A POTENTIAL CLAIM TO CERTAIN YORK COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA LAND BACKGROUND: Prepared by: A Special Task Force of the Greater Rock Hill Chamber of Commerce February 28, 1979 There is evidence that the Catawba Indians have been living In the York County area since 1540. In 1763, a treaty between the Colony of South Carolina and the Catawba Indians was signed, giving the Indians 144,000 acres in the present York and Lancaster Counties. By 1826, the Catawbas had leased most of their tribal land and in 1841, the Catawbas ceded to the State of South Carolina all of their land except one square mile on which to live. In return, the Catawbas received a small annual allowance, schools for their children, health services and a part-time agent. The Catawbas received full citizenship from the United States of America in 1924, and from the State of South Carolina in 1944. The State of South Carolina purchased in 1943, 3,434 acres of land in York County which was transferred to the federal government to be held in trust for the Catawbas. Also, assistance was provided the Indians to help them improve their standard of living. By 1955, there had not been a full-blooded Catawba Indian for several years. This was primarily because of their inter-marriage with white people. The 1959 United States Congress passed an Act to allow the Catawbas to divide their tribal assets, valued at that time at $254,396.14. The tribe voted to divide 3,434 acres among the tribal members in 1960. 630 acres of the old reservation was maintained. When the Catawbas divided their land among their people, the Catawba Tribe relinquished all rights provided them by the United States because of their status as Indians. On April 2, 1977 at a meeting of Catawba Indians, a resolution was passed asking that the United States Congress settle the Indians' old claim to 144,000 acres in York and Lancaster Counties. The Indians, according to a spokesman, were not interested in obtaining land which was actually occupied. The Indian spokesman said publically that it was their desire to settle the matter so questions about title to land in the claim area could be resolved with a minimum of trouble. The Catawba Indians' resolution said "Failure to reach a fair and honorable settlement which will benefit the great majority of residents in Lancaster and York Counties will force the Catawba Tribe to initiate lengthy and burdensome litigation against all present occupants of the 1763 reservation lands, to recover the land and damages for trespass. EXHIBIT 2a - i A FEW HIGHLIGHTS OF WHAT HAS TRANSPIRED SINCE THE CATAWBAS RE-INITIATED THEIR CLAIM TO CERTAIN YORK COUNTY LAND: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. The U. S. Department of the Interior announced support for the The Catawbas split over whether they want land or money to settle Catawba claim acreage identified and the York County portion Attorney General McLeod says Catawba claim valid. 150 area citizens attend meeting at Rock Hill Law Enforcement A study on a proposed Catawba Indian reservation and a land use & Associates. Landowners Association formed to keep informed on the Catawba United States Representative Holland pulls out of the Catawba Catawba Indians seeking a cash settlement, initiate a suit to York and Lancaster landowners attempt to get some national clout Catawbas vote to settle the tribe's claim to 144,000 acres by Deputy U. S. Attorney General James Moorman says citizens in the U. S. Representative Kenneth Holland says the State of South Carolina, not the landowners, has the responsibility for ending the Catawba Indian claim, and thinks the State should pay off. United States government indicates it will not condemn land for the Catawbas. A state appointed commission to study the Catawba claim established. The General Assembly appointed commission is comprised of a seven-member task force, with two senators, two representatives and three members of the public. Federal government reached agreement to settle the Indian claim in Maine for a cash settlement. The Charlotte Observer Sunday March 6, 1977 'This Land Is Rightfully "A lot of people have written us off. but we're still here.". Evans "Buck" George Catawba Tribal Council, 1977 By HENRY EICHEL Observer Columbia Beress CATAWBA INDIAN RESERVATION, S.C. - No signs tell you that you're here, just a couple of mobile homes squatting on grubby patches of red mud and rocks when you turn off a country road near the Catawbe River below Rock Hill. For a mile, a bumpy paved road curves through thick woods. There are mobile homes and some small wooden houses with names like Canty, Blue. Sanders. Harris on the mailboxes. The woods end, and there's a small white Mormon chapel next to a rotting, abandoned wooden schoolhouse. That's it. That's what's left of what was once one of the most powerful Indian nations of the East, people who hunted from