The Fourth Annual Alfred A. Cave Lecture in Native American Studies: Native Independence and the American Revolution
Professor Kathleen DuVal
Thursday, April 9, 2026
In the 250th year of American Independence, renowned historian Kathleen DuVal discusses Native sovereignty before, during, and after the Revolution, drawing from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Native Nations and earlier work to illustrate how Native leaders such as Shawnee Chief Tecumseh united tribes against U.S. expansion through diplomacy and confederation.
Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and American Indian history. Her 2024 book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as the Bancroft Prize, the Cundill History Prize, and the Mark Lynton History Prize. Her earlier book Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is also the author of The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent and a coauthor of Give Me Liberty!, and she appeared as a commentator in Ken Burns’s documentary The American Revolution.
Sponsored by: American Indian and Indigenous Studies; and George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.
The recorded introduction to Professor DuVal’s lecture by Ken Sassaman was corrupted. Below is the script of that introduction, less the announcements of the Cave Scholars for 2026, which are featured elsewhere on this website.
Good afternoon and welcome to the Fourth Annual Alfred A. Cave Lecture in Native American Studies
I am Ken Sassaman, Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of Florida Archaeology, Department of Anthropology, and Steward of American Indian and Indigenous Studies, sponsor of today’s program with co-sponsorship by the George A. Smathers Libraries.
We are honored to be joined by Professor Kathleen DuVal of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, whose lecture today draws from her latest book, Native Nations, to make the case that this 250-year-old nation we call the United States was hardly the first on this continent and that its establishment and expansion did not eliminate the hundreds of Native Nations whose histories were ignored, or contrived, in support of American exceptionalism.
We usually begin these events with a land acknowledgment statement, but this time with a twist, inspired in part by Professor DuVal’s op-ed in the New York Times last year. It is true that land we occupy in Gainesville was home to Alachua Seminole and Potano Timucua. To these we can add at least 14 millennia of Indigenous communities in the region, starting in the Ice Age when sea level was 80 m below present level and the Florida peninsula twice as wide as now. But missing in land acknowledgement statements about the place in which we find ourselves today is that land of 120 tribes west of the Mississippi River was expropriated and sold to endow the University of Florida as a land-grant institution. We implore our leaders to acknowledge this act of dispossession—as did those of MIT, South Dakota State, and other universities—and to invest the derivatives of land-grant funding in growing Indigenous Studies at UF.
Operating without state funding, American Indian and Indigenous Studies is a consortium of 21 UF faculty members spread across 10 administrative units. It started in 2008 at the urging of undergraduate students of Native American ancestry who rightfully sought greater capacity at UF for the study of Indigenous history and culture. With financial and moral support from diverse partners, the program has provided curriculum, scholarly programs, and public outreach since its inception 18 years ago. An endowment fund established in 2019 ensures that American Indian and Indigenous Studies at UF will thrive in years to come. In memory of the illustrious career of historian and educator Alfred A. Cave, Mary Koslovsky, Professor Cave’s wife, gifted funds to UF in support of Native American studies. We remain eternally grateful to Mary her vision and generosity of spirit.
In a career spanning over half a century, Alfred A. Cave contributed greatly to our understanding of the colonial history of Native America, particularly during the Jacksonian Era but also throughout prior centuries of warfare and conflict, and in ensuing decades of Native revitalization movements. Professor Cave taught at various universities after earning his PhD in history from UF in 1961. It was not long before he rose the ranks of higher administration, first at the University of Utah and later the University of Toledo, where he served with distinction as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1973 to 1990. He thereafter returned to full-time teaching and research until his retirement in 2007. Among the many awards acknowledging Professor Cave’s career is the 2015 Distinguished Alumnus Award from his alma mater.
And that brings us to our esteemed guest, Professor Kathleen DuVal, and her lecture: Native American Independence and the American Revolution.
