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

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

Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840. By Brooke M. Bauer. Indians and Southern History. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. xviii, 245. $54.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2143-7.)

In Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840, an important and methodologically innovative book, Brooke M. Bauer writes a history of Catawba women, and in doing so she rewrites Catawba history and the history of the Native South. Through archaeological analysis, fresh approaches to familiar sources, and insights drawn from language and storytelling, Bauer persuasively argues that women were central to the creation of Catawba Nation and its continuity through centuries of upheaval.

Bauer’s methodology skillfully combines ethnohistory with techniques from Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS). Her ethnohistorical work is first-rate, displaying equal facility with material culture and colonial texts. She intersperses these analyses with stories, both traditional and personal. For example, she uses the First Woman creation story as evidence that women were central to the Catawba worldview; similarly, she connects the Indian slave trade to the origin of the mischievous, child-stealing “Little Wild Indians”—stories Bauer’s mother told her as a girl to warn about the consequences of misbehavior (p. 71). Bauer amply proves that storytelling is a powerful tool of analysis.

In another NAIS technique, Bauer grounds interpretations in the Catawba language. She introduces words ranging from simple objects (ituskre, pot) to complex concepts (yępasiha yá ki, a woman of poor character doomed to the Under World) (pp. 122, 68). In Bauer’s hands, even simple words illuminate. For example, she relates how contemporary women’s usage of ituskre shows that crafting pottery plays a central role in the maintenance of Catawba identity and its transmission to the next generation—in other words, to Catawba Nation’s continuity. Bauer powerfully argues that stories and language are necessary to “decolonize the archival material” because “personal and tribal knowledge unlocks voices silenced for hundreds of years” (p. 12). Her deft combination of ethnohistory and NAIS produces insights into Catawba history that could only be possible from her emic perspective as a Catawba woman.

Becoming Catawba offers a history of Catawba Nation that corrects a historiography dominated by men. The opening portrays the gendered world of the Ye Iswą (“People of the River,” the Catawba ethnonym) and Piedmont Indians (diverse peoples, including the Ye Iswą as well as others who later coalesced with them). Through an examination of Catawba relationships with the land and their ways of living on it, Bauer establishes that women embodied the nexus between land, kinship, and procreation. Those relationships were disrupted by European invasions, when war, disease, and slaving turned their homeland into (borrowing Robbie Ethridge’s framework) a “shatter zone” (p. 2). Women created new webs of kinship through intermarriage, taught refugees and adoptees how to be Catawba, and—because Catawbas were matrilineal—passed Catawba identity down to their children. Thus, they were the key figures in transforming survivors and refugees into Catawba Nation.

The significance of Bauer’s feminist framework is evident in her examinations of mid-eighteenth-century trade, diplomacy, and war, all of which are [End Page 402] typically viewed through a masculinist lens. She reveals that behind every encounter between Catawba and settler men, a community of women was central to decision-making, weathering crises, and rebuilding after catastrophe. Women remained important in the early United States, when women marked a distinctive Catawba identity through their pottery and safeguarded Catawba sovereignty through collective ownership of land.

Becoming Catawba contributes to the historiography of the South through its exploration of the gendered mechanisms of Indigenous political and cultural continuity. Contrary to declension narratives—which, despite decades of ethnohistorical scholarship, remain frustratingly pervasive—Bauer illustrates how Catawbas shaped everything from the clash of empires to the patterns of settlement well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, she demonstrates that NAIS methods are essential for the next generation of scholarship on the Native South.

Matthew Kruer University of Chicago Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...