Gipson Institute: Eighteenth-century Catawba Women, Pottery-making, Identity, and Nation-building

Brooke Bauer, Ph.D. is a citizen of the Catawba Nation of South Carolina and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She is the author of Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-building, 1540-1840. She has published articles about Catawba Indians and Indigenous identity in the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History and the Journal of the Early Republic, and contributed chapters in The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War, We Will Always Be Here: Southern Native Peoples on Living and Thriving in the 20th Century and Beyond, and The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research: Reporting on Environmental Degradation and Warfare. Her current projects focus on the Catawba Nation’s federal termination and Southeastern Native American childhood and education. Dr. Brooke Bauer will discuss eighteenth-century Catawba women’s role as potters, analyzing the apprentice practice of learning pottery-making skills not only positioned women in a male-centered trade economy. Most important to Catawbas, the tradition reinforced identity and nation-building through kinship practices and ties to a homeland.