PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anisa Khalifa: About a decade ago, historian, Kathleen Duval, set out on a mission to write a book that challenges the way we regard Native American history.
Kathleen DuVal: Non-native people in the United States have tended to see Native American history as these moments. The touch points in most
Anisa Khalifa: history textbooks, the lost colony, Jamestown with Pocahontas moments like
Kathleen DuVal: Indian removal and the Cherokees, and.
And what we tend to do is, is miss the big picture, and that makes Native history seem like episodic and really not that important,
Anisa Khalifa: right? But framing Native American history in such a way makes us lose sight of something
Kathleen DuVal: crucial. We lose this sense of how Native Americans have been here the whole time and are still here and have been a tremendously important part of the history of the United States and what came before the United States.
Anisa Khalifa: I am Anisa Khalifa. This is the broad side where we tell stories from our home in North Carolina at the crossroads of the South this week, how a new wave of scholarship is changing the narrative on Native history and the role that non-native people can play to carry it forward.
Kathleen DuVal: I am Kathleen Duvall. I'm a history professor at the University of North Carolina, so modest. You recently won the Pulitzer Prize. I did also win the Pulitzer Prize recently.
Anisa Khalifa: Earlier this year, Kathleen Duvall's book made headlines for winning her a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for history. And rightfully so.
The work is a sweeping exploration of an often overlooked and underappreciated topic. It's called Native Nations, a millennium in North America. It's a wide ranging history of indigenous people on this continent. A subject Kathleen has been studying throughout her nearly 30 year career.
Kathleen DuVal: When I decided to write this book, I knew it would have to be broad and big as a millennium in North America, but for each of the times and places and peoples that the book focuses on, I wanted to combine as many different kinds of sources as I could.
Anisa Khalifa: That meant written documents going back centuries, archeological artifact. Native Nations oral histories and much more. It's a lot. The final product is a massive 700 page book and pieced together. It creates a living picture of this continent's last thousand years.
Kathleen DuVal: Native Nations were here a long, long time ago.
They've been here for not just one millennium, but for millennia as nations, right, as political sovereignties. And they're still here today, and they're gonna be here long into the future.
Anisa Khalifa: I understand that you aren't Native American yourself, so how do you navigate, as you quoted in your book, um, a Shawnee Tribe Chief, the task of working with and not on indigenous communities.
Kathleen DuVal: Yeah, so it's really only over time that not only Native American history, but. Native America itself and the Native American present has been more and more a part of what I do, what I'm interested in, what I write about. And so working with tribal historians, just learning from them over time. Um, so both oral history going way back of how particular Native Nations talk about themselves and their creation and things that are important to them, and also a different kind of, sort of native history, which is how those nations today are presenting their history.
So. I did a lot of talking to tribal historians, going to cultural centers and museums, and trying to incorporate what I could learn about how those Native Nations tell their history today, um, into this book. Now,
Anisa Khalifa: it's not every day I get to talk with a Pulitzer Prize winner from my home state. So I wanted to start there in Eastern North Carolina specifically, or in the language of the original owners of that land, Ossomocomuck. This territory includes Roanoke Island – where one of the earliest and most famous encounters between indigenous people and Europeans took place. Kathleen says folks who lived there spoke various Algonquian languages, so they’re often called coastal Algonquians. In reality, they were a group of different nations.
Kathleen DuVal: They lived in probably towns of, of, I mean a few hundred to possibly, in some cases a few thousand people. And then some of those towns were Confederated. Um, so there were in some places, and certainly in the group of people who, for whom Roanoke Island was part of their realm, where they live their country, there was a sort of central leader over several different towns.
Anisa Khalifa: How did Native North American and European cultures compare when you look at, you know, this time when they began to encounter each other in the 16th century? Yeah. Yeah. That's a big question. I know. If you can give like a big picture answer. Yeah.
Kathleen DuVal: One of the things I really wanted to do in this book was to sort of break down that myth that European people in say the 16th century at the time of Roanoke, were.
Vastly different from Native American people. In fact, they were more like one another than either kind of, people were like us today in the 21st century. I think they recognized one another. So at first things seemed pretty good. Some of that sort of mutual recognition worked at first. Um, both sides.
Wanted to trade the English. Were there in part to trade with Native Americans. Native Americans already knew about Europeans. There had been all kinds of contexts over the previous, almost a hundred years, with, with European ships passing by. And so when the English came to Roanoke Island, uh, the people of the Outer banks, uh, osimo as they called the region at the time.
They knew what they wanted from them. They wanted metal goods, and at first it seemed like that was gonna be a good exchange. The native people would provide some food, um, some hospitality, but things, uh, sort of went downhill from there.
