Catawba History and Culture

In the early 1700s, the Lords Proprietors of the colony of South Carolina were unsuccessful in regulating Indian trade, which shaped the lives of Native Americans who lived in this colony, particularly the Yamasee at the town of Pocataligo near present-day Beaufort, South Carolina. As early as 1713, the Board of Indian Trade began hearing complaints from Indians concerning abuse committed by Carolina traders. The growing crisis that occurred between the traders and the Native American population was a by-product of ecological and economic changes taking place within the colony, reflecting the depopulation of the whitetail deer. This chapter argues the importance of reporting on indigenous warfare as part of the Catawba Indians’ adaptive response to colonialism.

NARF Legal Review
In a 2-1 decision, a federal appeals court ruled this morning that the Catawba Indians have the right to sue to recover 144,000 acres of land in York and Lancaster counties that they claim were taken from them illegally.

Southern Cultures
"Like their ancestors for thousands of years, Catawba potters of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have continued to adapt their material traditions to ever-changing modern contexts. In the process, they create remarkably contemporary works of visual and tactile art."

During the two centuries following European contact, the world of late prehistoric Mississippian chiefdoms collapsed and Native communities there fragmented, migrated, coalesced, and reorganized into new and often quite different societies. The editors of this volume, Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, argue that such a period and region of instability and regrouping constituted a "shatter zone." In this anthology, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists analyze the shatter zone created in the colonial South by examining the interactions of American Indians and European colonists.

Native South challenges scholars of southern history to expand their conception of the field to include more than the black and white post-colonial south that colors much of the historical literature of the region. The journal focuses on the investigation of Southeastern Indian history with the goals of encouraging further study and exposing the influences of Indian people on the wider South. It does not limit itself to the study of the geographic area that was once encompassed by the Confederacy, but expands its view to the areas occupied by the pre-contact- and the post-contact descendants of the original inhabitants of the South, wherever they may be.