It doesn't look like much now -- just a bunch of half-built huts and cabins among the oak sapling woods -- but the Catawba Nation is rising again.
Work has recently begun on a re-created Catawba Village, which spans 500 years of tribal housing -- from round, birch-bark huts and communal long houses to log cabins and conventional stick-built homes.
Hopes are to complete the village behind the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project by late 2008.
Part of the grounds will be partitioned off with wooden palisades -- large sharpened logs driven into the ground to form a protective barrier around the village.
Beckee Garris, a tribal member and staffer with the Catawba Indian Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Office, said the village will highlight Catawba culture and reflect the tribe's Native American heritage while showing how it adapted to the European culture that was introduced in the mid-1700s.
"The village will become the centerpiece of our outside exhibits and give the public, as well as our tribe, a real sense of what life was like in a Catawba village throughout history," said Garris, a student in the Native American Studies program at the USC Lancaster campus.
Garris said that when the village is complete, tribal members dressed in period costumes will re-enact tribal life such as cooking over an open fire, tanning deer hides and building dug-out canoes.
"We've had re-enactors before, but this will give a more complete view of tribal life in their housing in the woods along the Catawba River," said Garris, who was born on the reservation.
The village is being built by Cultural Center staffers Ronnie Beck, Donnie Boyd and Amanda Rogers during spare time from their regular chores at the center.
Tribal officials hope grants can be secured to help complete the work.
An example of their craftsmanship is a 16-foot canoe they have created from a poplar tree that was blown down by the wind. It took the three-person crew about 40 hours to complete. The narrow, flat-bottomed, high-sided boat would be used by tribal members primarily to pole up and down the river because of the relatively shallow depth of the Catawba.
This canoe is different from the stereotypical paddle-propelled, birch-bark canoe that was used primarily by Native American tribes in the Plains, New England and Pacific Northwest.
"This is a style of construction that our tribe used to build dug-out canoes, which was an important type of transportation for a tribe that lived and worked almost their entire lives along the river," said Donnie Boyd.
Before the introduction of European iron adzes and axes, the dugouts were made by placing hot coals on the center of the wood and burning out the center and scraping it smooth with sharpened rocks and large seashells.
The houses in the village, which are in varying states of completion, include:
• A rectangular long house, 30 by 20 feet, made of logs and birch bark with a thatched roof, a central smoke hole and a dirt floor.
Long houses were used primarily as a meeting place.
• A circular bark hut for a small family with a dome about 6 feet high and built of bent saplings with bark siding and roof, supplemented with animal hides.
• A traditional log cabin based on settlers' homes of the 18th and 19th centuries, mud-daubed with glass windows, stone fireplace, sawmill-slat door and cedar-shake roof.
• A stick-built home of sawmill lumber, brick fireplace and chimney, windows and asphalt-shingle roof -- sometimes the more modern houses would be built over a log cabin foundation.
The stick-built home has particular relevance for Beck -- it was built by his great-great grandfather, Sam Taylor Blue, with lumber he cut himself just after coming home from the Civil War. Beck grew up in the house until he was 18; his grandmother, Lula Beck, lived there until her death in 1994.
"These places are a lot more than just pieces of wood out here," said Beck, an accomplished tribal drummer who has also built his own drums. "This is where our people lived their lives."
IN MY OPINION Dan Huntley
