Heretofore, scholarship has mostly ignored that adaptation of native Americans to the new American cultural and physical milieu and has instead dwelt on warfare, expropriation, suppression, and annihilation. Attempts to incorporate native peoples into the mainstream of American history have usually taken the form of lists of Indian "contributions" to American culture or, conversely, a solemn paean to Indian respect for nature.
This chronicle of the Catawbas takes note of all of the above. But its center is the Catwabas' encounter with the colonists and their entourage: unfamiliar diseases, crown diplomats, trade goods, and Christian missionaries. Each of those required creative responses, which transformed Catawba life rather than destroyed it. Natives constructed new societies in the aftermath of epidemics, assimilated both traders and their enticing goods into established cultural forms, came to terms with settlers, and fended off missionaries. Through it all, the Catawbas endured—as soldiers in the Revolution, as landlords and landladies on their reservation, as potters and farmers—retaining their Indian identity, remaining in their piedmont home, and becoming a part of the American mosaic.
Absorbing archeology, anthropology, and folklore into his vast historical research, Merrell provides what will be the definitive history of the Catawbas. The book also signals a new direction for the study of native Americans and will serve as a model for their reintegration into American history.
