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Rewriting History: How Native Nations Shaped North America
When you walk through the ruins of Cahokia in Illinois today, climbing the massive earthen pyramids that rise dramatically from the prairie, you're experiencing what was once North America's greatest city-a sophisticated urban center that rivaled medieval London in size and complexity. Yet for generations, Americans were taught that Native Americans were primitive nomads who never built permanent settlements. This deliberate erasure of Indigenous urban history served a political purpose: if Native Americans hadn't "properly used" the land, then European colonizers were justified in taking it.
Kathleen DuVal's groundbreaking work shatters these persistent myths, revealing how Native nations maintained sovereignty and shaped North American history for thousands of years before European arrival-and continued to do so long afterward. The book has garnered praise from both academic historians and Indigenous scholars for its nuanced portrayal of Native agency and resilience. As Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. noted, this work "helps restore Native Americans to their rightful place as central actors in our shared history, not as passive victims or romantic stereotypes."
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Ancient Cities and Sophisticated Civilizations
When William McAdams discovered evidence in the 1880s that the massive earthen pyramids in the Mississippi Valley were human-made, many 19th-century Americans refused to believe Native Americans had built them. Despite clear evidence, myths persisted attributing these structures to natural formations, lost European civilizations, or even Atlanteans. President Andrew Jackson explicitly used this falsehood to justify displacement, claiming the mounds were "memorials of a once powerful race" exterminated by "existing savage tribes."
The truth was far different. During the Medieval Warm Period (late first millennium CE), favorable climate conditions enabled large-scale agriculture to spread throughout North America. Cities emerged as agricultural surpluses allowed people to specialize as priests, artists, manufacturers, and scholars. North American cities rivaled their global contemporaries in scale and sophistication: Moundville's population compared to European cathedral towns like Oxford; Cahokia matched thirteenth-century London or Barcelona; and the Huhugam civilization's cities of 10,000+ people rivaled contemporaneous Florence or Delhi.
The Huhugam (ancestors of today's O'odham people) engineered North America's largest agricultural system in the harsh Sonoran Desert. Despite just seven inches of rainfall annually and temperatures exceeding 100F, they constructed an impressive network of canals-eventually over 1,000 miles long-that diverted river water to terraced farms miles away. This irrigation system supported diverse crops including corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and cotton, feeding over 100,000 people by 1000 CE.
Cahokia emerged as North America's greatest city around 1054 CE, coinciding with a spectacular supernova visible worldwide. Workers razed an existing town, covered the ground with fresh earth to create a perfectly flat plaza thirty football fields in size, and built identical houses with steep gabled roofs. Around this main plaza, they constructed massive platform pyramids using river-bottom clay laid in alternating light and dark layers. The largest pyramid rose ten stories high with three terraces crowded with buildings, including a grand palace. The central pyramid alone contained over 21 million cubic feet of dirt, moved entirely by hand in baskets.
Cahokia's rapid growth displaced thousands, drawing immigrants from near and far. The city was built to align with the night sky, with its grid and central causeway positioned to match the "lunar standstill." Elaborate burials included sacrificial victims alongside elite individuals buried with shell beads, copper sheets, and game pieces. Cahokia's leaders ruled through a combination of fear and prosperity, hosting games and ceremonies that celebrated harvests while reinforcing their combined religious, economic, and political authority.
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The Rise of More Egalitarian Societies
Around 1300, climate change reversed the conditions that had enabled large-scale agriculture across North America. Severe multi-year droughts in the late 1100s and early 1200s affected civilizations worldwide. Then around 1250, global cooling began, accompanied by continued weather volatility. This period, known as the Little Ice Age, brought six centuries of colder, more unstable weather.
As leaders failed to maintain prosperity during these climate shifts, inequality grew visibly. In Cahokia, elite families built grander houses while new walls separated them from commoners. The Huhugam faced both drought and unprecedented flooding-five major floods between 1298 and 1313 alone-destroying canal systems and crops. Death rates soared, with half of infants dying before their first birthday.
