Catawba Counter-Cartographies: Remapping the Indigenous Southeast, 1670-1730

When English colonizers arrived along the shores of the North American Southeast in 1670, they created new maps of their colony that opened the Native interior to view. The first published maps of South Carolina distorted the truth of this indigenous world. Over the next fifty years, Charlestown, South Carolina, became a destination for Native visitors, who had opportunities to view colonial maps in person. In the 1720s, the Catawbas presented South Carolina’s governor with a painted deerskin that represent the Indigenous and European settlements in the region. This article posits that the so-called Catawba Deerskin Map was a didactic response to the English cartography that sought to challenge errors observed on European maps. It argues that the unnamed “Casique” who painted it engaged in a process of “countermapping”, by which they challenged European representations with an Indigenous vision for the places and people of the North American Southeast. By the time the English established Charlestown in 1670, this world was dominated by mobile, coalescent societies that traded with Europeans. As English maps changed to reflect these new realities, the inhabitants of loosely confederated Siouan villages journeyed from their upcountry districts near the Catawba River to the colonial capital to negotiate with English officials. The Catawba Deerskin Map reflected the geographic knowledge Catawba travelers learned as they engaged with English colonists, challenging the idea that the map represents a static and “traditional” Indigenous worldview.