The American Revolution and the Survival of Native Nations

The American Revolution and the creation of the United States brought unprecedented challenges to Indigenous lives, land, and sovereignty in North America. Tecumseh was one of many Native prophets and leaders in the 18th and 19th centuries who urged all Native North Americans to band together as one people—one race—in order to protect themselves and their continent. Looking back, we might imagine that Native North Americans would have been better off heeding Tecumseh’s call for unity and uniformity. But in fact, the preservation of distinctions among their many hundreds of nations, communities, languages, and identities helped Native nations to survive through the 19th and 20th centuries and into the present and future.

Kathleen DuVal is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An expert in early American and Native American history, DuVal is the author of  “Independence Lost”  and the Pulitzer Prize-winning  “Native Nations.” In her informative and educational lectures, DuVal dives deeper into the subjects explored in her books, recounting the untold stories of early America’s marginalized voices, sharing new takes on the American Revolution, and centering Indigenous nations in our retelling of North American History.