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Fit for War: Sustenance and Order in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Catawba Nation

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-4385257

1527-5477

Brooke Bauer,

Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the diverse Mississippian and piedmont Siouan people who lived along the Catawba River sought to sustain their communities in the wake of epidemics, the Indian slave trade, massive depopulation, and other forms of violence caused by British colonial expansion. The distress of the period led many survivors of the northern piedmont to relocate their communities to the lower Catawba River valley in present-day South Carolina, where they sought refuge with the militaristic ye iswą (Nassaw), “People of the River.” In Fit for War, Mary Elizabeth Fitts analyzes the development and maintenance of the mid-eighteenth-century Catawba Nation’s collective identity, concentrating on the Catawba twin town of Nassaw-Weyapee and the refugee town of Charraw. Her central question is how Catawba refugee incorporation, settlement aggregation, and political coalescence influenced Catawba persistence in terms of sustenance and order. Using documentary and archaeological evidence, Fitts persuasively argues that Catawba militarism, refugee incorporation, and the labor of men and women resulted in a united political entity by the 1750s.In part 1, Fitts analyzes the origin stories of the Carolina colony and the Catawba Nation, specifically, how the two interacted with one another and with surrounding subcommunities. She considers how colonial invasion and ensuing policies adversely affected Carolina Indigenous people, as the colony’s government encouraged western expansion into the hinterland. Fitts’s examination of early Catawba nation building shows how the descendants of Mississippian and piedmont Siouan communities, people who did not share language, practices of home and hearth, or political histories, were able to forge a new cohesive polity. Catawba militarism, she argues, contributed to the coalescence and persistence of the Nation because warriors of each town waged joint military campaigns while the hunters cooperatively shared the region’s natural resources. Fitts further reasons that a shared southeastern belief system structured the political organization of the Nassaw-Weyapee and Charraw towns. Shared beliefs worked to solidify a spiritually and politically balanced relationship among the towns with Nassaw serving as a white town (senior, united, and peaceful) and Charraw a red town (junior, disunity, and volatile).Part 2 of Fitts’s book fleshes out the landscape where Catawbas lived and the social boundaries of Nassaw and Charraw. She focuses on clay mixtures, pottery attributes, glass beads, and metal assemblages to show patterns of variation within Catawba work groups and a difference in adornment practices. Fitts then examines adjustments women had to make to farming and foraging practices during the food crisis of the 1750s. The impact of enemy attacks and kidnappings motivated women to farm and forage closer to their respective towns for security and resulted in social cohesion between the towns. Catawba militarism and settlement aggregation directly contributed to the coalescence of a united nation, as did Charraw women’s incorporation into existing work groups from nearby Catawba towns.Fitts challenges us to think about mid-eighteenth-century Catawba coalescence as a complex, measured process in which Nassaw and Charraw each held onto specific practices in the face of dramatic transformation, customs that corresponded by 1760. A clear explanation of which Indigenous people belonged to “eastern Siouan” groups would help readers understand that coalescence was an ongoing process during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Although Fitts’s heavy use of archaeological terminology may hinder readers outside of the field from easily understanding what she is describing, she does a wonderful job bringing mid-eighteenth-century Catawba survival strategies to life. Her extensively researched book is a much-needed addition to present scholarship about the persistence of Catawba Indians and expands on James H. Merrell’s 1989 work on Catawba Indians, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. Her exciting work demonstrates the complicated nature of mid-eighteenth-century Catawba nation building during times of crisis.