Waccamaw Voices — recordings & film

In March 2021, students from Coastal Carolina University’s “Waccamaw Indian People: Past, Present, Future” project sat down with three members of the tribe and recorded them. Those recordings are among the most valuable objects in this museum — not documents about the People, but the People, speaking.

The museum preserves the audio and full transcripts in the tribal archive; the recordings below play from the project’s public collection.

Chief Harold “Buster” Hatcher

Forty minutes: the outsider childhood, the trip to Cherokee that told him who he was, Vietnam, the founding of the tribe, and what recognition means. Excerpts thread through the halls of this museum — start with In His Own Words.

Vice Chief Cheryl Sievers-Cail

Recorded five years before she became Chief. The voice of the successor, before the succession.

John D Turner

Memories of the settlement and the People.

On film

Meet Harold Hatcher — SCETV’s Native American Heritage Month profile (2015):

Conversations with Nicole — two long-form conversations with the chief (Horry County Government TV, January and November 2021):

The history, in his telling — Chief Hatcher’s Digibridge presentation on the Waccamaw past and present (2022):

The Right To Bury Our Own — the documentary on the tribe’s fight for burial rights and the return of its ancestors: watch at waccamaw.org/documentary. And After Action (public television’s veterans series) profiles his Vietnam service.

Recordings by Coastal Carolina University students, March 20, 2021, for “Waccamaw Indian People: Past, Present, Future” (waccamawpastpresentfuture.com) — published on the project’s public SoundCloud. Audio and machine transcripts are preserved in the tribal archive; quoted excerpts are verbatim from the transcripts and spot-checked against the recordings.