Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (Random House) has won the $75,000 Cundill History Prize, administered by McGill University.
Organizers observed: "The culmination of a 25-year project, DuVal shows how long before colonization, Indigenous peoples adapted to climate change and instability with innovation, forming smaller communities and egalitarian government structures with complex economies which spread across North America. Challenging dominant narratives, DuVal refutes that the arrival of Europeans led to the end of Indigenous civilizations in North America, instead she vividly reveals the interactions and complex relationships that developed between nations."
Jury chair Rana Mitter said: "One of the most wonderful things about Native Nations by Kathleen DuVal is that it brings unexpected and, to many readers, unknown aspects of that story, to prominence. She does this by bringing in historians and analysts of the Indigenous American experience from within their own scholarship, bringing the story to the forefront of our wider understanding in this huge sweeping history that starts more than 1,000 years ago and brings us up to the present day."