Waccamaw: Past, Present, Future

Between 2021 and 2024, the Waccamaw Indian People and Coastal Carolina University built something together: a public history of the tribe told across a museum gallery, a walking trail, oral-history recordings, and a website — Waccamaw Indian People: Past, Present, Future. It won a national Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History and the Society for American Archaeology’s award for Outstanding Public Archaeology Project. This exhibit preserves what it made and what it found.

A tribe and a university, working together

The project grew out of three CCU courses — IDS 430, ANTH 432, and MALS 530 — led by Prof. Katie Stringer Clary (History) and Prof. Carolyn Dillian (Anthropology & Geography), with thirty-five students and the tribe’s own leaders as partners and interviewees. It was funded by South Carolina Humanities, CCU’s Prince Fellows Program, and others, and made in partnership with the Horry County Museum. Crucially, it was built with the tribe, not merely about it — the scholars have written about the collaboration itself in History News and South Carolina Antiquities.

“It is important that information about the pipe be shared orally — not written down.” — a cultural protocol the project honored, quoted from the exhibit’s own panel on the ceremonial pipe.

What it built

• A museum exhibit at the Horry County Museum (2021–2022) — with a 3-D virtual walkthrough that lets anyone tour the gallery online, panel by panel.
• An ecological & cultural interpretive trail at the Tribal Grounds in Dog Bluff, a half-mile loop of outdoor panels, which opened April 16, 2024.
• Oral-history interviews recorded March 20, 2021 with Chief Harold “Buster” Hatcher, Vice Chief Cheryl Cail, and Second Chief John D. Turner — preserved as audio the People can always return to.

The deep past it recovered

The project reached back long before the written record — the archaeology of the Waccamaw’s ancestors on this coast:

• Paleoindian peoples (more than 10,000 years ago), hunter-gatherers of the Lowcountry who knapped stone points for game long since vanished.
• Archaic shell middens along the coast — clams and oysters, deer taken with the atlatl, a spear-thrower that gave a hunter reach and force.
• Woodland farmers who raised the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash planted together, each helping the others — and who grew and smoked tobacco, sharing it with Europeans and, unknowingly, with the world.
• The first Europeans to reach these people were slavers — Gordillo and Quexos, in 1521 — who carried off a young man they renamed Francisco de Chicora, perhaps the first Waccamaw named in any European record. The Spanish called this whole land Chicora.

The present it recorded, the future it named

The project let the living tribe speak for itself — nine members, from the Chief to the fire keeper, on what it means to be Waccamaw today — and it laid out plainly what recognition still costs. The Waccamaw are state-recognized (2005), not federally recognized; without federal status the tribe cannot repatriate its ancestors under NAGPRA, and a federal recognition bill (H.R. 1942, introduced March 2021) remains unfinished. As one member put it:

“I am who I am, and no recognition can change that.” — Glenn Cook, Chairman of Buildings and Grounds

The full project, including the 3-D walkthrough, the oral-history audio, and the interpretive-trail map, lives at waccamawpastpresentfuture.com — a Coastal Carolina University public-history project with the Waccamaw Indian People (2021–2024).