Hello, friends. I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center,

and welcome to Weep the People, a weekly show of constitutional debate. The National Constitution

Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit, chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding

of the Constitution among the American people. In celebration of Native American Heritage Month,

historian Kathleen Duval joins Tom Donnelly, chief scholar of the National Constitution Center,

to discuss her new book, Native Nations, a millennium in North America.

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Professor Duval traces 1 thousand years of Native American history, from the rise of ancient cities and the arrival of Europeans to today's emerging fights for sovereignty.

This conversation was originally streamed live as part of the NCC's America's Town Hall program on November 4, 2025. Thank you so much for joining us today,

Professor Kathleen Duval. It's my great pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And, you know,

this book has been such a topic of conversation in my house. It's so powerful, so beautiful. I have a very curious

eight-year-old son who's studying Native American history himself. And maybe just start with,

maybe the, I don't know if it's the simplest question, but why don't you choose to write this book?

Well, I, you know, I've worked on early American history my whole career, and Native American

history is a central, maybe the central part of that. I've always been interested in the

interactions among different European groups, different European groups, different European groups,

and different Native groups. And I teach a class on Native North America,

and it starts long, long ago, many, many millennia ago,

and goes to the present.

And one of the things I've come to love about that class

is that every student who takes it ends up realizing

that Native Americans have not only been

here a long time, they've been in diverse sovereign policies for much longer than Europeans and

...