October 30th 2024 in News

Kathleen DuVal wins 2024 Cundill History Prize for Native Nations

Kathleen DuVal has been announced as the 2024 winner of the US$75,000 Cundill History Prize for Native Nations: A Millennium In North America (Random House).

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.

The announcement was made this evening at a packed ceremony in Montreal’s Windsor Ballroom by Chair of the Jury Rana Mitter, in the company of the 2024 finalists and jury members. Fellow finalists, Gary J. Bass for Judgement at Tokyo and Dylan C. Penningroth for Before the Movement, were each awarded US$10,000 tonight. CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed hosted the ceremony. McGill University administers the Cundill History Prize and hosts the Cundill Festival in Montreal each year.

Chair of the Jury, Rana Mitter said: “One of the most wonderful things about Native Nations by Kathleen DuVal 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 that starts more than 1000 years ago and brings us up to the present day.”

The culmination of a 25-year project, 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.

Lisa Shapiro, Dean of the Faculty of the Arts at McGill, said: “The 2024 Cundill History Prize was another incredible year celebrating the value of well-informed historical perspectives. 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. Kathleen DuVal’s winning book truly embodies the Cundill History Prize’s aims: 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.”

Kathleen DuVal joins an exceptional alumni list of world-class historians: Tania Branigan (2022), 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).

The Cundill History Prize is the largest purse for a book of non-fiction in 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, as well as works translated into English.