Catawba Erotic

The Catawba call themselves Iswa, the river people, and the river is still the point. Their reservation sits on the Catawba River just outside Rock Hill, South Carolina, on a sliver of the old ground, and clay dug from its banks feeds a pottery tradition the tribe describes as the oldest unbroken one in North America. Catawba pots are coiled by hand, scraped thin, burnished with a river stone, and fired in an open pit without glaze, so each piece comes out mottled black, tan, and orange wherever the flames touched it. Potters like Georgia Harris, a National Heritage Fellow, and Sara Ayers made that look famous, and the craft still passes within families. When people say Catawba, this is usually what they mean first.

In the eighteenth century the Catawba were the dominant nation of the Carolina Piedmont, a confederacy that absorbed the Sugeree, Waxhaw, Cheraw, Wateree, Congaree, and other small peoples as disease and war thinned them. They chose the British colonists as allies, fought the Cherokee across the mountains for generations, and sided with the Patriots in the Revolution, which earned goodwill that never translated into land. Smallpox in 1738 and again in 1759 cut the population to a few hundred. A 1763 treaty guaranteed a reservation fifteen miles square; the 1840 Treaty of Nation Ford, signed with South Carolina and never ratified by Congress, took nearly all of it. That defect became the basis of a land claim the tribe pressed for decades, and its 1993 settlement restored the federal recognition Washington had terminated in the early 1960s. King Hagler, the chief who dealt with the colonies in the 1750s, remains the figure the tribe most identifies with.

Two things about the modern Catawba surprise outsiders. Their language is Siouan, a relative of Lakota and Dakota, but so distant from the rest of the family that linguists give it its own Catawban branch; the last fluent speakers died in the mid-twentieth century, and a small group is rebuilding it from recordings and word lists. And most Catawba are Latter-day Saints. Mormon missionaries reached the reservation in 1883, and within a generation the tribe had converted almost wholesale, making it one of the few Native nations where the LDS church is the majority faith and a ward has been part of reservation life for well over a century. Roughly three thousand enrolled members live mostly in and around York County, and each November they gather for Yap Ye Iswa, the Day of the Catawba, where the drum, the dances, and the pottery tables put the old identity on public display.