People responded by abandoning these failing systems. Cahokia's population plummeted from 20,000 in 1100 to just 3,000 by 1275. According to O'odham creation stories, the Wooshkam people ultimately overthrew Siwani (the great chief) and other corrupt leaders, destroying their "great houses" and creating a more sustainable future.
Cherokee oral history tells of the Ani-Kutani, a once-powerful priestly caste who built pyramids and controlled religious ceremonies. Over time, they became "haughty, insolent, overbearing and licentious to an intolerable degree," causing the people to rise up and destroy this "hereditary secret society." The Cherokee Museum explains that since this revolution, "no hereditary privileges have ever been tolerated among the Cherokees."
After the urban centers collapsed, Native Americans developed sophisticated systems to prevent power accumulation and encourage shared prosperity. As Anishinaabe historian Cary Miller explains, these nonhierarchical political systems "were neither weak nor random but highly organized and deliberate."
Native peoples prioritized food security through diversification. Eastern women grew beans, squash, and corn together-beans climbing cornstalks while squash vines covered mounds to discourage weeds. This "messy" approach to European eyes was actually more efficient than row planting. Studies show seventeenth-century Haudenosaunee farmers produced three to five times more grain than European farmers on the same land.
Reciprocity became a broadly shared value across North America, creating what Lumbee scholar Robert Williams calls "a complex web of connective, reciprocating relationships." Lumbee scholar Daniel Richter describes it as "a sort of upside-down capitalism" where the goal was to provide goods to others rather than accumulate them.
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Diplomatic Mastery: How Native Nations Managed European Newcomers
When Europeans arrived in North America, they encountered sophisticated Native nations with established diplomatic protocols. Far from being overwhelmed by European technology or disease, Native peoples often incorporated these newcomers into existing political and economic systems.
In 1673, the Quapaws lived in several towns along the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers, controlling a verdant homeland with fertile lowlands where women grew multiple corn crops yearly. When French explorers arrived, the Quapaws strategically managed these newcomers to advance their own interests. They guided the French to meet allies like the Taensas while preventing them from forming relationships with enemies.
Though the French performed symbolic acts of claiming "Louisiana," actual power remained firmly with the Quapaws, who outnumbered Europeans thousands to one. When John Law's Mississippi Company failed in 1722, about forty French settlers became refugees in Quapaw territory. Rather than expelling them, the Quapaws incorporated these newcomers, allowing them to establish a small village where they adopted Quapaw ways.
The Quapaws expertly maintained their independence while extracting maximum benefit from their French alliance. Despite nearly eighty years of close contact, the Quapaws and their Osage allies effectively held the French to an imperial standstill. The Quapaws lived securely in possession of their homeland, enriched by European trade goods, while maintaining their traditional lifeways.
A painted bison hide from the 1730s reveals the Quapaw perspective on their relationship with the French-depicting them as friendly neighbors to consult before battle, not as imperial overlords. When French soldiers sought asylum in Quapaw towns, Chief Guedetonguay successfully defended Quapaw jurisdiction over these cases, forcing the French governor to pardon the men rather than risk conflict.
Similarly, the Mohawks controlled access to Dutch trade at Fort Orange (Albany), preventing even other Haudenosaunee nations from trading directly. Despite Dutch West India Company prohibitions, colonists regularly sold alcohol and weapons to Mohawks, who wielded enough economic power that Governor Peter Stuyvesant eventually authorized a "moderate trade in munitions" rather than risk losing Mohawk friendship to English competitors.
This reversed the intended colonial power dynamic-instead of Europeans dictating terms, Mohawks determined which rules would hold, setting high prices for furs that made it difficult for Dutch traders to profit except through gun sales.
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Confronting Settler Power
By 1750, the balance of power began shifting as British colonists flooded westward. In 1784, a multinational Native delegation warned Spanish officials about Americans as "a plague of locusts" taking Native lands after the American Revolution. While the creation of the United States had unprecedented effects, most of North America remained under Native control, with Indigenous peoples still the majority population west of the Appalachians.
