In the Temeraire series itself North America and its history is mentioned rather rarely. Blood of Tyrants (book 8) does mention Tecumseh, a Native American, as being the President of the United States in 1812 (rather than James Madison). Alexander Hamilton is implied to still be alive (having survived or avoided his duel) and to have run for (but lost) the presidency:
The President?” Temeraire said, and listened with mounting indignation
as Wampanoag [an American dragon] said, quite casually, “Yes: I have
met him half a dozen times, and I am sure he will see the sense of a
proper treaty with the Japanese for us. I should rather have had
Hamilton in the job, of course, but there! You can’t have everything,
and for all that he isn’t a Federalist, Tecumseh is a clever fellow.”
In an interview from 2015, Novik remarked:
My idea for what happened in North America …was previously touched
upon in an earlier book [Blood of Tyrants] is that the Iroquois and other nations had
a single dragon to human relationship that was part of their
foundation. Through that relationship, the dragons were part of the
tribe and considered themselves responsible for the humans. I didn’t
want to erase the history of colonization and there are things dragons
can’t influence like disease... The colonists were willingly merged
with the Native American tribes that were there. The government is
essentially a confederation of tribes. The colonists’ advantages in
guns wasn’t able to overcome the natives’ advantage with dragons and
air power.
When asked if she was going to deal with this in more detail, she replied “Alas, not in the Temeraire series, because book nine is going to finish the Napoleonic Wars. I’m not going to get to North America or India, both which make me sad”.
Outside the nine-book series, however, she has given more details of the situation in North America. In 2017 Novik released Golden Age and other stories, which are set in the Temeraire universe. In particular one of these short stories, Planting Season, describes a few days in dragon John Wampanoag’s life, well before his appearance in Blood of Tyrants, as he carries goods between Boston and New York. A number of details about the development of the USA in this universe are given along the way. In particular there was initially hostility between the tribes and the British settlers, which pitted the Native Americans with their dragons, against the colonists' guns
the dragon riders had run the colonists all the way back behind the
long guns of Boston, and burned their farms. But the next spring,
their King across the sea had sent a big red-speckled egg, and a year
after that, Massachusetts Bay colony had a dragon bigger than any of
the ships in their harbor... So Philip had to make peace, and they
all sat down around a table and drew some new lines on some new maps,
and then the colonists went right back to nibble nibble nibbling
around the edges, anywhere there weren’t enough Indian folks to catch
them, which was everywhere.
When the American Revolution began, the tribes debated whether to side with the British or with the colonists:
Some folks wanted to help the British, who promised to keep the
colonists out of Indian lands. But Singing Bird had stood up and said
those promises weren’t worth any more than the ones they’d got before
now, and the colonists weren’t going anywhere. Better to divide them
from England with all its busy factories, and long guns, and dragons
who could knock you around like a flock of chickadees.
and from Join or Die, a drabble written by Novik about Benjamin Franklin's cartoon (also available in Golden Age and other stories), it seems that the Iroquois allied with New York, and the Wampanoag and Narragansett and other Algonquian-speaking tribes with New England. Following the war, which as in our universe ended in the defeat of the British,
young Tecumseh went flying all over the country... and by the time they
were ready for the Constitutional Convention, he’d gone to
Philadelphia with pretty much every dragon rider left at his back, and
demanded seats at the table. Nobody had seen their way clear to
sending him away.
So now Pokanoket was a state, and the other Indian nations were too,
and most importantly, it had been written into the Constitution that
nobody could own land in the borders of an Indian state, only the
right to use it, and their descendants had to renew their land-use
rights with the sachems whenever they inherited.
So it appears that in this universe the tribes entered the USA as full states. While disease did greatly reduce their numbers (Wampanoag recalls how deadly yellow fever had been to the native Americans), their use of dragons and air power led them to participate in the Revolutionary War, and enter the union as equals, so that a native American became president and dragons are US citizens who might seek higher attainments including membership in Congress.
