Catawba people
The Catawba, also known as Issa, Essa or Iswä but most commonly Iswa, are a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans, known as the Catawba Indian Nation. Their current lands are in South Carolina, on the Catawba River, near the city of Rock Hill. Their territory once extended into North Carolina, as well, and they still have legal claim to some parcels of land in that state. They were once considered one of the most powerful Southeastern tribes in the Carolina Piedmont, as well as one of the most powerful tribes in the South as a whole, with other, smaller tribes merging into the Catawba as their post-contact numbers dwindled due to the effects of colonization on the region.
The Catawba were among the East Coast tribes who made selective alliances with some of the early European colonists, when these colonists agreed to help them in their ongoing conflicts with other tribes. These were primarily the tribes of different language families: the Iroquois, who ranged south from the Great Lakes area and New York; the Algonquian Shawnee and Lenape ; and the Iroquoian Cherokee, who fought for control over the large Ohio Valley. During the American Revolutionary War the Catawba supported the American colonists against the British. Decimated by colonial smallpox epidemics, warfare and cultural disruption, the Catawba declined markedly in number in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some Catawba continued to live in their homelands in South Carolina, while others joined the Choctaw or Cherokee, at least temporarily.
Terminated as a tribe by the federal government in 1959, the Catawba Indian Nation had to reorganize to reassert their sovereignty and treaty rights. In 1973 they established their tribal enrollment and began the process of regaining federal recognition. In 1993 they regained federal recognition and won a $50 million Indian land claims settlement by the federal government and state of South Carolina. The state of South Carolina also recognized the tribe in 1993. Their headquarters are at Rock Hill, South Carolina.
, the population of the Catawba Nation has increased to about 2,600, most in South Carolina.
The Catawba language, part of the Siouan family, is being revived.
Name
The Catawba have also been known as Esaw, or Issa, named after their territory along the principal waterway of the region. Historically, Iswa, today the river is commonly known as the Catawba River from its headwaters in North Carolina and into South Carolina before continuing as the Wateree River in Fairfield county, South Carolina. The nations of the Iroquois frequently referred to the Catawba under the general term Totiri, or Toderichroone, also known as Tutelo.History
People have lived in the area since the Paleoindian period. Pottery along the Catawba river corridor have been found that date to the Woodland period. The Catawba were the people who inhabited the area when Europeans first began to settle.File:Indians NW of South Carolina.jpg|thumb|left|A annotated copy of a deerskin Catawba map of the tribes between Charleston and Virginia following the displacements of a century of disease and enslavement and the 1715–1717 Yamasee War. The Catawba are labelled as "Nasaw".
In the late 19th century, the ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft theorized that the Catawba had lived in Canada until driven out by the Iroquois and that they had migrated to Kentucky and to Botetourt County, Virginia. He asserted that by 1660 they had migrated south to the Catawba River, competing in this territory with the Cherokee, a Southern Iroquoian language–speaking tribe who were based west of the French Broad River in southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, northwestern South Carolina, and northeastern Georgia.
However, early 20th-century anthropologist James Mooney later dismissed most elements of Schoolcraft's account as "absurd, the invention and surmise of the would-be historian who records the tradition." He pointed out that, aside from the French never having been known to help the Iroquois, the Catawba had been recorded by 1567 by the Spanish expedition under Juan Pardo as being in the same area of the Catawba River as was known to be their later territory. Mooney accepted the tradition that, following a protracted struggle, the Catawba and Cherokee had settled on the Broad River their mutual boundary.
The Catawba also had armed confrontations with several northern tribes, particularly the Haudenosaunee Seneca nation, and the Algonquian-speaking Lenape, with whom they competed for hunting resources and territory. The Catawba chased Lenape raiding parties back to the north in the 1720s and 1730s, going across the Potomac River. At one point, a party of Catawba is said to have followed a party of Lenape who attacked them, and to have overtaken them near Leesburg, Virginia. There they fought a pitched battle.
Similar encounters in these longstanding conflicts were reported to have occurred at present-day Franklin, West Virginia, Hanging Rocks and the mouth of the Potomac South Branch in West Virginia, and near the mouths of Antietam Creek and Conococheague Creek in Maryland. Mooney asserted that the name of Catawba Creek in Botetourt came from an encounter in these battles with the northern tribes, not from the Catawba having lived there.
