Catawba people

The Catawba, also known as Issa, Essa or Iswä but most commonly Iswa , are a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans, known as the Catawba Indian Nation. They live in the Southeastern United States, on the Catawba River at the border of North Carolina, near the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina. They were once considered one of the most powerful Southeastern Siouan-speaking tribes in the Carolina Piedmont, as well as one of the most powerful tribes in the South as a whole.

The Catawba were among the East Coast tribes who made selective alliances with some of the early European colonists, when these colonists agreed to help them in their ongoing conflicts with other tribes in the region. These were primarily the tribes of different language families: the Iroquois, who ranged south from the Great Lakes area and New York; the Algonquian Shawnee and Lenape ; and the Iroquoian Cherokee, who fought for control over the large Ohio Valley . During the American Revolutionary War the Catawba supported the American colonists against the British. Decimated by colonial smallpox epidemics, warfare and cultural disruption, the Catawba declined markedly in number in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some Catawba continued to live in their homelands in South Carolina, while others joined the Choctaw or Cherokee, at least temporarily.

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