Catawba

The Catawba are a Native American nation of the Carolina Piedmont, whose name for themselves, Ye Iswąˀ, means "people of the river". Once among the most powerful peoples of the Southeast, they absorbed several smaller groups as colonial-era epidemics and wars reduced their numbers. Today the federally recognised Catawba Indian Nation is based near Rock Hill, South Carolina, on the river that bears their name.

People have lived along the Catawba River since the Paleoindian period, around 10,000 BCE, and pottery from the Woodland period has been found along its banks. In the nineteenth century the writer Henry Schoolcraft claimed that the Catawba had migrated south from Canada, but the anthropologist James Mooney rejected this as invention, noting that the Spanish expedition of Juan Pardo had already recorded them in the same area in 1567. Mooney accepted a tradition that after long fighting the Catawba and the Cherokee agreed on the Broad River as their boundary.

The Catawba were settled farmers who grew corn and also hunted deer and fished. Women were especially known as potters and basket-makers, and the Catawba pottery tradition is thought to be the oldest surviving one east of the Mississippi; since the late twentieth century men have taken it up too. Each year the nation holds Yap Ye Iswa, the "Day of the People", at the Catawba Cultural Center.

Spanish explorers in the mid-sixteenth century estimated the Catawba at 15,000 to 25,000 people. English colonists arriving in South Carolina around 1682 counted about 1,500 warriors, roughly 4,600 people in all, and by 1728 they put the total near 1,400. The Catawba allied with some colonists against northern enemies, fighting the Seneca of the Haudenosaunee and the Lenape, whose raiding parties they chased as far as the Potomac in the 1720s and 1730s. Smallpox struck in 1738, and an epidemic in 1759 is said to have killed nearly half the nation. In 1763 a Shawnee party killed the noted chief King Hagler, and that year South Carolina confirmed a reservation of 225 square miles.

The Catawba supported the colonists in the American Revolution, withdrawing into Virginia when British troops approached in 1780. By 1784 only about 250 were reported. In 1840 the Treaty of Nation Ford sold almost all their remaining land to South Carolina, leaving one square mile; because only the federal government could make such a treaty, it was invalid from the start. Some Catawba went to live among the eastern Cherokee or the Choctaw in Indian Territory, and from about 1883 a number joined the Latter-day Saints and moved west. Nineteen men served in the Confederate army in the American Civil War.

Chief Samuel Taylor Blue began seeking federal recognition in 1929, and it came in 1941, followed by a constitution in 1944. In 1959 the federal government terminated the tribe, ending its benefits and dividing communal property. The Catawba began working to restore their status in 1973, and after the Supreme Court allowed their land claims to proceed they prepared some 60,000 suits against landowners. A 1993 act of Congress restored recognition and settled the claims for $50 million.

The Catawba population was put at about 2,600 in 2006, and 3,370 people reported Catawba ancestry in the 2010 census. The reservation covers about 1,012 acres in York County, and in 2021 the nation opened a casino at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, after a legal challenge by the Eastern Band of Cherokee failed. Citizenship rests on descent from the tribal rolls of 1943, 1961 and 2000 rather than blood quantum, and the Catawba language is being revived.

Our 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650 and 1700 maps draw an approximate Catawba territory in the Piedmont; these years reflect the basemaps rather than the nation's history. The Cherokee and the Natchez are among the other south-eastern peoples drawn on the same maps.