The Catawba Indians

The Catawba Indian Nation of the 1750s developed from the integration of diverse Piedmont Indian people who belonged to and lived in autonomous communities along the Catawba River of North and South Carolina. Catawban-speaking Piedmont Indians experienced many processes of coalescence, where thinly populated groups joined the militarily strong Iswą Indians (Catawba proper) for protection and survival. Over twenty-five groups of Indians merged with the Iswą, creating an alliance or confederation of tribal communities. They all worked together building a unified community through kinship, traditional customs, and a shared history to form a nation, despite the effects of colonialism, which included European settlement, Indian slavery, warfare, disease, land loss, and federal termination. American settler colonialism, therefore, functions to erase and exterminate Native societies through biological warfare (intentional or not), military might, seizure of Native land, and assimilation. In spite of these challenges, the Catawbas’ nation-building efforts have been constant, but in 1960 the federal government terminated its relationship with the Nation. In the 1970s, the Catawba Indian Nation filed a suit to reclaim their land and their federal recognition status. Consequently, the Nation received federal recognition in 1993 and became the only federally recognized tribe in the state of South Carolina. The Nation has land seven miles east of the city of Rock Hill along the Catawba River. Tribal citizenship consists of 3,400 Catawbas including 2,400 citizens of voting age. The tribe holds elections every four years to fill five executive positions—Chief, Assistant Chief, Secretary/Treasurer, and two at-large positions. Scholarship on Southeastern Indians focuses less on the history of the Catawba Indian Nation and more on the historical narratives of the Five Civilized Tribes, which obscures the role Catawbas filled in the history of the development of the South. Finally, a comprehensive Catawba Nation history explains how the people became Catawba and, through persistence, ensured the survival of the Nation and its people.

“We’re Going to Take Our Land Back Over”

Reading is a cultural activity, meaning that we read from a particular space and cultural positionality. An ethnography of reading, then, takes into account how one’s positionality affects one’s reading, and, concomitantly, how that reading reflects (and affects) one’s position in the world. As I argue and hope to subsequently demonstrate, Indigenous peoples read The Book of Mormon from a particular space that places them in a special, and potentially fraught, relationship to the text. Since The Book of Mormon claims to be a history of the peopling of the Americas, the stakes of interpretation are particularly high for Indigenous Americans, because, for those who accept the historicity and sacred status of The Book of Mormon as scripture, it has significant bearing on articulations of ancestry, identity, and Indigeneity. In this chapter I provide an ethnographic reading of an Indigenous woman’s reading of The Book of Mormon from the Catawba Indian Nation.