Kathleen Duval on Independence Lost (Part of The Revolution Is News)

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the American Revolution principally involved two nations– or one nation and one proto-nation, Great Britain and the United States, with an important assist for the latter from France. But as Kathleen Duval shared with us, there were many native nations involved in the revolutionary conflict, from among the "extraordinary" number of native nations in North America. They allied with the primary combatants, or stayed neutral, or changed their calculus depending on events and information.

From her most recent book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America as well as her remarkable Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, Dr. Duval is an expert guide to understanding the complexity of Indigenous peoples’ experiences and actions during the revolutionary period. She helped us see the importance of ongoing and fairly new treaties with different European empires as a factor, the role of different regional contexts, and the fact that for most of the period most of the continent was fully controlled by native nations, not Europeans.

Join us for this introduction not only to information about Indigenous people in the era of the American Revolution, but to frameworks for thinking about the people and the period.