Becoming Catawba

“Becoming Catawba makes an original and significant contribution to scholarship on the Native South by unraveling the difficult and complex history of the Catawba people from the tribal point of view, digging deeper into the roles of kinship, land ownership, and maintaining tribal identity over the span of three centuries.”
—Denise E. Bates, author of Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884–1984
 
“Simultaneously a work of human drama and scholarly inquiry, Becoming Catawba connects the past to the present, evoking the intrigue, grief, and joy experienced by Catawba women as they confronted effects of colonial malice and indifference to preserve that which remains most precious. Here we see the history of the Catawba Nation in full color; Bauer has produced a landmark synthesis of documentary analysis, oral history, and archaeological findings.”
—Mary Beth Fitts, author of Fit for War: Sustenance and Order in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Catawba Nation
 
“Brooke Bauer accomplishes something uniquely and immanently important in the field of early American history: a community-informed, generations-breathing history of the Catawba people that spans three centuries. Her book is definitive, comprehensive, deeply researched, multidisciplinary, and is a deeply personal love letter to her community and family. This is a book that only she could have written, and we are indebted to the fact that she shares her peoples’ story and language with us.”
—Bryan C. Rindfleisch, author of George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America
 

“Histories concerning the Catawba Indian Nation, as well as other southeastern Indian tribes, typically present a male perspective due to the nature of the written record and the fact that documented encounters involved mostly men. In Becoming Catawba, Brooke Bauer deftly blends knowledge derived from oral history, ethnohistory, ethnography, archaeology, and her own experience growing up as a Catawba to construct a gendered narrative about Catawba women and the uniquely important roles they played. While Bauer’s book concerns the lives of Catawba women generally, she personifies them in Sally New River, a remarkable woman who lived during the critical period in Catawba history spanning the Seven Years’ War and in her later years was widely regarded as the Catawbas’ matriarch.”
—R. P. Stephen Davis Jr., coauthor of Time before History: The Archaeology of North Carolina

“Bauer constructs a riveting narrative about how the communities, economies, families, and polities of Catawbas in the Carolinas became intricately entwined and maintained over three centuries of turmoil brought about by European and US colonialism.
—American Society for Ethnohistory.

"[Bauer's] speculative moments add to the liveliness and accessibility of her prose in a transparent manner. That it is also an engrossing and emotionally compelling read makes a complicated story more intuitive: there is not a single thread or series of strong women who drive this narrative, but rather a compelling case for ordinary Catawba women who as diplomats, artisans, farmers, heads of household, and stewards of the land created and safeguarded a nation."
—Jessica Taylor, H-AmIndian.