Anisa Khalifa: When Kathleen says things went downhill. It was pretty rough. The English sent three expeditions to Roanoke.
At first, things were friendly, but the second trip ended in betrayal and bloodshed. The third group came with plans to create a permanent English settlement, which became what many of us now know as the lost Colony.
Kathleen DuVal: And they come planning to set up a. Probably a permanent colony, a trading post. And the English colonists, these families, they end up settling in this place where there's been violence between the English and native people. And things are kind of dicey. Uh, but the leader, John White, ends up going back across the Atlantic to get more supplies.
'cause one of the things the English realizes if they don't bring enough food for themselves, that's what can lead to conflict with, with locals. If they're expecting Native Americans to feed them all the time, he goes back across the Atlantic, but then he can't come right back with more supplies.
Anisa Khalifa: This is when John White ran into a big hurdle.
England was at war with Spain and Queen Elizabeth wouldn't let any ships leave for the Americas, so John White was delayed for years.
Kathleen DuVal: And so when he comes back, uh, he sees no people on Roanoke Island, no native people or English people, but the colonists have left a sign for him. Before he left. They agreed that they would write on.
A tree or wherever they could write it where they were going. And if they were going in dangerous flight, like fleeing from something, they would put a mark above the word. Um, he finds there two places where they've written cro a toe on, which is Hatter Island today. No, mark above it. No sign that they were, you know, fleeing danger.
It really makes sense that they might've moved in with their Cro Toan allies on Haters Island. They were basically the only friends that the English had left in the region. So that's, uh, currently the most likely theory of what happened to the lost colonists. But what we definitely know is whatever happened to them, um, had something to do with the native people of what's now North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: I mean, it strikes me that like there doesn't really seem to be much mystery there, but it's been framed as this mystery story for like hundreds of years. Exactly. Why does this story have such a huge hold on us even so many years later? Yeah,
Kathleen DuVal: I think, I mean, I think it's that mystery aspect. I mean, even though as, yeah, John White didn't think it was a mystery and.
I think it's been warped a bit by what happens in the centuries after that. If you went to see the version of the Lost Colony Play performed out at Roanoke before the last couple of years, it's basically central theme was that the Lost Colony created the United States, which is of course absurd because the United States comes not until the late.
18th centuries. Mm. Um, and is definitely not a direct result of a failed colony, but I think Americans and especially North Carolinians like to, you know, look at that as the beginning of what came after that instead. I think it's a really important window into the native peoples of North Carolina, who are of course still here and descend from that history, but also a broader and bigger history of this place over time.
Anisa Khalifa: So can we go back to a thousand years ago when your book starts when the only people here were native folks? What fascinated me to learn was that this was an age of the metropolis for native populations.
Kathleen DuVal: So yeah, it was really important to me to start before Europeans got here. And between a thousand years ago and say 700 years ago or so, there were urban civilizations in North America that were every bit as centralized, every bit as urban as there were in Western Europe.
These cities
Anisa Khalifa: were all over the place, the southeast, the Mississippi Valley. The Southwest. Each of these urban centers was unique, but Kathleen says they had a few things in common.
Kathleen DuVal: Many of them would have a big central plaza around which there would be sort of a marketplace, and then rising above the central plaza.
Be, in most cases, earth and mounds. So basically very big hills in some cases, uh, you know, as many as like 10 stories tall, built out of earth. So built by human beings. And then on top of those would be palaces and temples and government buildings. So as sort of a common person in the plaza, you could look up there and really see where the more political and religious leaders of the city, um, would live and do their business.
Anisa Khalifa: But at a certain point, these grand cities started to decline. Kathleen says, we don't know exactly why, but there are a few likely reasons. One involves the so-called medieval warm period. This era helped agriculture flourish on a large scale. And cities both here and in Western Europe grew as a result.
But that came to an end with the
Kathleen DuVal: little Ice Age, as the name implies, things got colder. Um, growing seasons were shorter, and also for various reasons, weather was less, less predictable. There were droughts and floods, and it became harder to farm. On a large scale,
Anisa Khalifa: human choice might've played a part too.
Oral histories, reference people who wanted an alternative from these large stratified societies and the inequality that came along with them.
Kathleen DuVal: People really decided to spread out to live in smaller scale and to diversify their economies to do more hunting, more gathering. And also to have more like what we would call democratic political structures, where one of the main points was to try to prevent a sort of strong dictatorial leader or leading class.
Right. And hierarchy from developing.
Anisa Khalifa: Hmm. And how did Europeans who were coming from a society that was organized with a strong. Dictatorial leading class. Right. Um, how did they interpret how they saw Native Americans living when they
Kathleen DuVal: came to this continent? So Europeans, they're moving in the other direction, right?
