Kathleen DuVal, history Ph.D. alumna and 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner, returned to UC Davis to give a talk to a packed audience at the Walter A. Buehler Alumni Center on February 25.
A professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, DuVal presented her research on Tecumseh, a 19th century Native American leader. She described Tecumseh’s efforts to unify various tribes, each with their own history, culture and language, into a larger, and singular identity for the purpose of fighting against the U.S.
“Eventually,” said DuVal, “Native Americans come to the idea that they can be citizens of their own nations, and they can also be Native American. That can be an additional identity. That idea really wasn't in place in the early 19th century, but it is today.”
DuVal’s book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024), which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize, puts the tragedy of loss in the centuries after the arrival of Europeans into a much broader perspective and a narrative of resilience. In addition to the Pulitzer, the book won the Bancroft Prize, the Cundill History Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize.
In her talk, DuVal described how Tecumseh’s efforts in the 19th century laid the foundation for how Native American tribes today navigate complex identities and senses of belonging that span individual tribal identities as well as their connections as Native Americans and as U.S. citizens. In many ways, she said, fighting in the U.S. military during World War I and World War II helped to solidify an understanding of each of these identities.
Central to DuVal’s work as a historian and writer is powerful storytelling that intimately connects her readers with the full complexity of the people whose lives she meticulously documents in all their complexity. It’s the complexity of multiple, often contradictory, perspectives that adds richness to these stories.
“We don't all agree on what happens and what we should think about it,” said DuVal. “I try to track as many different perspectives as possible, and that itself becomes the story. There are facts and things that happened, but the most interesting part of the story is how different people understood — and often understood differently — what was happening.”
DuVal credited her early growth as a historian and writer to her experience and training at UC Davis. She worked with historical luminaries, including Karen Halttunen, Andrés Reséndez, Charles Walker, Clarence Walker, Louis Warren, and Alan Taylor, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize. She also worked with Steven Crum in the Department of Native American Studies.
“It was such a pleasant place to be a graduate student,” said DuVal. “Being a graduate student is not pleasant usually. There are lots of things about it that are really painful and stressful, and you don't know what your future is going to be. But they were happy years, as well as being fruitful in starting my career.”
In addition to teaching her own class as a graduate student, she worked with K-12 teachers on instructional materials and took part in other forms of public-facing history. Her academic work in her Ph.D. dissertation and engaging students and others outside of academia as a teacher were separate threads that over the years have come together.
“I was trained by people who are really good writers and taught me to think about storytelling and narrative alongside making academic arguments,” she said. “I find that my writing and my speaking to public audiences and my teaching are actually much more similar than when I first got started.”
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