On Thursday, October 31st, the Cundill History Prize announced that Kathleen Duval as the winner of the $75,000 Cundill History Prize for Native Nations: A Millenium in North America.
DuVal was among the three finalists of the prize, alongside Judgement at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass and Before the Movement by Dylan C. Penningroth. Fellow finaists were each awarded USD $10,000 during the ceremony.
“The 2024 Cundill History Prize was another incredible year celebrating the value of well-informed historical perspectives,” said Lisa Shapiro, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at McGill. “After a summer of intense reading through a record number of submissions, the jurors managed to arrive at an exceptional shortlist of eight titles. From these, they chose our superb three finalists, which together showcase the range of insights, from the local to the global, from the more recent to the distant past, that compelling history affords.”
The 2024 jurors awarded DuVal, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for her “sweeping” 1,000-year history of North America from the rise of ancient cities to the present day, which entirely reframes our understanding of the period with Indigenous power and sovereignty at its center.
“Kathleen DuVal’s winning book truly embodies the Cundill History Prize’s aims,” said Dean Shapiro. “It is not only an outstanding achievement in historical scholarship, it also engages the reader and dramatically reorients our perspectives on North America. It demonstrates the real significance of history writing.”
Native Nations is the culmination of a 25-year project in which 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.
“One of the most wonderful things about Native Nations by Katheleen DuVal is that it brings unexpected and, to many readers, unknown aspects of that story, to prominence,” said the Chair of the Jury, Rana Mitter. “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 1000 years ago and brings us up to the present day.”
The Cundill History Prize is the largest purse for a book of non-fiction written in or translated into English. The prize is awarded to a work of outstanding history writing and is open to books from anywhere in the world, regardless of the author’s nationality.
Hosted by CBC Ideas’ Nahlah Ayed, the winner ceremony was the conclusion of the two-day Cundill History Prize Festival hosted and administered by McGill university each year.
Katheleen DuVal joins an exceptional alumni list of world-class historians: Tania Branigan (2023) Tiya Miles (2022), Marjoleine Kars (2021), Camilla Townsend (2020), Julia Lovell (2019), Maya Jasanoff (2018), Daniel Beer (2017), Thomas W. Laqueur (2016), Susan Pedersen (2015), Gary Bass (2014), Anne Applebaum (2013), Stephen Platt (2012), Sergio Luzzatto (2011), Diarmaid MacCulloch (2010), Lisa Jardine (2009), Stuart B. Schwartz (2008).