On November 29, 1993, the Catawba Indian Nation formally reached a settlement with the state of South Carolina and the government of the United States in a land dispute that had begun more than 150 years earlier. Chief Gilbert Blue, in a public ceremony at the tribe's new cultural center, signed a document on behalf of the tribe's fourteen hundred members in which the Catawbas agreed to give up their claim to lands taken from them by South Carolina in the Treaty of Nation Ford on March 13, 1840. In return, the Catawbas received federal recognition as an Indian tribe, along with $50 million for land purchases, economic development, social services, and education.
This agreement signaled a new chapter in Catawba history. And yet, as important as it was, the agreement is only one in a long series of turning points for the Catawbas. The first came perhaps one thousand years ago, when Siouan-speaking people headed east across the Appalachian Mountains. By the time Spanish explorers visited the southeastern interior in the mid-sixteenth century, the descendants of these first settlers, divided into many tribes, had spread across the southern piedmont. Among the most prominent of these piedmont peoples were the Catawbas, living beside the river that today bears their name.
With the arrival of strangers from Europe and Africa the Catawbas, like all Native Americans, faced a world every bit as new as the "new world" confronted by the transatlantic travelers. The contours of the Catawbas' new world were shaped first and most profoundly by imported diseases. In 1698, 1718, 1738, and 1759 epidemics tore through Catawba villages, reducing the nation's population from perhaps five thousand in 1690 to less than five hundred in 1760. In order to survive, during the early eighteenth century Catawbas incorporated neighboring Indian groups—Waterees, Cheraws, Pedees, Saponis, and others—in similar straits. So successful was this strategy that a visitor in 1743 heard more than twenty different languages spoken in the nation's six towns.
While rebuilding their society, Catawbas also learned the wisdom of befriending Anglo-America. We "cannot live without the assistance of the English," one leader admitted to colonists in 1715. By then, a generation of trade with Anglo-America had left Catawbas dependent on these outsiders for weapons and other necessities. Unable to live without the English, Catawbas learned to live with them, even serving as allies against the French in the Seven Years' War.
Such accommodation was not surrender, however. Though colonists boasted that Catawbas were "directed intirely by the Government of So. Carolina," in fact these Indians made the most of their precarious position in the new American world. Led by chiefs such as Hagler (1750-63), the nation developed a strategy of playing rival interests off against each other that had several provinces courting its favor. "Those Indians," noted one colonial observer in 1757, "seem to understand well how to make their Advantage of" such attention. Through such negotiations Catawbas acquired an abundant supply of European goods and, during a drought in the late 1750s, hundreds of bushels of corn.
The late 1750s, however, brought another terrible test to the nation, and again the Catawbas relied on Anglo-America to meet that test. In the fall of 1759 a smallpox epidemic killed two of every three Catawbas. At the same time, colonial settlers moving into Catawba territory frequently clashed with the Indians. In response, surviving Catawbas went through provincial authorities to acquire from King George III in 1763 a 144,000-acre reservation along the Catawba River. Secure in this legal protection, the Catawbas learned to get along with their new neighbors. Catawba women sold them traditional pottery; Catawba men caught runaway slaves and sold deerskins; Catawba leaders rented out reservation land. The nation's support of the rebels in the American Revolution secured its reputation as a steadfast friend of the piedmont's new rulers.
Their reputation as potters and patriots did not make Catawbas immune to the powerful forces pressing after 1800 for Indian exile. Though the nation escaped the spate of removals during the 1830s, removal came at last when in 1840 Catawba leaders sold the entire reservation to South Carolina, receiving in return promises of cash and a new reservation elsewhere in the Carolinas. These were the terms of the Treaty of Nation Ford, which, unfulfilled by the state and never ratified by the U.S. Senate as federal law requires, nonetheless drove the Catawbas from their homeland.
In exile for several years, by 1850 Catawbas had begun to drift back to their ancestral territories, taking up residence on 640 acres that South Carolina agreed to buy for them with some of their treaty money. Ever since, this state reservation has been at the core of Catawba identity.
A second pillar of modern Catawba identity has been the Mormon Church. Missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints first arrived on the reservation in 1883. They enjoyed immediate success, in part because Indians had a central role in Mormon theology. An added attraction was that neighboring whites hated Mormonism; thus converts to the new faith had a way to channel resistance to their conquerors. Mormonism revitalized Catawba life. Teachers, preachers, and a new social code became important forces in the nation, just as the Mormon church was the largest building on the reservation.
In the twentieth century outsiders have often predicted the Catawbas' imminent demise as Indians. Catawba children have grown up knowing only English, and the last speaker of Catawba, Samuel Blue, died in 1959; intermarriage with whites has become increasingly common, and the last alleged Catawba "full blood," Hester Louisa Blue, died in 1963; finally, in 1962 the federal government terminated the Catawba tribe, giving official sanction to what appeared, in other ways, to be the end of a long road.
In fact, neither Mormonism nor English, neither termination nor intermarriage, has spelled the Catawbas' doom. The reservation has remained—a tangible symbol of the Catawbas' special status. Enduring, too, has been the pottery tradition, passed from one generation of women to the next. Finally, Catawbas have never wavered in the pursuit of their land rights, a long campaign that culminated in the ceremony at the Catawba Cultural Center in November 1993.
That campaign and that agreement are part of a larger revitalization of Catawba life that includes an annual festival, pottery classes, and a language program based on tapes made by the tribe's elders two generations ago. Contemporary Catawbas, listening to those voices from the past speak once again, are akin to their more distant ancestors crossing the Appalachian range a millennium ago. Like those pioneers, Catawbas today are poised on the frontier of a new world filled with challenge and promise.
See also
Hagler.
Douglas Summers Brown, The Catawba Indians: The People of the River (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1966); Charles M. Hudson, The Catawba Nation, University of Georgia Monographs no. 18 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1970); James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
James H. Merrell
Vassar College
