Análisis de la demanda.

In 1929 anthropologist Frank Speck declared in a publication on Catawba religious beliefs and customs that “the case of the Catawba” is “unique, so far as available

information goes, in the history of evangelical mission labors among Indians of North America.” “The event of a mass conversion of the tribe to the Mormon church is,” Speck felt assured, “one unequaled in the history of Indian missions.” Speck had never heard,

apparently, of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation—also “Mormon Indians”— who were still farming at Washakie at this point (see chapter 1, above), but I suppose we can forgive him for that. The Catawba case did seem rather exceptional. Cautious to not completely overstate the case, he did note that, “As a tribe, almost in entirety, they adopted Mormonism” (emphasis added). He noted that a few, such as Susan Harris Owl, resisted Mormon conversion and “indignantly removed to the Eastern Cherokee,” becoming “a most devout Baptist.”1 _{But she and a few others were the exceptions; by and large, the Catawba}

people converted en masse to Mormonism. By the 1920s, by most counts, over ninety percent of the Catawba people in the Catawba Nation were on the church rolls. And while the same is not exactly true today, nearly all Catawba people are connected in one way or another to Mormonism.

1 _{Frank Speck, “Catawba Religious Beliefs, Mortuary Customs, and Dances,” Primitive Man 12.2 (April 1939):}

24-26. Mrs. Owl, as Speck refers to her, was the first “medium” through whom he made “contact with Catawba ethnology” in 1913. Ten years later he “made contact” again, this time collecting “data” from Margaret Brown, a Mormon Catawba woman who had lived her entire life on the Catawba Reservation. These two contacts offered Speck, he claimed, “two angles of insight” into Catawba “native deistic beliefs.” Of the two, he oddly supposed that Owl was “a less contaminated source.” Apparently being Baptist does not muddle one’s pure Catawba nature as much as Mormonism, at least according to Speck’s reasoning.

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Speck seems to have found this situation of Catawba Mormon conversion

lamentable. He was there to investigate, discern, and above all collect “native concepts.” The interposition of Mormonism only made his task all the more difficult. How to sift the pure nuggets from the “garbled notions of Christian theology” and the additional layers of Mormonism he found in the Catawba Nation? Speck investigated each of the items he collected with a careful “suspicion of Mormon teachings.” He seemed to long for that time when they had “remained untouched as a group” by Mormonism or “any of the numerous denominational proselyting agencies.” Speck bases his nostalgic quest for “pure” Catawba teachings on an assumption that he paints as prelude to this article: “Until about 1850 we may picture the Catawba as retaining some of the form and content of their original beliefs and rituals.” It is clear that Speck imagines a static state of anthropological purity in place prior to the intervention of European colonialism, after which everything became altered.2

However, if Speck saw Mormonism as continuing this process, he does not identify Mormonism as the primary culprit for this “loss.” In Speck’s view, by the time the Mormons arrived, the damage had already been done.3 _{He blames this state of affairs on what he calls}

a “period of dispossession” or an “era of vagrancy.” Following the loss and expulsion of their twenty-five square mile tract of land—recognized in the British Treaty of Augusta— “the Catawba went into social and economic exile, dispersed throughout the counties

2 _{Speck, “Catawba Religious Beliefs,” 21-28.}

3 _{Because Speck did not find “occurrence of characteristics known elsewhere in the southeastern area,” many}

of which he thought would have persisted, despite disruptions, “had they existed at all,” Speck comes to the rather surprising (and condescending) conclusion that “the Catawba of old may have had relatively little to lose.” While Speck recognized that collapse and “obliteration from tribal memory” might explain the absence of a ceremonial complex, curative formulas, wampum, war rituals, “and the like,” he chooses to finally regard these “deficiencies” as evidencing a “persistence of former cultural poverty.” Speck, “Catawba Religious Beliefs,” 41-42. I am not advancing Speck’s argument in any way here, but am rather using it as a foil for a model of cultural understanding that not only allows for but assumes and expects change.