In 1721 the colonial governments of Virginia and New York held a council at Albany, New York, attended by delegates from the Six Nations and the Catawba. The colonists asked for peace between the Confederacy and the Catawba. The Six Nations reserved the land west of the Blue Ridge Mountains for themselves, including the Indian Road or Great Warriors' Path through the Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia backcountry. This path was frequently traveled and was used until 1744 by Seneca war parties to pass through the Shenandoah Valley to raid in the South.
In 1738, a smallpox epidemic broke out in South Carolina. Endemic for centuries among Europeans, the infectious disease had been carried by them to North America, where it caused many deaths. The Catawba and other tribes, such as the Sissipahaw, suffered high mortality in these epidemics. In 1759, a smallpox epidemic killed nearly half the Catawba.
In 1744 the Treaty of Lancaster, made at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, renewed the Covenant Chain between the Iroquois and the colonists. The governments had not been able to prevent settlers going into Iroquois territory, but the governor of Virginia offered the tribe payment for their land claim. The peace was probably final for the Iroquois, who had established the Ohio Valley as their preferred hunting ground by right of conquest and pushed other tribes out of it.
Tribes located to the west continued warfare against the Catawba, who were so reduced that they could raise little resistance. In 1763, a small party of Algonquian Shawnee killed the noted Catawba chief, King Hagler, near his own village.
In 1763, the colonial government of South Carolina confirmed a reservation for the Catawba of, on both sides of the Catawba River, within the present York and Lancaster counties. When British troops approached during the American Revolutionary War in 1780, the Catawba withdrew temporarily into Virginia. They returned after the Battle of Guilford Court House, and settled in two villages on the reservation. These were known as Newton, the principal village, and Turkey Head, on the opposite side of the Catawba/Wateree River.
19th century
In 1826, the Catawba leased nearly half their reservation to whites for a few thousand dollars of annuity; their dwindling number of members depended on this money for survival.In 1840, by the Treaty of Nation Ford with South Carolina, the Catawba sold to the state all but of their reserved by the English Crown. They resided on the remaining square mile after the treaty. The treaty was invalid ab initio because the state did not have the right to make it, which was reserved for the federal government, and never gained Senate ratification. and did not get federal approval. About the same time, a number of the Catawba, dissatisfied with their condition among the whites, removed to join the remaining eastern Cherokee, who were based in far Western North Carolina. But, finding their position among their former enemies equally unpleasant, all but one or two soon returned to South Carolina. The last survivor of the westward migration, an elderly Catawba woman, died among the Cherokee in 1889. A few Cherokee intermarried with the Catawba in the region.
At a later period some Catawba removed to the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory and settled near present-day Scullyville, Oklahoma. They assimilated with the Choctaw and did not retain separate tribal identity.
The Catawba fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Nineteen men enlisted with the Confederate Army and saw combat across Virginia.
Historical culture and estimated populations
The Catawba are historically sedentary agriculturists, who have also fished and hunted for game. Their customs have been, and are, similar to neighboring Native Americans in the Piedmont region. Traditional game has included deer, crops grown have included corn, and the women in particular are noted makers of pottery and baskets, arts which they still preserve. They are believed to have the oldest surviving tradition of pottery East of the Mississippi, and possibly the oldest on the American continent.Early Spanish explorers of the mid-16th century estimated the population of the Catawba as between 15,000 and 25,000 people. When the English first settled South Carolina about 1682, they estimated the Catawba at about 1,500 warriors, or about 4,600 people in total. Their decline was attributed to the mortality of infectious diseases. The English named the Catawba River and Catawba County after this indigenous people. By 1728, the Catawba had been reduced to about 400 warriors, or about 1400 persons in total. In 1738, they suffered from a smallpox epidemic, which also affected nearby tribes and the whites. In 1743, even after incorporating several small tribes, the Catawba numbered fewer than 400 warriors. In 1759, they again suffered from smallpox, and in 1761, had some 300 warriors, or about 1,000 people. By 1775 they had only 400 people in total; in 1780, they had 490; and, in 1784, only 250 were reported.
During the nineteenth century, their numbers continued to decline, to 450 in 1822, and a total of 110 people in 1826. As of 2006, their population had increased to about 2600.