Dr. Kathleen DuVal is the Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is renowned for research that centers Native American perspectives, marginalized voices, and the complex interactions that shaped North America. Her latest book, Nation Nations: A Millennium in North America, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in History, along with several other prestigious awards. Professor DuVal is also a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Humanities Center Fellow, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, and an Elected Fellow of the American Antiquarian Society and the Society of American Historians. Listing all of her books, awards, recognitions, and other accomplishments would steal precise moments from the time we have to listen and learn from this incredible scholar, so without further delay, please join me in welcoming to the University of Florida, Professor Kathleen DuVal.
A member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory with Anishinaabe and mixed European heritage, Dr. Jesse Popp strives to promote inclusive science that embraces multiple ways of knowing while on her journey of learning and sharing. As the PI of the Wildlife, Indigenous Science, Ecology (WISE) Lab, she and her research team work to weave Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to contribute to the advancement of environmental and ecological science. Through Indigenous-led projects that uplift Indigenous values and ways of knowing, Dr. Popp and her team contribute to environmental caretaking and the progression of the natural sciences in the spirit of reconciliation.
Sponsored by: American Indian and Indigenous Studies; Imagining Climate Change; Land Use and Environmental Change Institute; Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences; and George A. Smathers Libraries.
The Second Annual Alfred A. Cave Lecture in Native American Studies: Boarding Schools and American Indian Dispossession
Professor Brenda J. Child
Monday, March 4, 2024
Government boarding schools went hand in hand with the American Indian land dispossession policies of the United States. Professor Child’s grandparents were among the thousands who attended the schools. She draws on her own family story to humanize the broader history of segregated Indian education.
Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. In 2021, she was the University of Minnesota’s recipient of the President’s Community Engaged Scholar Award, and in 2023 was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Professor Child is the author of several award-winning books including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940; Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community; and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation. The latter won the American Indian Book Award. Her new book project is The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country. She has a popular documentary, Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World: Ojibwe People and Pandemics. She also authored a bilingual book for children, Bowwow Powwow, winner of the American Indian Youth Literature Medal. Professor Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota and is part of a committee developing a new constitution for the 15,000-member nation.
The Inaugural Alfred A. Cave Lecture in Native American Studies: The Land Beneath Our Feet: Indian Removal, Crimes of State, and Public Memory
Professor Claudio Saunt
Monday, April 17, 2023
In the 1830s, the United States carried out one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations of the modern era. Claudio Saunt will describe how the United States expelled eighty thousand Native Americans from their homelands and explore how online mapping can reinscribe their presence on the land.
Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History, Regents’ Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia. He has written four books that explore Indigenous histories across North America. His most recent book, Unworthy Republic (2020), was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunt was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022.
Sponsored by the UF American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, the UF Department of History, and the UF Department of Anthropology
A Conversation with Chief Afukaka: Indigenous Peoples and Partnerships in the Brazilian Amazon
February 15, 2023, 3:00 pm, Smathers 100
UF American Indian and Indigenous Studies and the Department of Anthropology invite you to a public conversation with Chief Afukaka Kuikuro, Paramount Chief of the Kuikuro Nation in the Territorio Indigena do Xingu in central Brazil. Chief Afukaka and his heirs will discuss their views on collaborations with archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and other scientists over the past three decades, and the hope that continuing partnerships will inform solutions for the pressing problems of their community: deforestation, ecosystem degradation, catastrophic drought and wildfires, water pollution, and public health.
Chief Afukaka’s oration will be in Kuikuro and Portuguese, translated by Kalutata and Amuneri Kuikuro, his son and grandson, and Portuguese, translated by Helena Lima (Museu Goeldi).
The conversation with Chief Afukaka is preceded by a short introduction by UF Anthropology Professor Michael Heckenberger on collaborative projects over 30 years, partnered with Brazilian collaborators from the Museu Nacional (Rio), the Museu Goeldi (Belem) and the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia (USão Paulo). This deeply engaged research collaboration brings to light many of the past cultural achievements of Indigenous Amazonian peoples, challenging the widely held view of pristine nature and primitive societies, and the resilience of descendant communities. Dr. Helena Lima will provide an overview of new directions in this collaborative project, particularly considering recent changes in Brazil under President Lula.