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adjoining the great river which gave them name and character.” The inevitable

consequence of this dispersion, Speck avers, “was to prevent the ancient spiritualistic legacy from being handed down through teaching, practice or imitation.” What the younger generation carried with them from this time was “the poignant memories of poverty and plague,” not the “narratives and rituals of the past.”4

There is, of course, some truth to this. This period of dispossession and wandering surely did disrupt ceremonial practice to a significant degree, as had the plagues, diseases, and other challenges that preceded it—including, beyond cultural disruption, the very stark fact of massive population loss. European and American colonialism had dealt a severe blow to the Catawba people. (I have heard several Catawba people make similar points.) But, this qualified truth notwithstanding, Speck’s basic assumptions represent an anthropological fantasy: the “pure native.” By its very nature, such a way of looking at Catawba culture and peoplehood cannot view change and adaptation as anything but corruption, dissolution, or “contamination.” It does not allow the Catawba people to be people. People adapt and change, and to change is not to cease to exist; it is simply to be human. Colonialism and Mormonism both brought profound changes for Catawba people, to be sure, but that did not mean they stopped being Catawba.

Many Catawba people, of course, view the advent of Mormonism among them in rather different terms than Speck, even if they do share a few points in common with his observations. Some Catawba people also view Mormonism as something that came to replace something what was lost. As one Catawba woman explained to me: “We were kind of lookin’, because we had lost our tribal religion—it had been lost early on… And then the

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Mormon missionaries came to the area and they were accepted by the Catawbas.” Some view the arrival of the Mormons as providential, even foretold. Prominent Catawba leader Samuel Taylor Blue is remembered as saying that the missionaries brought a book that was “a direct history of our forefather, which we had no other history of before this book came along.”5 _{In other words, Mormon missionaries restored to them something that was}

already theirs—their own history, in the Book of Mormon. Some Catawba people believe that, had it not been for the cohesive force of Mormon community and leadership, the Catawba people may not have survived the challenges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As a group of Catawbas reportedly told a group of other Christians who proposed to build them a church on the reservation, after the Mormons had come: “We have found what we have been looking for!”6

But if Mormonism brought cohesiveness to the Catawba community, it also brought some divisions and challenges. This is particularly true for a group of Catawba people who left the nation in South Carolina as part of a larger Mormon migration out of the South to settle in the American West. Though the developments that ended up dividing them after that initial migration had much more to do with the state of South Carolina, the U.S. government, and the Catawba Indian Nation and community in the South than with the Mormon Church, it is all part of the story. And Mormonism, entangled as it is in Catawba life and history, tends to pop up here and there amidst the controversies. In significant ways, it is something that many Catawba people, east and west, citizens and descendants, still hold

5 _{Life of Chief Samuel T. Blue, July 28, 1955, p. 2, qtd. in Mikaela Adams, “Who Belongs? Becoming Tribal in the}

South,” PhD Diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012, 103.

6 _{Columbia South Carolina Stake, Columbia South Carolina Stake Fortieth Anniversary, 199-200, qtd. in}

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in common, in addition to and tangled up in their shared Catawba ancestry and heritage. And there is still a sense, among many in the East as well as the West, that the so-called Western Catawba are still Catawba, even if they are no longer citizens of the nation, included on tribal rolls (as will be explained below). This chapter, then, is only partially about Mormonism among Catawbas; or rather, in order to tell that story, I must tell much more as well. It is a story about what it means to be Catawba, to Catawba people, in terms of ancestry, citizenship, nationhood, descent, longing, diaspora, and, for some, in terms of the Book of Mormon, as a descendant of father Lehi.

