My Indian Life By: Imani Bridges

My tribe & region Dear Diary, my name is Namid [ meaning star dancer]. I am a part of the Catawba tribe. My family and I live in the southeast region of what will later be called the United States. It is the year This is my story …

Building Day Today my father, mother and I decided it was time to start building our round clay houses for the summer. It was fun at first, until it started to rain and we didn’t get to finish… YaY it stopped raining we can finish before it starts raining again.

The Perfect Outfit Today I decided to sneak one of my moms skirts to were and show off to my friends at school. Though clearly its really hard to be sneaky when you are a clumsy person and trip and fall to when your mother catches you. I’m officially grounded for 2 weeks and have 3x more chores than usual, but I still get to were the skirt and one of my friends frilly shirts.

Dinner Time For dinner today my father and I went hunting for turkey and deer while my sister and mother washed and prepared corn, beans and squash. It was amazing, tomorrow morning my sister, dad and I are going fishing.

SECRET INFORMATION My tribe is kind of scary for instance once the Iroquois tribe tried to attack another tribe but ended up attacking our tribe so my dad and the other soldiers chased them so far that they almost reached Pennsylvania. But if you get to know my tribe we are actually pretty nice. Like now we are kind of helping these STRANGE white dudes that “SAY” there from another country but honestly I don’t believe that.SHH!! Also we kind of sued South Carolina for not giving us fair land rights

Where we live My family and I live in the southeast region of America ( known as the piedmont region of North Carolina & South Carolina.) Where we live has a lot of rolling hills and plateaus and the climate is regular rainfall and warm hot summers and cold winters. We also share some of our land with the Cherokee tribe who has to move, and we are going to have to move if these crazy dudes have anything to with it.

My favorite place out of all our land is the forest. I love that because of all the cool animal you see for instance you have deer, raccoon, turkey, all different kinds of little tiny animals that are so CUTE. My second favorite place is by the Catawba River, where the whole tribe plants luxurious things like tomatoes, potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and over 100 wild plants. Another reason is because I like to put my feet in the river to feel the fish on my feet. Animals and Plants

Hail storm The Weather here is pretty normal. We have a good amount of rain each month and we get enough of sunlight to plant food for each year. We can have some harsh winters but so far, so good. Like one year we were gathering all our belongings getting ready for winter when, these clouds rolled in and it started hailing. My sister almost got a concussion but she was able to dodge and weave like she had done it 1000 times.

Weather Changes The way the weather affects us isn’t to bad I mean every tribe in the southeast has to change their house twice every year like we did a few days ago. Also we have to make sure we harvest enough food and hunt enough food to last a winter, but that is so normal around here. My favorite thing about the weather changing is seeing all the little squirrels begin to hibernate it’s so cute.

I ALMOST GOT STRUCK BY LIGHTNING Today was ruff, I was standing outside and it started raining. I heard this loud BOOM sound and was running to get inside when this flash of light landed right in front of me. I was so scared and, we don’t get a lot of severe weather here except for a fair amount of thunderstorms. I personally have never been in a hurricane, tornado, earthquaky-thingy and some other weird stuff that my parents talk about while I secretly ease drop to figure out what I’m getting for my b- day. P.S. I so hope that my parents don’t read this diary or it will spoil all my future plans.

It has been two years and today is my last day probably ever writing in a diary again for the STRANGE white people I told you about, well they have turned on us and are sending my family, friends and I to Oklahoma. I will miss my home very much but I wont miss those dirty little Europeans I’m guessing that your supposed to call them that ( who knows, and who cares I told you I didn’t trust them and since nobody listened we have to move on to a resever thingy tomorrow so they can dig for something called gold)GRRRRRRRRRR!!! We’re Moving

Evaluation On this project I did fairly well and will probably get an A or a B. I feel that way because it wasn’t a project I really enjoyed and it was hard to find good information that tied into my PowerPoint. I would probably pick a more well known tribe and focus more on the weather section than on journal entry 1 if I did it again. I did learn a good amount about my tribe, like what type of houses we live in and what we do to survive in harsh climates. I also learned that we could be friendly and also very mean at the same time, but over all it was an okay project.

Bibliography  "Catawba Tribe." bigorrin.org. Native Languages of the Americas website, Web. 1 Oct  "South Carolina – Indians, Native Americans – Catawba." sciway.net. Web. 1 Oct  "Catawba Indians." northcarolinahistory.org. N.p., Web. 1 Oct  Ciment, James, and Ronald LaFrance. "Catawba." Encyclopedia of the North America Indians. N.p., N.d. Web. 8 Oct  The Southeast Indians. Charlotte, NC