Native nations responded to growing settler power through various strategies. Many formed new alliances, even with former enemies. Some fled to take refuge with other nations or formed minority communities within colonies and states. Others learned to use British and U.S. legal systems to protect their rights.
As settlers pushed westward, Native nations debated how to respond. Some, like the Shawnees and Cherokees, centralized their governance to negotiate more effectively. Allied nations formed confederacies, pledging not to surrender land without unanimous agreement. The Muscogee (Creek) Confederacy grew to thirteen thousand people by the mid-1700s. The Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa proposed an even more radical solution-urging all Indians to unite as one Native American race under centralized leadership.
The Cherokee Nation emerged as a powerful example of Indigenous adaptation and resistance. They embarked on a remarkable path of national development, creating a republic with clear borders, a written constitution, and institutions paralleling other modern nations-all while maintaining their distinct identity and sovereignty.
In 1827, the Cherokee Nation adopted a constitution that began with a preamble echoing the U.S. Constitution, deliberately adopted on July 4th to signal that Cherokees were a sovereign, modern nation founded on principles of liberty and self-governance. The Constitution established a bicameral legislature and outlined executive powers while prominently declaring Cherokee territorial boundaries and affirming that land would "remain the common property of the Nation."
Perhaps the most significant cultural innovation was Sequoyah's development of a Cherokee syllabary in the early 1820s. Working with his daughter Ayoka, he created a writing system that spread "like fire among the leaves" throughout the nation. The syllabary proved remarkably easy to learn-most Cherokee speakers became literate within weeks-and by the 1830s, about half of Cherokee households had at least one literate member, exceeding the English literacy rate among neighboring whites.
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Removal and Resistance
In one of America's most egregious violations of sovereignty and human rights, the U.S. government systematically expelled tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homes and forcibly relocated them to "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi. This policy, formalized under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, represented a devastating betrayal of earlier treaties and agreements. Despite the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Worcester v. Georgia that Georgia's laws had "no force" in Cherokee territory, President Andrew Jackson famously defied the Court, reportedly declaring, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
The Cherokee removal of 1838-1839 stands as the most notorious example of this brutal policy. Federal troops, led by General Winfield Scott, surrounded Cherokee villages at gunpoint, forcing twenty thousand Cherokees and two thousand enslaved people from their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs. The forced march west occurred during a bitter winter, with inadequate food, shelter, and medical care. At least four thousand people - nearly a quarter of the Cherokee population - perished from starvation, exposure, and disease along what became known as the Trail of Tears. The suffering was particularly acute among the elderly and young children, who died in disproportionate numbers.
When the survivors finally reached Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, they took swift action against those they held responsible for their ordeal. Following both traditional clan justice and Cherokee law, which made unauthorized land sales a capital crime, they executed several leaders who had signed the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota, including John Ridge and Elias Boudinot.
The Shawnee nation faced similar coercion and heartbreak. Their final departure from Ohio in September 1832 was marked by profound grief and anger. As one Shawnee leader expressed, they mourned most deeply "having to leave the graves of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and children, to the mercy of a people who, while living, cared little for them, and would care less for their dead." The Shawnee removal fractured their society and scattered their people across multiple territories.
Despite the U.S. government's determined effort to eliminate all Native presence east of the Mississippi, significant numbers of Indigenous people managed to remain in their ancestral lands through various forms of resistance and adaptation. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, for instance, found refuge in the mountains of North Carolina, where they purchased land and established legal recognition. Other communities survived by developing strategic alliances with sympathetic white neighbors, obtaining individual land titles through various treaties, or retreating to less desirable territories that white settlers initially ignored. The Seminole people of Florida waged a prolonged resistance through three wars, with many choosing to hide in the Everglades rather than submit to removal. These acts of resistance and survival demonstrated the remarkable resilience of Native peoples in the face of overwhelming pressure to abandon their homelands.
