The Catawba — also known as Issa or Essa or Iswä but most commonly Iswa (Catawba: iswa - “people of the river”) — are a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans, known as the Catawba Indian Nation. They live in the Southeast United States, along the border of North Carolina near the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Catawba were once considered one of the most powerful Southeastern Siouan-speaking tribes in the Carolina Piedmont. The Catawba and other Siouan peoples are believed to have coalesced as individual tribes in the Southeast. Living along the Catawba River they were named one of the most powerful tribes in the south.

Primarily involved in agriculture, the Catawba were friendly toward early European colonists. They were at almost constant war with tribes of other major language families: the Iroquois, who ranged south from the Great Lakes area and New York; the Algonquian Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware); and the Iroquoian Cherokee, who fought for control over the large Ohio Valley (including what is now in present-day West Virginia). The Catawba allied during the American Revolutionary War with the Patriot colonists against the British. Decimated by earlier smallpox epidemics, tribal warfare and social disruption, the Catawba declined markedly in number in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The people ceded their homeland to South Carolina in 1840 by a treaty; it was not approved by the United States Senate and was automatically invalid.