wars that they waged. As Kathleen stated, Native peoples and nations have been in North America for a very long time. There are resilient peoples who survived the worst areas of colonialism and who have actively contributed to the history and development of the United States. They also have histories that impart wisdom and lessons for how we might face our own dramatic changes in climate, politics and religion. We can't truly understand the early American past if we emit Native peoples and nations. They were here long before Europeans arrived and they're still here, making active contributions to our communities. Look for more information about Kathleen, her book Native Nations, plus notes, links and a transcript for everything we talked about today on the show notes page. BenFrankelensworld.com/397 Word of mouth recommendations are the best way for podcasts to find new listeners. So be a good friend and tell your friends about BenFrankelensworld. Production assistance for this podcast comes from my colleagues at Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios, Jordan Hammond and Morgan McCullough. Breakmaster Sylinder composed our custom theme music. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. To discover and listen to their other podcasts, visit airwavemedia.com. Finally, I'm curious. What do you think of the idea of placing United States history within a long array of the history of North America? I also wonder if there are any particular Native nations or cultures that you'd like to investigate in a future episode. So let me know what you think. Liz, at BenFrankelensworld.com