Tecumseh and the Survival of Native Nations

I just went to a talk at the UC Davis Alumni Center entitled “Tecumseh and the Survival of Native Nations” given by the historian Kathleen DuVal. DuVal’s most recent book is entitled Native Nations: A Millennium in North America and won both the Pulitzer Prize for history and the Bancroft Prize in 2025, as well as a couple of other history prizes. She also got her history PhD at UC Davis in 2000, and her talk today was something of a homecoming — there was a contingent in the audience who knew her from her graduate school days here.

I have not yet read Native Nations, but it was clear from her talk that as a retelling of Native American history it emphasizes the individual identities of sovereign Native nations, a characteristic that continues to be important today. She illustrated this with a photograph from the Standing Rock protests in 2016 showing flags from all the tribes who had assembled together. Her talk today was about the visionary Shawnee leader Tecumseh who along with his brother the religious leader Tenskwatawa (often known as The Prophet) tried to build a unified Native confederacy to resist the incursions of white American settlers into the lands beyond the Appalachians at the beginning of the 19th century. Tecumseh was a great orator and many listened to him and the prophesies of his brother, but overall their call for unification did not win out over sovereignty. Tecumseh ends up dying fighting with the British against the Americans in 1813. Tenskwatawa moved across the Mississippi and dies in Kansas in 1836. But the Native nations persist, and by the late twentieth century Native Americans have three identities in varying degrees: that of their tribe or sovereign nation, that of being a U.S. citizen, and of being a Native American.