Indigenous Knowledge and Public Lands: A Collaborative Approach to Indigenizing Education in Outdoor Recreational Spaces

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Early colonial violence in the Eastern United States had a detrimental impact on Native nations, including population reduction, loss of cultural knowledge, and forced assimilation. As a result, very few Native communities on the East Coast have received Federal Recognition status from the U.S. Government. The lack of acknowledgment has created conditions that limit Native control over how cultural knowledge is shared and represented. On the other hand, academic and professional archaeologists play a major role in interpreting and disseminating cultural information. Without extensive collaboration and consultation, archaeological data can often be misinterpreted under a Western lens, leading to the spread of misinformation and/or limited educational resources in public spaces. This work is a collaboration between non-Native academic archaeologists, the Waccamaw Indian People, and the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge. A central goal is to co-develop and introduce new signage to the Refuge that highlights Indigenous history, knowledge, and life in the ancestral lands of the Waccamaw people. This work highlights how Native communities, federal programs, and archaeological data can work together to improve access to educational opportunities for the general public about local history and ecology from an Indigenous perspective in coastal South Carolina.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Collaborative and Community Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51192