They're moving toward more centralization. They imagine that there's this natural progression of human societies from hunter gatherers to agriculturalists, to eventually, you know, the kind with a, with a king and a elaborate hierarchy, and they think that Native Americans are behind them on that trajectory.
Without understanding really the, either the history or the complicated present that they're looking at
Anisa Khalifa: after the break, how Europeans arrival upended native life, and the resilience indigenous Americans embodied in response to survive.
So Kathleen, we were talking about how European colonists first perceived native people when they got here. But early on, native people were still mostly calling the shots in their interactions, right? Like some of these nations were actually quite powerful during that early colonial period. So
Kathleen DuVal: there are nations like the Cherokees that are large and powerful really from the beginning of the colonial period.
And then the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, uh, or Iroquois Confederacy of the Northeast around what's now New York state and Southeastern Canada. Um, and they use Europeans. Mostly for trade goods at first, sort of, um, metal for metal tipped arrows later for guns and, and other kinds of weapons, um, as well as other goods.
But that access to European trade goods helps them expand their influence and their power and really they for quite a long time control their relationships with Europeans. Europeans who want to ally with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy really have to do things on their terms. One of the things that really
Anisa Khalifa: struck me was how like daily life and sort of the daily use of goods changed for both people here and people back in Europe because of the exchange that was happening.
Yeah. There's
Kathleen DuVal: so much in sort of daily life that changed and you can really watch people see something useful in somebody else's sort of. Society and, and take it on. So for example, if you went to a, a Mohawk home in the 16 hundreds, you would see like the basic shape of it would be probably the way Mohawk grandmothers had made their homes.
But, uh, there might be a door with a hinge. That hinge was made in Europe, wasn't it? And then the other way around. So we see certainly, um, so many foods from Native America spread around the world. Um, and then the trade with Native Americans affects how things are made in Europe. So there are goods made in the Netherlands and in France and in England purposely for native markets.
Anisa Khalifa: That's incredible. Yeah, and I think it speaks again to this sort of weird separation that we always have when we talk about history, where of course there would be trading with each other, and of course that encounter would have impacts on how they were living, right?
But this initial dynamic of trade and exchange peppered by periods of warfare, but still pretty reciprocal, changed drastically with the creation of the United States. More and more settlers started to come to these shores and began to multiply once they got here.
Kathleen DuVal: So by the second half of the 18th century, the population of the British colonies on the East Coast is doubling every generation.
And then that huge population growth is combined with the creation of the United States. So British colonists rebel create their own country, um, and it's a republic. And one of the promises that the United States makes to itself, to its voters is a republic will work because individual men get to own their own property.
But when you combine that with the fact that the population's doubling every generation, that means. The United States needs twice as much land, every generation,
Anisa Khalifa: and it's around this time that white Americans started to push a new narrative. As they looked to expand their footprint, they began to see native land as essentially up for grabs.
They started to believe that indigenous people don't believe in property ownership. Kathleen says much of that myth has persisted into the present.
Kathleen DuVal: I think it's safe to say Native Americans before the coming of Europeans, and then pretty far into the colonial period, didn't believe in private property.
They didn't believe individuals could own land, but that did not mean a nation couldn't have its own land. So the Cherokees, for example, would have and still do have, but had a large territory that was theirs. It was their country. It was not the Chickasaws and it was not. The British, it was Cherokee country, so you sort of, you can almost hear it how insidious it is, right?
They don't really own the land, therefore, it's okay for other people to take it.
Anisa Khalifa: Soon enough, white Americans turned away from coexistence and reciprocity. Instead, they believed Native Americans. Only options were assimilation. Removal or death. But some Native Nations saw a possible alternative.
Kathleen DuVal: The Cherokee Nation imagines that the Cherokee Nation can continue to exist within its borders and just maybe be surrounded by the United States or with the, maybe the Muskogee Creeks on one side.
Anisa Khalifa: And the Cherokee Nation did attempt this in the 19th century. They centralized their politics to prevent their land from being picked off little by little.
Kathleen DuVal: They create a, um, a national council that meets every year and passes legislation. They make a Cherokee newspaper that prints those laws in the newspaper so Cherokees can, uh, read what those laws are and, and buy in really to this nationalization.
Um, Sequoia, who is a Cherokee, he invents a syllabary in alphabet. For writing down the Cherokee language and the Cherokees achieve something like 95% literacy rate in reading Cherokee. Wow. And so, yeah. So it really is a national effort to, in some ways, to respond to the United States and protect the Cherokee Nation from the United States, but also I think importantly be on the world stage like the United States, like Mexico, and they really envision that as as the best future for the Cherokee Nation.