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The Native West and Continued Sovereignty
In the early nineteenth century, European Americans began entering Kiowa territory on the Great Plains, but their colonial ambitions differed greatly from the reality on the ground. The Kiowas maintained a sophisticated understanding of their territorial dominance, viewing the West as a complex tapestry of polities dominated by powerful Native nations including themselves, the Comanches, and other allied tribes. They developed their own nuanced system for categorizing outsiders, based primarily on appearance and geographical location rather than by empire or republic. French traders and Americans were collectively known as T'o:T'aukaui (Northern or Cold T'aukaui), reflecting their origin from northern territories.
When Americans ventured onto the Plains, they quickly encountered a political and social reality that challenged their assumptions of dominance. In July 1820, during a particularly telling encounter, Captain John Bell's declaration that the land belonged to "the numerous and powerful nation of Americans" met with a diplomatic but firm correction from a Kiowa leader. The leader's response - noting that the T'o:T'aukaui were "far" from their nation and merely welcome to travel through Kiowa country - demonstrated both the Kiowas' clear understanding of territorial sovereignty and their diplomatic sophistication in managing foreign relations.
The Kiowas maintained strict control over their territories through a complex system of enforcement. They implemented and enforced detailed hunting restrictions, establishing clear boundary lines and specific trade protocols that all outsiders were required to follow. These regulations weren't merely suggested guidelines but were actively enforced through their military strength and political alliances. U.S. expeditions throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, despite their military presence and diplomatic overtures, consistently failed to convince the Kiowas that the United States held any meaningful power in the region.
Following a colonial tradition dating back to the Roanoke settlement of the 1580s, U.S. officials repeatedly proposed bringing Plains Indians to Washington, D.C., believing that displaying the nation's capital, military strength, and industrial development would impress and intimidate tribal leaders into submission. However, the Kiowas remained notably uninterested in such visits, viewing them as unnecessary diplomatic gestures. Their reluctance to sign treaties or participate in these diplomatic missions reflected not ignorance but a clear understanding of their own power and sovereignty. The Kiowas continued to operate according to their own diplomatic protocols and territorial understanding, effectively maintaining their independence and authority over their ancestral lands well into the nineteenth century.
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The Survival of Nations
As Native nations faced unprecedented assaults on their sovereignty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they demonstrated remarkable resilience. Despite systematic attempts to destroy tribal sovereignty, ban Indigenous religious practices and languages, and separate children from their families, Native peoples remained absolutely determined to survive as distinct nations. This determination manifested in both overt resistance and subtle adaptations to preserve cultural practices underground.
By the 1880s, U.S. aggression had touched every Native nation, forcing them onto smaller territories, often alongside former enemies or strangers. The General Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act) further fragmented tribal lands, reducing Native-held territory from 138 million acres to just 48 million by 1934. Despite these harsh conditions, reservations became new homelands where Native nations painfully but necessarily rebuilt their communities, developing innovative ways to maintain traditional governance structures within the constraints of federal oversight.
For Plains peoples like the Kiowas, Comanches, and Cheyennes, dispossession happened with devastating speed-in less than fifty years, they went from controlling vast territories to confinement on reservations dependent on U.S. Indian agents. Without hunting opportunities and on land unsuitable for farming, they faced food dependency, disease outbreaks, and cultural suppression as agents worked to eliminate ceremonies like the Sun Dance and Ghost Dance. The Lakota people, for instance, continued these sacred practices in secret, often at night or in remote locations.
Despite these challenges, Native nations shifted from resisting reservations to preserving them as vital spaces for sovereignty. Even on these reduced land bases, tribes maintained some authority and continued as autonomous communities. The Navajo Nation, for example, successfully established its tribal council in 1923, creating a model for other tribes to adapt traditional leadership systems to modern governance needs.
