Sitting with Ms. June — the chief as his people's historian

Every other hall of this museum holds recordings of Chief Hatcher made by someone else — a university, a television crew, the Library of Congress. This one holds the opposite: a recording he kept, of an afternoon when he was the one asking the questions.

Sometime in 2016, a mutual friend named Wendy — herself Native — arranged the visit and brought the chief to the home of an elderly friend near the Waccamaw — “Ms. June,” the recording calls her, an elder of an old family of the inlet. As a girl in the 1930s she had lived at Wachesaw, the plantation ground downriver whose name the people on the tape render as “place of the weeping” — and she had been there when the graves came out of the ground. The chief came to hear it firsthand, and a recorder ran for two hours and forty-five minutes: as someone on the tape puts it, “We’re recording because I’m too lazy to take notes.”

What survives is the founder of the tribe doing exactly what this museum does — sitting with a source, letting her talk, testing what he thought he knew against what she remembered. The chief as his people’s historian.

Content note: this exhibit concerns Native graves and human remains — disturbed, scattered, studied, and, in the end, reburied.

“Let the birds clean it”

Ms. June’s family kept a puzzle for eighty years: skulls unearthed at Wachesaw in the 1930s, found full of small clay beads. How did the beads get inside? She was nine when she heard the answer the old people gave.

“You know as a child I remember digging the graves up over there when they were making [the] original home at Wachesaw. And they found them and they said, you know how would they have gotten the beads in?” — Ms. June

“And I remember them saying that they would put them on platforms up in the trees or something and let the birds clean it. Now, you know, that’s just what I remember.” — Ms. June

She and her sister were children among the digging — and even then it troubled them. What they did about it, two little girls with a shoebox, is the reason the chief came to meet her:

“We felt like it was almost sacrilegious, you know? We got some of the bones … [put] them in a little shoebox that we had — and we had a little service and buried them by this tree there.” — Ms. June

Her mother felt the same. When baptisms were held at the river’s edge where bones lay exposed:

“I remember Mama saying, you know that is just sacrilegious. And I remember as a child she got sheets and went and covered all the bones so they could have the baptism and the bones weren’t exposed — but I was just, you know, a child then.” — Ms. June

The chief’s answer to all of it is the closest thing on the tape to a formal statement — the gratitude of a man who had spent decades trying to get his ancestors off museum shelves:

“It happened a lot in South Carolina though — it still does — where people don’t [honor] bones … And I appreciate you having respect for those bones, at least try to make it right.”

The Marion County reburial

Then he traded her a story for her story — the time archaeologists called him to put ancestors back in the ground:

“They did an archeological dig and they found some bones there and they invited me to come and rebury the bones. So at any rate it was a man and his sister that they found, but they had died almost a year apart — which I’m trying to calculate this, why would they? … I’m sure the man wouldn’t carry his dead sister around with him for a year before … they would bury them.”

He worked the evidence like a field archaeologist — because he had noticed something at the graveside that the report couldn’t explain:

“The archaeologists try to figure things out but I tried to figure things out too. [In that] particular case where we did reburial there in Marion County, there was a … full pot right behind the man’s head, and … his skull was full of dirt but it wasn’t dirt that was in the grave. It was different kind of dirt … So those bodies had to have been taken away and buried. And which also explains why they would bury the two together, because they probably dug where his sister was and put him aside.”

And here, in Ms. June’s living room, her bead story and his reburial story clicked together into a hypothesis:

“The only thing I can think of is — [it] was beads being in the skulls? We may have discovered something here that it’s very important for us to know … our practices may have been to bury them above the ground and then bury them, and we don’t know that.”

“Everything you think you know, you have to rethink”

What makes the tape remarkable is not that he had answers. It’s that he was willing to give one up. He had taught the sitting-up burial his whole life:

“Well, I had always been told and I always believed that when the Waccamaw buried someone they buried them sitting up. And it was a little dome-shaped grave but … I’m beginning to question that, because of course all you find is the skeletons, so you don’t know if they were buried as bodies or skeletons. But now with the reburial that we did in Marion County and what your sister wrote in the book, it sounds like we may have done exactly what the … people did out west. We buried them above ground until they were nothing but bones, and then buried the bones.”

Asked why it would have been done that way, he refused to invent an answer — and then gave the one piece of the old religion he did know for certain, the same eagle-feather teaching he carried into every public fight (In His Own Words):

“We can’t really answer the question because i don’t really know … Theoretically, the ones out west are doing it to release the spirit. Now I don’t know if that’s what the Waccamaw did or not … Nobody else does either at this point. But we have some practices where we put an eagle feather generally with a body when they’re buried … The eagle feather, [it] being a bird of prey — it’s been to heaven one time, basically, and it knows the way back to God and it’ll lead the spirit back to God. … Everything you think you know now, you have to rethink sometimes.”

The historian at work

Midway through the visit a neighbor wandered over, and the tape catches something the formal interviews never quite do: the chief giving the whole history of his people, unprompted and unrehearsed, to a stranger on a porch. The Dimery Settlement:

“We require, to be a member of the tribe, that you’d be a descendant of the property up here called the [Dimery] Settlement … It talks about a group of Indian people who live right in the A[y]n[o]r area … There is a lot of people who have passed themselves off as whites or blacks since way back when. And so some of those people don’t want to become Indian. Although they’re eligible for membership, they don’t want to be an Indian.”

His mother’s fear — the history of citizenship itself, told through one woman:

“My mother was born in 1913. Indians weren’t allowed to be citizens until 1924. So she remembers the Citizenship Act. She remembers when you couldn’t own land … You weren’t allowed to do your own affairs … She was afraid to be Indian for a long time because she thought she’d lose her social security and her citizenship. Of course its not true — but she passed away in 2011, but she was a member of the tribe when she passed away.”

And his own childhood, in a new turn of the line he typed for the Library of Congress. He would not repeat the slurs; he softened them himself:

“They called us blacks. Well, they didn’t call us blacks — they called us other words. I grew up being all those names. We couldn’t go to white schools, or we couldn’t go to black schools because the law said colored. And they didn’t consider us colored, so they put us in a white school. We lived in black neighborhoods but we went to white schools, and if you were wrong at school, you were wrong at home — with no place where you’re right.”

Even a tourist stop became fieldwork. On a visit to Tombstone, Arizona, he had gone to the cemetery and read it the way he read everything:

“At Boothill they bury them all. You see the Chinese, blacks, whites — everybody buried together. I thought that was pretty unique. … But around here, a lot of stuff depends on your race.”

Why this tape is in the museum

The tribe the chief built spent his whole tenure fighting for the right to do what he did that day in Marion County — more than 600 sets of ancestral remains sit on shelves in South Carolina that the tribe, still not federally recognized, cannot bring home (Federal Recognition). Years before The Right To Bury Our Own put that fight on film, he was already at the gravesides, and already keeping the record: finding the elders, hearing them out, letting their memories correct his own.

That is what a historian does. It is what this museum tries to do with him.

He ended the visit the way he ended everything:

“Thank you. If there anything else I can do for you let me know.”