Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations is the latest in a raft of books that tackle the long history of Native America. It resonates with Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (2022) and Ned Blackhawk’s capacious The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of American History (2023). For legal historians, DuVal’s book makes for interesting reading because it combines both the long history of Native America – including the rise and fall of Indian cities like Cahokia – and the more recent past, all the way up to the “indigenous renaissance” of today. (P. 552.)
Like Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent, DuVal begins her story before European contact, explaining how Native Americans thrived on the North American continent for centuries. Cahokia, a massive complex on the Mississippi River, boasted a population larger than London in 1250. However, in the years leading up to European arrival, oddly modern problems—including “climate change”—led Native Americans to abandon their urban lives for smaller, more democratic social formations, or what DuVal calls a more “egalitarian order.”
Once Europeans did arrive, Native Americans engaged them in ways that defy stock narratives of colonization. They played Europeans off one another, exploited them for trade purposes, made alliances with them when helpful and—when necessary—killed them. It was not until the nineteenth century, in other words, that Europeans truly began to make inroads into the continent, a story that tracks Hämäläinen’s narrative. “By 1830,” DuVal notes, white Americans outnumbered Native Americans ten to one: “the United States had an astounding 12.8 million people (two million of them enslaved),” while the entire Native American population of the continent was down to less than one million (P. 442.)
During this phase, the Supreme Court handed down one of its most important opinions on Native Americans, Worcester v. Georgia, which declared American Indians to be members of “domestic dependent nations” (Pp. 451-52.) This concept was novel. Nations, as a general matter, enjoy sovereignty. However, by declaring them “dependent,” the Court created something new, an entity that lacked true sovereignty but—at the same time—lacked the various Tenth Amendment protections enjoyed by the states. This treatment could have been viewed as a defeat for Indian hopes of autonomy, but DuVal does not read it that way. For her, the Westphalian idea that Native Americans were “nations” became internalized in the minds of Native Americans, and survived removal orders, reservation systems, and the Civil War.
Which, incidentally, was another turning point in the status of Native American nations. Not just a struggle between North and South, the war emerges in DuVal’s book as a battle for federal primacy over all entities that might claim sovereign status. The Southern states’ loss became the Indian nations’ loss as well, for the war rapidly expanded the size and scope of the federal government—a government that directed the same force that it had used to quash the Confederacy against Native Americans. “The Civil War forced Native nations into new relationships with the United States,” notes Du Val. “For the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U.S. policy would fluctuate between brutal violence against American Indians and attempts to incorporate them into the United States.” (P. 493.)
Hämäläinen ends his book here, at the close of the nineteenth century, a moment that DuVal calls “the nadir” of Native American hopes for retaining their culture, their land, and their “nations.” However, DuVal continues her story into the twentieth century, enabling her account to explore the winding, largely legal history of Native American survival and – as she puts it a “renaissance” of “possibilities” that exist in “the present.” (P. 500.)
DuVal’s twentieth-century discussion resonates with Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America, another sweeping history of Native America that begins with first contact and then follows the various ways that Native Americans have shaped American history. Both Blackhawk and DuVal lament the 1910s and ’20s, which were marked by forced assimilation, allotment, and the “sending of Native children to boarding schools.” (P. 514.) However, both agree that something changed in the 1930s. Under the leadership of John Collier, FDR’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the federal government abandoned allotment and assimilation and “moved back toward the ‘domestic dependent nations’ of Worcester v. Georgia,” by allowing Native Americans to constitute their own governments, reject allotment, and recover their traditional cultures. (P. 523.)
This moment, marked by the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, is the subject of one of the most interesting passages in DuVal’s book, which suggests that FDR’s radical rethinking of American society had a profound effect on the plight of Native Americans. Indians had been lobbying for their rights since at least the days of Tecumseh, in 1811. So, what had changed?
Perhaps it had something to do with the Great Depression. William E. Leuchtenburg, David M. Kennedy, and others have all documented the crisis in confidence that beset the nation during the 1930s, a startling turn away from the “roaring” exuberance of the 1920s. Did this downturn help Indians? Perhaps. John Collier held up Native American customs and culture as superior to white, a startling admission for a federal official.
However, in subsequent decades, anti-Indian sentiment within the federal government continued to fluctuate. In the 1950s, for example, DuVal explains that the federal government embraced a theory of “termination” that sought to break-up Indian traditions and move Native Americans to cities – a move oddly reminiscent of the Court’s integration mandates in Shelley v. Kraemer and Brown v. Board of Education. However, Native Americans survived the transition, took inspiration from Black Power, and reconstituted their own “nations” in urban America, beginning with the American Indian Movement, or AIM, in 1968.
By 1974, the federal government fluctuated once again and passed the Indian Self-Determination Act, a law that recognized both “individual rights and tribal sovereignty.” (P. 539.) Both DuVal and Blackhawk attribute this legislation to Native American activism, and in particular the American Indian Movement, but one wonders whether other factors contributed as well. For example, Richard Nixon signed the bill into law as anger simmered over the Vietnam War, doubts roiled over his involvement in Watergate, and Americans once again questioned their nation’s identity. This leads to a final thought. Could it be that Native American “nations” fare best when the American “nation” fares worse? And could a similar dynamic explain historians’ interest in Native American nations today?