the Blue Ridge mountains to the Pee Dee River, who counted among their enemies the Cherokee, the Shawnee, the Iroquois, the Creek. Today, after centuries of intermarriage with whites, there are no pure-blooded Catawbas. No one speaks the Catawba language. no one dances the Dance of the Green Corn. Until a class last summer revived interest, only four elderly women knew how to make the old Catawba pottery. The Catawba Tribe Today Only about 150 of the 1,200 persons on the Catawba tribal rolls live on the old reservation, which dates from 1842. The rest have blended into the rural and smalltown life of York County and Rock Hill, working as electricians, machinists, mill hands, industrial laborers. Nobody makes a lot of money, few of the kids go to college or teach school, and high school dropouts are common. But it's better than it used to be 50 years ago when no Catawba could go beyond elementary school and the only jobs were cutting firewood or plowing other people's fields. "We've been treated as bad as the colored folks," Edna Brown, 66, says. "The only thing is, the colored folks had enough gumption to do something about it, and we just took what was handed to us." In 1959, it seemed the Catawbas might disappear as a people. They gave up federal recognition as an organized tribe and split up their assets, including 3.434 acres east of Rock Hill given them 16 years earlier. Younger Catawbas wanted individual deeds to their own land so they could get home mortgages, and so their white husbands or wives could share ownership. Ours' A New Wind Stirs But in the early 1970s, the new winds of tribal nationalism, which first stirred among the militant Western tribes, blew eastward. When Gilbert Blue, grandson of the longtime Catawba chief and religious leader Samuel Taylor Blue, was elected chief in 1973, he began thinking of ways to strengthen Catawba society. Now, the Catawbas have revived their claim to the old Catawba nation 144,000 acres in a 15-mile square that includes Rock Hill and Fort Mill. The land was guaranteed to the Catawbas in treaties signed with the British government in 1760 and 1763, and sealed into United States law in 1790. The year the federal act was passed. President George Washington explained it to the Indian nations. "The General Government will never consent to your being defrauded, but it will protect you in all your just rights...." Brushing Off The Claim The 1790 law wasn't invoked for a major land claim until 1972, when the Penobscot and Passamoquoddy Indians sued for nearly two-thirds of the state of Maine. At first. Maine officials brushed off the claim as the idle talk of a couple of half-forgotten tribes; then the U. S. Justice Department jumped in on the Indians' side. Now, state and federal officials are working out a settlement with the Indians to be submitted to Congress. Three years ago, Gilbert Blue, attending a meeting of Eastern Indian tribes in Washington, heard about the suit filed by Indians in Maine. He contacted the Native American Rights Fund, which handled the case. Now, the Catawbas and lawyers from the fund are negotiating In South Carolina, too, with Gov. Jim Edwards and Attorney General Dan McLeod. So far, white reaction has been calm. Dr. Bill Long, a retired Winthrop College drama professor who put on a Catawba history pageant 15 years ago, says: "Everybody feels they've been very poorly treated.... And we know they couldn't possibly take over Rock Hill." Blue declines to specify what would satisfy the Catawbas, but he has said it may include land, an education fund, housing and community services for the reservation. "We're not trying to push anybody out, we're not being radical." Blue says. "but the land is rightfully ours, and we're going to negotiate for the best settlement we can get. We want to do it in as friendly a manner as possible." See THE CATAWBA, Page 4C, Col. 1 4C THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER Sun.. March 6. 1977 ... The Catawba Claim: Continued From Page IC The Catawbas say their biggest problem is education. Hardly any Catawba over 40 has been beyond the eighth grade because South Carolina's segregation laws once restricted the Indians to a reservation school. "We send a few students to Brig. ham Young University because the Mormon Church helps out." Blue says (the Catawbas have been Mormons since the 1880s, when missionaries came to them). "But only about two or three of our kids are in college now." Because so many Catawbas are poor and semi-educated. he adds. "We've got a certain amount of -dropout problem. A lot of them quit school to work so they can help their families or have things for themIselves." On the reservation. 