(10) Merrell's research on the Piedmont region reveals how visitations of smallpox and other Old-World diseases decimated individual tribes throughout the Piedmont, forcing them to join one another and eventually become identified as the
Catawba. Even though those tribes united, their weakened state made them prey to their stronger enemies and the balance of power in the colonial Southeast shifted.
"We were ready to file suit against 63,000 defendants, trespassers on
Catawba land," says attorney Jay Bender, who represents the
Catawbas.
(97.) For reprint and brief discussion of the
Catawba map, see lames Merrell's Indians' New World:
Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989); Gregory A.
Those who formerly spoke Sewee, Wateree, and Waxhaw or Ibo, Hausa, and Kongo had to learn
Catawba, Gullah, and English in order to survive in their new worlds.
In the absence of such a treatment, Hudson's Southeastern Indians serves as an important overview of Cherokee religious traditions, especially as they are thought to have been lived and practiced prior to significant European contact.(10) While Hudson describes the book as a "comprehensive introduction" to the Native Americans of the Southeast, including the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles,
Catawbas, Timucuas, Caddos, and many others, Fogelson and Walter L.
This characterization would best seem to fit the early twentieth-century situation for groups like the Poarch Creeks, the Lumbees, the Virginia Indians, the so-called Houmas, the Low-country South Carolina groups, and even to a considerable extent the
Catawbas and Tunica-Biloxis.
The activism of the American Indian Movement in the early 1970s served to reignite the determination of the
Catawbas - and many other tribes - to reinstitute claims.
Worse, the editors mistakenly place the
Catawbas in Virginia, not in South Carolina (p.