Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 by Brooke M. Bauer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 by Brooke M. Bauer Alejandra Dubcovsky Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840. By Brooke M. Bauer. Indians and Southern History. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. 263 pages. Cloth, ebook. The second endnote of Becoming Catawba cites "personal knowledge gained from my grandmother" (173). With this, Brooke M. Bauer announces a different kind of historical project, one that relies on as well as privileges Native archives, perspectives, and knowledges. Blending ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological, personal, and historical sources, the book chronicles three hundred years of Catawba history, arguing for the centrality of Catawba women in the making and remaking of the Catawba Nation. Detailing "Indigenous/American pasts, presents, and futures," Becoming Catawba seems a fitting embodiment of the type of scholarship Philip J. Deloria called for in his recent presidential address for the Organization of American Historians.1 The book moves chronologically, with chapters that overlap temporally to create a layered history of Catawba people in the Carolina Piedmont. Centering Native women and their experiences and struggles, Bauer reframes a familiar narrative about the political coalescence and eventual decline of the Catawba Nation as a story about persistence and identity making that was as malleable as it was enduring. Becoming Catawba is thus as much a story of change as it is one of "startling continuities" (1) of Catawba culture, traditions, and language. Cognizant that she is describing broad changes and patterns, Bauer anchors her study in the life of Sally New River, a Catawba woman who lived from approximately 1746 to 1821 and had a long career as a steward and protector of Catawba lands. By opening almost each chapter with Sally New River, Bauer helps provide a face, a name, and intimate details to a sweeping history of Catawba people. New River's experiences ranged from losing a parent to the smallpox epidemics, working away from her people within an English household, learning to read, returning to Catawba territory and marrying an important leader, gaining her town's trust, and eventually securing a land deed that helped protect Catawba lands from encroachment. Through New River, Bauer shows that the everyday activities of women, from planting fields to collecting water, were part of broader social, political, and even spiritual contexts. New River, along with her life and stories, serves as a touchstone for Catawba life. [End Page 394] Becoming Catawba begins before the arrival of Spanish conquistadores, chronicaling the environmental and political world of the Piedmont Indians, ancestors of the people who would become known as the Catawbas. Bauer stresses the importance of water to the lives of Native women in the Piedmont, showing how waterways were critical to women's labor, health, and beliefs. And though never explicitly tying these long-standing beliefs to ongoing Native advocacy for water rights today, Bauer shows the deep history of this connection. But this early chapter offers more than a lesson on Catawba lifeways that would soon come under threat by European invasion; it is also a methodological guide for how to do early Native history. Bauer seamlessly blends well-known colonial sources—such as the 1585 Theodor de Bry engraving "Indians Dancing around a Circle of Posts" (37)—with archaeological evidence and oral sources, creating not only a much more textured early history of the people who would become Catawba but also one that elevates Native voices and sources by placing them on equal footing with materials that are more familiar to early Americanists. The core of the book aims to show the multifaceted ways Native women participated in the creation, consolidation, and endurance of the Catawba Nation. Chapter 2 explores an intense period of change from 1540 (with Hernando de Soto's entrada) to the 1750s (with the firm entrenchment of English colonies in the region). Carefully reading English colonial sources that downplay and often outright dismiss Native women, Bauer weaves a different story. She shows the important role of Native women, who "helped their families by integrating their traditional knowledge, subsistence patterns, and kinship networks with those of other Catawban-speaking people within the region" (55). Becoming Catawba argues that coalescence...