The latter half of the nineteenth century, prior to the encounter of the Catawba people with Mormon missionaries, had been a time of great uncertainty and many hardships for the Catawba people. In the 1840 Treaty of Nation Ford the state of South Carolina dissolved the Catawba homeland with a guarantee of an equivalent plot of land in the mountains of North Carolina, away from the encroachment of white settlers. When the state of North Carolina refused to negotiate these terms, however, the Catawba people were left without any title to a territory. Some took up residence with the Eastern

Cherokees in western North Carolina; others scattered elsewhere. A few returned to South Carolina and were able to secure a small, one-square mile plot of land, held in trust by the state as a reservation, on which, by most accounts, they were barely able to eke out a subsistence. By the 1870s and 1880s many returned from their sojourn in North Carolina and coalesced around this small area near Rock Hill, South Carolina—the site of the current reservation and Nation headquarters.7

7 _{See Mikaela Adams, “Who Belongs? Becoming Tribal Members in the South,” PhD diss., University of North}

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The first missionaries we know of to enter the Catawba Nation did so shortly after this, in May of 1883. One of these missionaries noted that “We have been to see a remnant of a tribe of Indians called the Catawba Indians.” The term “remnant” was used frequently in Mormon writings to refer to Indigenous peoples as a remnant of ancient Israel (the Book of Mormon frequently refers to the Lamanites’ descendants as the “remnant” of Israel or of Joseph), but here it seems to refer to the depleted condition of this once populous and powerful nation. Robison, one of the missionaries, wrote that “they are almost run out and badly mixed with the whites” but also noted that “they seem very taken with us.” In

October of that year two Mormon elders preached to a crowd of fifty Catawba people who invited them to return. Two weeks later James Patterson was the first Catawba individual to apply for baptism and about a month later four more applied and all were baptized in the Catawba River.8 _{Shortly after that more were baptized, including several prominent}

tribal members, whose example led others to follow suit.9 _{Just over a year after the}

missionaries’ initial arrival, missionary Joseph Willey noted in his journal: “We organized a Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ if Later Day Saints and set Bro. James Patterson apart to Preside over the Branch… The Saints numbered 31 in all, 25 of the number was

Lamanites.”10 _{Willey also noted that “The Indians called us there preachers and the white}

people called us the Indian preachers.” 11

8 _{According to Willey’s diary, the first five to be baptized were Lucy Wats, James Harvey Wats, Mary Jane}

Wats, James Patterson, and Taylor George. Jerry D. Lee, “A Study of the Influence of the Mormon Church on the Catawba Indians of South Carolina, 1882-1975,” MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 1976, 39.

9 _{Liestman, “We Have Found What We Have Been Looking For,” 229-30.}

10 _{Liestman, “We Have Found What We Have Been Looking For,” 230, citing Lee, 50-52.} 11 _{Quoted in Judy Canty Martin, Genealogy of the Western Catawba (n.p., 1998), 3.}

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As historian Patrick Mason has noted, Mormon missionaries faced violent

opposition throughout much of the South during this period, due largely to the Mormon practice of polygamy and the perceived threat it posed to Southern womanhood—or the chivalrous male protection thereof—as well as general nativist distrust of outsiders.12 _York

County, South Carolina—where the Catawba Nation is located—was no different. A memory that has been passed down among many in the Catawba Nation today is that of Catawba individuals hiding missionaries in their homes and helping them hide in the woods and swamps to protect them from mob violence.

The opposition to Mormon missionaries became so violent in the region that in November of 1884 the Rock Hill Branch was temporarily disbanded and the missionaries along with twenty-two Catawba Church members relocated to the farm of Mormon church member James Russell in Spartansburg, South Carolina, about 63 miles west of Rock Hill. According to Liestman, several Catawba converts also migrated to Utah beginning in 1884.13 _{But a few months later most of the Catawba people had returned to their homes,}

though threats of mob violence against the missionaries did not cease. At its height one missionary was shot and wounded while his companion was captured, stripped, and whipped. Nevertheless, the missionaries continued to have success. On August 2, 1885, missionaries organized the Catawba Nation Branch and set apart Alonzo Canty as branch president. Historian Jerry Lee claims this “was the first Indian Branch of the Church to be

12 _{Patrick Mason, The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (New York:}

Oxford University Press, 2011).