Throughout the twentieth century, Native Americans increasingly identified as U.S. citizens while simultaneously maintaining their tribal identities. The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act formally recognized Native Americans as citizens, though many tribes had already achieved citizenship through various means. Boarding schools, military service - particularly during World Wars I and II - and other off-reservation experiences that brought together people from multiple tribes fostered both a pan-Indian identity and activism for self-determination and civil rights.
The first generation of these activists emerged in the 1910s-20s, educated but deeply connected to their tribal heritage. In 1911, boarding school graduates founded the Society of American Indians (SAI), intentionally named "of" rather than "for" Indians to emphasize Native leadership. As Arapaho Sherman Coolidge stated, it would be "managed solely for and by the Indians." The SAI became a model for future organizations like the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), founded in 1944, which continues to advocate for tribal sovereignty and rights today.
This period also saw the emergence of influential Native intellectuals and leaders like Charles Eastman (Santee Dakota), Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Dakota), and Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai-Apache), who used their education to advocate for Indigenous rights while maintaining strong connections to their cultural traditions. Their work laid the groundwork for the Native American rights movements of the mid-twentieth century.
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Indigenous Renaissance Today
Today, Native America is experiencing a profound cultural and political renaissance. More young people are actively learning ancestral languages, traditional arts, and sacred ceremonies, with Indigenous languages increasingly taking their rightful place in the American tapestry. From the Navajo Nation's immersion schools to the Cherokee language apps, innovative programs are helping preserve and revitalize Native languages for future generations. Cultural centers across tribal lands are offering workshops in traditional crafts like beadwork, pottery, and basket weaving, connecting youth with their heritage.
Tribal governments have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness during crises, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Having successfully taken over management of their public health systems from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, many tribal governments responded more swiftly and effectively than neighboring non-Native counties. The Navajo Nation, for instance, implemented comprehensive testing programs, strict mask mandates, and efficient vaccination drives. The Cherokee Nation developed its own contact tracing system and vaccination distribution network that became a model for other communities.
Native Americans showed higher trust in their own chosen officials and health professionals, leading to notably better health outcomes. This success has led to increased recognition of tribal sovereignty, with tribal governments now included as equal government partners in receiving COVID relief funds, infrastructure bills, and representation in America250 planning. As Paul DeMain explains, decades of "filing lawsuits and challenging government directives" have led to "greater power in the hands of the tribes," establishing precedents for tribal self-determination.
Tribes are implementing innovative approaches to community wellness, focusing on preventive health, exercise programs, and community gardens. The Eastern Shawnee have constructed state-of-the-art greenhouses to "decolonize people's diet," promoting traditional food sovereignty. The Quapaw Nation operates an extensive Indigenous seed bank, preserving heritage varieties of corn, beans, and squash, while making these resources available to other Native nations. The Oneida Nation has developed a successful organic farm operation that provides fresh, traditional foods to tribal members while creating sustainable employment opportunities.
David Treuer reflects, "I can't help feeling we are using modernity in the best possible way: to work together and to heal what was broken." This sentiment is powerfully captured in Native artist David Kanietakeron Fadden's influential work "Kill the Indian, Save the Man," which depicts boarding school children in stark black-and-white on the left, but as the viewer's eye moves right, the children begin to smile and take on vibrant colors in traditional Native dress-representing emergence "from that dark time" into cultural renewal. The piece has become a symbol of Indigenous resilience and revival.
Despite historically devastating U.S. policies aimed at cultural erasure, Native Americans have successfully rebuilt their nations while maintaining distinct cultural identities. Modern tribal communities are blending traditional wisdom with contemporary innovations, creating sustainable economic development through casinos, renewable energy projects, and cultural tourism. As Comanche scholar Paul Chaat Smith notes, "Our survival against desperate odds is worthy of a celebration," while poet Joy Harjo (Muscogee) eloquently speaks of "the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival those who were never meant to survive." This renaissance represents not just survival, but the thriving continuation of America's first peoples.
