Based both on library research and field research, the author's effort has been to reconstruct the history of the Catawba Indians, concentrating on their external relations from prehistoric times up to the present, and to examine the manner in which this history is remembered and socially codified in the present by both whites and Catawba Indians. Two short periods of field work, August to September of 1962 and June to October of 1963, were a mixture of directed interviewing and participant-observation with the object of learning how the Catawbas and their white neighbors thought of themselves in terms of their past. It is reported, for example, that the majority of the Catawbas are Mormons, that they work in local textile mills, and that they experience social conflict both with outsiders and among themselves due to increasing assimilation. Among the historical facts, it is noted that they divided their assets and terminated their relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1962; that the last speaker of the Catawba language died in the person of their last chief; and that existing and future marriages between Indians and whites were legalized in South Carolina in April of 1960. (BO)