Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840

Brooke M. Bauer’s Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 offers the first book-length treatment of Catawba women and adds to a limited number of volumes dedicated to Catawba history. While federal recognition occurred relatively recently for the Catawba Nation, the Catawbas and their ancestors have resided in the Carolina Piedmont predating the arrival of European colonists. Bauer traces the development of disparate Catawba-speaking people across the region as they coalesced into a distinct and unified community. Throughout this process, Bauer explores and contextualizes the significance of women’s gendered roles and uses the historical experiences of Sally New River (ca. 1746–1821) to demonstrate the importance of leading women within Catawba society. Bauer addresses Catawba women’s connections to land, kinship, and cultural traditions as central to revealing how these women maintained an individual and community identity and facilitated strategies to navigate the historical turmoil of colonialism.Throughout Becoming Catawba, Bauer utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to recover and explain the centrality of Catawba women to Catawba identity, nation building, and survival. She deploys an ethnohistorical framework, examining archival sources, incorporating anthropological field work and ethnographies, and leveraging Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) methodologies. Because Catawba women rarely appeared in the documentary record, Bauer aims to “decolonize the archival material” by foregrounding “personal knowledge and oral stories,” emphasizing how “personal and tribal knowledge unlocks voices silenced for hundreds of years” (12). Through upstreaming, Bauer incorporates her understanding of Catawba kinship, pottery manufacture, and beliefs about the land, explaining that “much of this knowledge comes from [her] mother, grandmothers, and aunts, who come from a long line of Catawba women who taught them the traditional ways of being Catawba” (13).Across six chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, Bauer’s Becoming Catawba addresses the influence and importance of Catawba women in the Carolina Piedmont from the mid-sixteenth century until South Carolina’s seizure of Catawba land in the 1840 Treaty of Nation Ford. While chapters are generally organized chronologically, several have overlapping periodizations to address critical themes and challenge the traditional lineality of historical inquiry. Becoming Catawba opens by describing how Indigenous people of the Piedmont lived on a changing land through the mid-1700s. The bulk of the book then centers the eighteenth century and how the Catawba navigated the transforming Native South. Historians will recognize familiar discussions on coalescence, economic exchange, educational and missionary interventions, and colonial slavery, but Bauer consistently places these topics within reference for Catawba women and gendered relationships within Catawba society.Bauer’s Becoming Catawba provides a valuable addition to the history of Indigenous people in the American South. Her methodological approach offers innovative and creative perspectives on critical topics related to gender, colonialism, and Indigenous survivance. Her examination of Catawba pottery traditions demonstrates an exemplary blend of how to interconnect archaeological, historical, and the contemporary knowledge sources of a practice that dates back thousands of years. Likewise, by pairing anthropologically anchored discussions on Southeastern Indigenous gender practices with archival research on landownership, Bauer shows how Catawba women sustained their role as stewards of Native land. While Becoming Catawba is a tightly focused examination of Catawba history, Bauer’s work provides opportunities for future historians to connect the Catawba experience to wider narratives of nineteenth-century colonialism, Southern history, and Native studies. Overall, Becoming Catawba provides an admirable contribution to the University of Alabama Press’s emerging Indians and Southern History series and a compelling opportunity to expand how we understand Native American history and the American South.