A thousand years of Native North America told as the history of powerful nations rather than as a prelude to colonization. DuVal opens at Cahokia, the city on the Mississippi bigger than London at the time, and works forward through the great mound societies, their deliberate abandonment, and what people built afterward — Haudenosaunee, Osage, Quapaw, Mohawk, Shawnee, the Pueblos. Europeans show up a third of the way in as one more factor to be managed, and are managed, for a long time. Her argument is that the centuries after contact were shaped as much by Native diplomacy and strategy as by anything Europe did, and that these are ongoing nations, not a closed chapter.
Native Nations