40 families live in trailers or fixed-up 100-yearold houses because they can't get loans when they don't own the land. There's no community center. no recreation area for children beyond a couple of swing sets, no programs to keep Catawba history and traditions - alive. No Indians Left "I'd like to see the state do some thing to protect the Indians' heritage," says Jean Plyler, a white woman married to a Catawba, "be "This Land Is Ours' "These wretched Indians live in a state of abject poverty, the consequence of their indolence and dissipated habits... a people to whom this state is indebted; who were the best friends and allies South Carolina ever had.. who yielded their lands freely to our forefaup these poor deserted sons of the forests! Robert Mills, Designer of the Washington Monument, after a trip to the Catawba Nation, 1826 ... cause otherwise, there aren't going thers.. to be any Indians left at all." Historians have traced that heritage back to the Ohio River valley, sometime before Columbus landed in the West Indies. While the Catawbas drifted South, others went West and became the Sioux nation of the Great Plains. Spanish explorers passed through their lands in the Carolinas in the mid-1500s. By the early 1600s. trad. ers from Virginia were bartering guns, clothes and trinkets for furs at the main Catawba village, near present-day Fort Mill. During the 18th century, the Catawbas allied with the English. Under war chiefs such as Yanabe Yalangwe ("The Young Warrior") and Arataswa (called King Haigler by the whites), the Catawbas became hated and feared by other Indians. One historian records that it was considered such a feat of courage and skill to kill a Catawba that Indians from as far away as the Great Lakes sought Catawba scalps. It was their friendship with the English that did the Catawbas in. When white settlers moved in on their hunting grounds, in the 1740s the Catawbas gave up their lands except for a circle. 60 miles across, that stretches from north of presentday Charlotte down to just north of what is now Camden. The whites broke that agreement, as they had all others dealing with King Haigler's Treaty In August 1760. his tribe shrunken by decades of warfare and by recurring waves of smallpox caught from the whites. King Haigler signed the Treaty of Pine Tree Hill at Camden, giving up all the Catawbas' lands except a 15-mile square in present-day York County. In exchange, the whites agreed to build a fort to protect the Catawbas from their ene mies (giving Fort Mill its name) and to leave the Catawbas unmolested by settlers. Haigler was so respected by the whites that in 1826 an iron weathervane in his image was made and put on top of the old Opera House in Camden. It's still there. But by that time, the Catawbas had become wandering beggars on their own land, leasing it to the whites for as little as 15 cents an acre and often taking their rent in old horses and tattered bedspreads. By 1840, pressure was mounting on the state legislature to end the Catawbas' ownership and give title to the white people in York County who were living on the land. In the Treaty of Nation's Ford that year, signed just outside what is now Rock Hill, the Catawbas gave up all their land and the state promised to buy them $5.000 worth of unsettled land in the North Carolina mountains. But North Carolina refused to sell any land for the Catawbas. The Indians drifted miserably back, and in 1842. South Carolina bought them one square mile that was so rocky it was practically impossible to farm. That's the reservation today. Because neither the 1840 treaty nor the 1842 settlement were approved by Congress, the Catawbas today claim that the 1760 treaty is the only valid agreement ever entered with South Carolina. Over the years, some groups of Catawbas left and went west of the Mississippi to Oklahoma and Colorado. merging into other tribes. Of those who stayed behind, Dr. H. Lewis Scaife wrote In 1893: "The present condition of the tribe, morally, socially and financially is a disgrace...On the streets of Rock Hill these miserable creatures may often be seen begging, and if they are befriended they ever after besiege their benefactor. It is safe to say that the condition of the Catawbas generally is a little below the standard of the average Southern Negro...." To this day. Roy Brown, 72, remembers having no work but cutting firewood at the rate of three cords for a dollar. His wife Edna, realls. "All we'd have to supper was. Observer Phot Roy Brown Used To Sell Three Cords Of Wood For $1 the most traumatic experience of my life, being thrown out into the wide world. It's really something for a little kid to go to school away from people you know and be greeted with war whoops." And Edna Brown recalls that when she used to work in a cotton mill, the other workers used to call her, "that Indian woman." Still, whites in York County say. their feelings toward the Catawbas are warm. When Winthrop College presented a pageant called, "Kawwoh Catawba" ("Thank You, Cat abas") in 1962, it drew 10,000 peo iii Edna Brown With Catawba Pottery ...we just took what was handed to us' |