Brooke M. Bauer – författare

The story of Catawba women who experienced sweeping changes to their world but held onto traditional customs to create and preserve a Catawba identity and build a nationWinner of the Anne B. & James B. McMillan Prize in Southern HistoryWinner of the 2023 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award WinnerWinner of the 2022 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book AwardWinner of the 2022 George C. Rogers, Jr. Award from the South Carolina Historical SocietyBrooke M. Bauer’s Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 is the first book-length study of the role Catawba women played in creating and preserving a cohesive tribal identity over three centuries of colonization and cultural turmoil. Bauer, a citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, weaves ethnohistorical methodologies, family history, cultural context, and the Catawba language together to generate an internal perspective on the Catawbas’ history and heritage in the area now known as the Carolina Piedmont.This unique and important study examines the lives and legacies of women who executed complex decision-making and diplomacy to navigate shifting frameworks of kinship, land ownership, and cultural production in dealings with colonial encroachments, white settlers, and Euro-American legal systems and governments from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Personified in the figure of Sally New River, a Catawba cultural leader to whom 500 remaining acres of occupied tribal lands were deeded on behalf of the community in 1796 and which she managed until her death in 1821, Bauer reveals how women worked to ensure the survival of the Catawba people and their Catawba identity, an effort that resulted in a unified nation.Bauer’s approach is primarily ethnohistorical, although it draws on a number of interdisciplinary strategies. In particular, Bauer uses “upstreaming,” a critical strategy that moves toward the period under study by using present-day community members’ connections to historical knowledge—for example, family histories and oral traditions—to interpret primary-source data. Additionally, Bauer employs archaeological data and material culture as a means of performing feminist recuperation, filling the gaps and silences left by the records, newspapers, and historical accounts as primarily written by and for white men. Ultimately, Becoming Catawba effects a welcome intervention at the intersections of Native, women’s, and Southern history, expanding the diversity and modes of experience in the fraught, multifaceted cultural environment of the early American South.

Interpreting the Indigenous South reframes public history as a space of Indigenous authority and self-representation, where communities define how their histories are told, their knowledge preserved, and their relationships to place understood.In the American South, where Indigenous histories have long been obscured by narratives of disappearance, Native nations are not only present but are actively reclaiming how their stories are told. Drawing on vivid examples from across the region, this book shows how tribal nations have transformed museums, archives, landscapes, and public platforms into instruments of cultural survival and continuity. The book reveals how Indigenous communities are using public history as a living practice to sustain their identities and project their futures. From environmental stewardship and commemorative journeys to digital storytelling and intergenerational teaching, what outsiders may dismiss as performance or tourism emerges as strategic practice.By exploring different methodological approaches and providing multiple examples of how tribal communities are involved in the co-production of knowledge and historical interventions, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Native American studies and history, as well as public history practitioners.