Indigeneity: An Historical Reflection on a Very European Idea
Lecture by Dr. Judith Friedlander
Thursday, February 9, 2023, 4-6 pm, Smathers 100
The Role of Institutions for Academic Freedom and Human Rights
Lunch conversation with Dr. Judith Friedlander
Friday, February 10, 2023, 12-2 pm, Friends of Music Room, University Auditorium
Dr. Judith Friedlander is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She has written extensively on questions of ethnic identity among Indigenous peasants in Mexico and Jewish intellectuals in France and the United States. Among her publications are Being Indian in Hueyapan, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968, and A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile. Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Dr. Friedlander amassed extensive experience in leadership at institutions of higher education. In addition to occupying the Eberstadt Chair in Anthropology, she served as an academic dean of the New School for Social Research, SUNY Purchase and Hunter College. She has also worked as a special advisor to the provost and president of Hunter College on a number of new academic initatives, including the creation of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. She is a frequent collaborator with The New University in Exile Consortium.
Since its inception, AIIS has developed the following programming:
Native Heritage month speaker series (since 2008)
2008: Winona La Duke “Native Americans and Sustainable Development”;
2011: International Conference on “Multidisciplinary Approaches to Plants and Religion”, featuring several panels on indigenous use of plants in ceremonies;
2012: Troy Wayne Poteete (Chief Justice of Cherokee Supreme Court) “Fraudulent Identities”, and panel discussion by Cherokee Satellite Community representatives (Patsy Edgar, Daniel Morris), and Joe Quetone;
2013: David Narcomey & Ruby Beaulieu “Native Americans at Alcatraz: The Untold Story”, and “the American Indian Movement today” with presentation by Bobby Billie, Traditional Seminole, on the Fort of St. Augustine;
2014: Panel on “Indigenous Knowledge, Spirituality, and the Future of Humans in Nature”(Marcus Briggs-Cloud (UF), Dr. William Lyon (Kansas), Dr. Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (SUNY), Timothy Mesh (UF), Dr. R. Wright (UF),
2015: Presentations of music, poetry, and reflection by Tommy Wildcat (Cherokee cultural ambassador), Wathla Recvlohe, Daniel Morris “Native Americans: Recovering Indigenous Identities”;
2016: Rev. Dr. Casey Church “Contextualized Ministry and Indigenous Education” & Native American Law Students Association commemoration of Timucua Mound plaque;
2017: Dr. Phil Deloria “American Indians in the American Imagination”; student presentation at the Gainesville Regional Utility;
2018: Dr. Jose Barreiro, Scholar Emeritus of the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), “Cuban Indigeneity”; panel discussion: “Contemporary Native Communities”;
October “Indigenous Peoples Day”
2013: screening of “Native Americans at Alcatraz: The Untold Story”;
2016: screening of “The Seventh Fire”;
2017: petition circulated on the Plaza in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day;
2018: talk: “The Creek Green Corn Ceremony”, Adam Recvlohe; information table on Plaza of the Americas.
Other events
2016: Meeting and Exchange between Brazilian Indian leader Ailton Krenak Krenak and the Seminole Tribal Council in Tampa, Florida.
UF American Indian and Indigenous Studies and the Department of Anthropology invite you to a public conversation with Chief Afukaka Kuikuro, Paramount Chief of the Kuikuro Nation in the Territorio Indigena do Xingu in central Brazil. Chief Afukaka and his heirs will discuss their views on collaborations with archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and other scientists over the past three decades, and the hope that continuing partnerships will inform solutions for the pressing problems of their community: deforestation, ecosystem degradation, catastrophic drought and wildfires, water pollution, and public health.