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staffed entirely by Indians.”14 _{I have heard several Catawba Ward members tout the}

Catawba Ward as the longest continually meeting Lamanite unit in the Church.15 _{By 1887}

three quarters of the Catawba people reportedly identified with the Mormon Church.16 _In

1885 two Catawba men, Pinkney Head and Alonzo Canty, were sent as missionaries to preach, as Head recorded in his journal, “among the Cherokee Lamintes in North Carolina.” It apparently did not take long for Catawba converts to accept and to implement Mormon terms, such as Lamanite, in reference to themselves and other Indigenous peoples.17

All of this occurred while Southern States Mission president John Morgan was leading a mass exodus of Mormon converts out of the South to settle in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. By 1885 Morgan had become aware of the Catawba people and their

14 _{This may be true, as most branches established prior to this in the West among American Indian peoples}

were typically presided over by missionaries or “white” branch presidents. Lee, “Influence of Mormon Church on the Catawba Indians,” 51.

15 _{Lee also makes this claim, stating that the Catawba Branch/Ward it is the “oldest Indian branch in the}

church,” by which he presumably means the oldest branch that is still organized as such (though it is now the Catawba First and Second Wards), because he also notes that the Washakie Ward was established in 1877 but closed in 1965. Ibid. This claim thus rests on definitional technicalities by ruling out wards with an earlier claim if they were eventually closed, and presumably not counting wards that were not exclusively Lamanite units (though the Catawba Branch/Ward never has been exclusively Lamanite either). For example, the Papago Ward was organized by 1883, if not earlier, among Tohono O’odham and Maricopa peoples and is still in existence and, as far as I know, has been continually meeting since then (the earliest recorded bishop for this ward was white, but he assigned at least one O’odham-Papago bishopric counselor). Thus, the Papago Ward may beat the Catawba Ward’s claim by at least two years. See D. L. Turner, “Akimel Au-Authm, Xalychidom Piipaash, and the LDS Papago Ward,” Journal of Mormon History 39.1 (Winter 2013): 170.

16 _{Liestman, “We Have Found What We Have Been Looking For!” 232-36.}

17 _{Quoted in Martin, Genealogy, 88. Mission President John Morgan stated regarding these missionaries:}

“During our visit two of their number quite intelligent young men, were called and sent on a mission to a remnant of the Cherokee Native in North Carolina, numbering about 1500, and it was trusted that through their acquaintance with the Cherokees, formed in previous visits that access could be obtained to their hearts and confidence, and that in due season Elders could follow after and much good be done in their midst.” John Morgan to Pres. John Taylor, Charlotte, NC, 7 October 1885, in Morgan Papers, Marriott Library Special Collections, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

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conversion to Mormonism18 _{and began making plans to migrate the entire group as part of}

the Mormon gathering and settlement in the West. He noted in a letter to Church President John Taylor:

Among those that the Elders have come in contact with are the remanents of the once numerous and powerful Catawha [sic] tribe of Indians now numbering only 93 souls, they live on a reservation, consisting of 660 acres of land, and receive an annuity of $800.00 per annum from the state of South Carolina.

He indicated that “about two thirds of the tribe have embraced the Gospel, with very fair prospects of all or nearly all being baptized” and informed him of his plans to relocate the entire tribe to the West: “At the coming session of the Legislature we shall endeavor to secure an act, empowering them to sell their land, with a view of gathering them out to the appointed gathering place.”19

Morgan’s plan to arrange the sale of Catawba land never came to fruition, and neither did his plan to relocate the entire group en masse. But between 1886-1890 five Catawba families migrated away from the nation as part of Morgan’s Southern States Mission exodus. At a time when most estimates put the entire population of Catawba people residing in the Nation at about one hundred, the loss of five families constituted a