“One of the things we want to point out is that we dress just like everyone else does too … When everybody sits and thinks, ‘Oh, we are going to see an Indian’ … they expect to see us dressed in buckskin, take a picture with us and go home. We want to show that we work and live just like everyone else.” These are the words Kristine Carpenter, a representative from the Catawba Nation, spoken this past Thursday at Dina’s Place for Native American Month. This was, in essence, the message of both Kristine and her associate Beckee Garris.
Carpenter is a dual-citizen of both the Catawba Nation and the United States. She has run the Catawba Cultural Center for 20 years, alongside her former co-worker and mentor Beckee Garris, who is visiting from Florida. During the event, the speakers went through a rundown of the Catawba Nation’s rich history. They began with life before European settlement. One of the key ideas expressed in this part of the lecture was the importance of the Catawba River to both early and modern Catawba. It served as a source of fish, a place to wash — and by extension — fertilizer for their gardens. It was a practice of the Catawba to take a whole fish caught from the river and place it into a hole before planting crops such as corn, beans, squash and berries. This provided the gardens with valuable nutrients. The speakers explained that these gardens were not like modern ones, with “nice little rows of corn, and then you have your rows of tomatoes, and then you have your rows of beans.” They said that the crops in Native American gardens were planted together. The reason corn, squash and beans were planted together was because they would all work to add nutrients to the soil another one needed or, in the case of beans, climb up the corn stalk giving more support to the structure. Life for the Native Americans at this time was not luxurious, but the land was abundant.
Carpenter explained that life began changing for the Native Americans slowly at first, but eventually the landscape was completely different. King Hagler (ca. 1749-1763), one of the great chiefs of the Catawba Nation, facilitated diplomacy between the new English settlers and the Catawba Nation. According to Carpenter, he would converse with white townsfolk, and “if he deemed them worthy, or friendly enough, he would give them parts of our land to start their own plantations … that’s why you see statues of King Hagler in Fort Mill.” Eventually, the Catawba Nation sold most of their land to the state of South Carolina through a non-federally ratified treaty in 1840 — hence the area called Indian Land in Lancaster County.
One recurring issue that kept coming up during the talk was the aspect of the ownership of Native American lands. The Catawba Nation settled with the state for the illegal/unconstitutional buying of their land in the 1990s, which addressed certain breaches of the treaty by South Carolina. However, many problems still exist today with Native American property rights. Currently, all tribal lands are held “in trust” by the federal government. In other words, they do not actually own their land. Native Americans may own a house on top of it, but they do not own the land itself. This means that they cannot sell the land to people outside the tribe or mortgage it to a bank. In addition to over-regulation, this has severely infringed on economic success of many tribes. Native American lands are estimated to contain as much as 50 percent of the coal reserves west of the Mississippi and 20 percent of known oil and gas reserves. The vast majority of these resources remain undeveloped due to these policies.
The Catawba Nation, although they do not possess natural resources such as coal or oil, is an example of faulty governmental control of Native American lands. Although not enthusiastic about the development of fossil fuel sources in general, Carpenter said that she does agree that property rights should be given back to Native Americans. When asked what was the biggest problem facing the Catawba Nation today, the speaker replied that economic development is the single largest obstacle for the tribe. Currently it is illegal in the State of South Carolina to run private gambling facilities, but the Catawba are working on a deal with the state to run their own operations. Additionally, the tribe is working on its own judicial system. Once completed, they would qualify as a “sovereign” nation. Although they will neither have full rights to their land nor independence from South Carolina laws, they will be able to jail criminals and run their own court system.
