Federal Recognition — the unfinished fight
The Waccamaw Indian People have been recognized by the State of South Carolina since February 17, 2005. The United States government has not recognized them at all. That one gap — between state and federal — is the tribe’s unfinished fight, and Chief Hatcher named its cost until the end.
Two kinds of recognition
State recognition (2005) made the Waccamaw real in the eyes of South Carolina. Federal recognition is a separate, far harder status, granted by the U.S. government, that establishes a nation-to-nation relationship — and unlocks rights the tribe still does not have. As of today the Catawba Indian Nation is the only federally recognized tribe in South Carolina; the Waccamaw are one of the state’s nine state-recognized tribes.
“The only people in this country that are required to be recognized are Native Americans. No other ethnicity, none.” — Chief Hatcher, WMBF, 2023
The impossible bar
Federal acknowledgment asks a tribe to prove continuous existence and descent across centuries — with paperwork that, for a people the state spent generations trying to erase, was never allowed to exist.
“The federal government requires that we be able to show a known Waccamaw today to a known Waccamaw at historic times, which was about 1689… There wasn’t any damn birth certificates from then.” — Chief Hatcher, MyHorryNews, 2018
The word the government would not define
That bar rested on a single undefined word. The regulation required descent from a tribe existing in “historical times” — and for decades the government would not say when historical times began. Chief Hatcher wrote to the Bureau about it more than once and received no answer. In a phone call with Congressman Tom Rice and the director of the acknowledgment office, he was told the Dimery Settlement was not enough: the tribe would still need to connect the settlement’s people to a known Waccamaw.
He was being told the rule correctly. Under the regulation then in force, “historically” meant “dating from first sustained contact with non-Indians” — a clock that started in the 1600s, and a demand no southeastern tribe could meet, because the records that would have satisfied it were the records the law had forbidden.
2015 — the rule changes
On July 31, 2015, the Department of the Interior’s rewrite of 25 CFR Part 83 took effect. The criteria moved — what the tribe had always called 83.7 became 83.11 — and the Department defined the word at last, in three words at 25 CFR 83.1:
“Historical means before 1900.”
In the preamble to the rule, Interior took up the older, contact-era benchmark by name and declined to adopt it, saying such beginning dates “would not achieve any reduction in the documentary or administrative burden.” It also stated how descent would actually be weighed: “The final rule provides for evaluating the most recent evidence prior to 1900.” Backward from 1900 — not forward from first contact.
The Dimery Settlement was founded in 1813, and its families appear on the federal Indian population schedule in 1900. The reach the tribe had been asked to make now ends inside the record it already holds.
Nobody told the tribe. The change was published in the Federal Register; no letter came. Chief Hatcher’s own writing on federal recognition quotes the new 1900 start date for three of the criteria while still describing the old contact-era standard for descent — the two halves of his argument straddling a rule change he was never informed of.
The fight is not over. The descent charts still have to be drawn, and as of 2026 no tribe has completed the revised process from start to finish. But the wall he spent twenty years describing is not where he was told it was.
The cost: ancestors on shelves
The sharpest cost is spiritual and specific. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) — the federal law that lets tribes reclaim their ancestors’ remains — applies only to federally recognized tribes. So the Waccamaw cannot bring their own dead home.
“We have a lot of our people on museum shelves… The federal government owns them, and they won’t work with us because we’re not federal.” — Chief Hatcher, WMBF, 2023
More than 600 sets of ancestral remains are held in South Carolina institutions that the tribe cannot bury. It is the subject of the 2025 documentary “The Right to Bury Our Own.”
The road through Congress
The other path to federal status is an act of Congress. In March 2021, Rep. Tom Rice (SC-7), with Rep. Nancy Mace, introduced H.R. 1942 — the Waccamaw Indian Acknowledgement Act in the 117th Congress. It was referred to committee and died without a vote. The tribe has kept at it — filing a federal recognition petition in 2022 and continuing to press its case with South Carolina’s delegation — but the fight is not won.
“For my people, it would mean that they would actually take their place as honored and known citizens… I don’t think I’ll ever see it personally. But… it would be like acknowledging that my people are valid.” — Chief Hatcher, WBTW, 2023
He did not see it. The work now belongs to the administration that follows him.