Kathleen DuVal wins $75k Cundill History Prize

Kathleen DuVal has been announced as the 2024 winner of the £57,770 ($75,000) Cundill History Prize for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House) at a gala in Montreal, where the prize is administered by McGill University. 

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. Her book covers everything from the rise of ancient cities to the present day and reframes our understanding of the period by highlighting Indigenous power and sovereignty.

The announcement was made by chair of the jury Rana Mitter. Finalists Gary J Bass and Dylan C Penningroth, who were also in attendance at the ceremony, were each awarded $7,700 ($10,000).

Mitter said: “One of the most wonderful things about Native Nations 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 which starts more than 1,000 years ago and brings us up to the present day.”

The winning book is the culmination of a 25-year project, in which DuVal shows how, before colonisation, Indigenous peoples adapted to climate change and instability. The author refutes that the arrival of Europeans led to the end of Indigenous civilisations in North America, demonstrating the relationships that developed between nations.

Lisa Shapiro, dean of the faculty of the Arts at McGill, added: “DuVal’s winning book truly embodies the Cundill History Prize’s aims. It is not only an outstanding achievement in historical scholarship, but it also engages the reader and dramatically reorients our perspectives on North America. It demonstrates the real significance of history writing.”