Anisa Khalifa: But the Cherokee's achievement of equal footing with other countries in the emerging world order was short-lived In 1830, the American government authorized one of the most infamous policies in its history with Native Nations and displaced more than a hundred thousand indigenous people who remained in the east.
Kathleen DuVal: The Indian Removal Act says that, um, the United States will do everything it can to negotiate treaties with the Native Nations still existing east of the Mississippi River, to persuade them to move, be removed west of the Mississippi River. And then over time, it takes several years. The United States does through a variety of mostly nefarious means, sort of negotiate treaties with those nations and then forcibly remove the Cherokees and other native nations west of the Mississippi River.
Anisa Khalifa: Ultimately, the United States expelled the majority of these people from their homelands. 80,000 people, at least 13,000 died in the process. Only a minority were able to stay and keep some of their land. Ancestors of tribes like the Lumbee. An Eastern band of Cherokee who are still in North Carolina today,
this extreme act of state sanctioned violence against indigenous communities. Forever changed the shape of this country. And Kathleen says it wasn't an isolated act, but part of a campaign of forced displacement and assimilation.
Kathleen DuVal: removal. Sometimes, you know, people think of, of Indian removal or even earlier times as the worst periods, but over and over when I talk to tribal historians, they talk about the late 19th century and early 20th century as being the worst.
Starting in the late 19th century, the US government really tried to destroy Native Nations as nations. They mainly did this in two
Anisa Khalifa: ways, allotments and boarding schools. The allotment Act made tribes divide up much of their land and sell off what was left. It caused Native Nations to lose a staggering 90 million acres.
By the time allotments ended in the 1930s, that's almost two thirds of their land gone in about 40 years. And then there were the boarding schools. The government forcibly and often violently took native children from their families and sent them to live at schools where they were punished for speaking their own languages and forced to adopt Christianity.
Kathleen DuVal: And really tried to assimilate that new generation into the United States in such a way that there would be no more Native Nations. How did they survive that devastation? Yeah, they did. So it's, you know, it's important to emphasize the devastation, but also to emphasize the survival. So over and over, I heard and read stories of kids going home for the summer and sitting at grandma's house.
And learning the lessons of how to be Shawnee, how to be Kiowa. This is who you are no matter what they've told you at school all year. And in some cases in the boarding schools, they met kids from other Native Nations that either in some cases they'd never heard of. In some cases in. They knew as their traditional enemies and right.
And then they would say, Hey, they're not so bad. And they started talking about their families and their histories and they're speaking in English, right? These are peoples who couldn't communicate with each other in the past 'cause they spoke such different languages and didn't have trading relationships, so didn't have interpreters.
English gives them a language to communicate in. And so, you know, there are many. Small answers to the survival of Native Nations. One of those answers is this meeting of kids and how they created a, uh, really a sense for the first time of a real Native American identity and politics and use that to try to change things back home.
Anisa Khalifa: On top of this, one of the most important ways that Native people have continued to survive is their sovereignty. That sovereignty has always existed, but it's a concept that very few non-native Americans understand. I.
Kathleen DuVal: Within the United States, there are nearly 600 federally recognized tribes, and there are many state recognized tribes as well.
Here in North Carolina, we have eight state recognized tribes, uh, counting the federally recognized eastern ban of Cherokee. That
Anisa Khalifa: sovereignty means they operate as fully functioning independent polities. Part of that includes treaties with the US government. Around everything from healthcare to criminal justice.
Kathleen DuVal: There are ways in which Native Nations still have sovereign rights, um, and really are increasing their, uh, abilities to exercise those rights in the 21st century. Today,
Anisa Khalifa: only a minority of native people live on their tribal lands, let alone the ancestral lands of their nation. But Kathleen says they maintain a connection to their heritage by visiting their homelands.
Keeping that connection alive. Even as the world changes and for indigenous people today, there's power in fully claiming both citizenships to their native nation and to the United States of America.
Kathleen DuVal: I think one of the things that native activists decided about in the early 20th century then, this was controversial at the time, was that the best way to protect Native America was also to exercise US citizenship.
Anisa Khalifa: So obviously we've barely had time to scratch the surface on this very long and complex and fascinating history. Um, why is it important for us to know this history?
Kathleen DuVal: I think the most important reason is that. We need to understand their survival as nations into the present day is a result of tremendous tenacity and careful work on the part of their ancestors.
And if we don't understand that part of it, um, if we sort of just think of Native Americans as a minority group within the United States, then we've missed not only, you know, a really important and fascinating history, but uh, but we've kind of missed a point today.
Thank you so much. Oh, thank you, Anisa. This has been amazing.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode was produced by me, Anissa Khalifa, and edited by Charlie Shelton Ormond. The rest of our team includes editor Jared Walker and executive producer Wilson Ser. The Broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org.
If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating or review or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.