In His Own Words — Chief Hatcher
Nearly every line below is his — verbatim, from the memoir he typed in his own hand for the Library of Congress, from recorded oral-history interviews, from broadcasts, and from his last letter to the People. The museum adds only the order, and the occasional line of connective tissue in italics.
The name
“Why would two Indians name a kid Harold? That don’t make no sense to me! I’d rather have the name Buster. I sound like a clown, but, I like it.” — WPDE, Jefferson Award profile, 2018
The boy
He grew up in and around Conway and Myrtle Beach in the 1940s and 50s. He set the whole of it down himself, decades later, for the Veterans History Project.
“My family lived mostly in black neighborhoods. That caused problems, but we had nothing to compare our lives to, so as far as we knew, everybody lived the same way. When I was six, I was enrolled in a white elementary school.”
“The teacher kept asking me if my mom ever washed me or my clothes. She asked me if we had any soap at my house and I told her ’no.’ … The next day she [gave] me a bar of soap to take to my mom.”
“There was only one water fountain in the school. On one of the first days I was there, I went and tried to get a drink. I was manhandled about it and told my water was outside. I started going to the hose outside to drink.”
Content note: the next passage recounts a racist attack he suffered as a child and, in his own regretful words, what he said back. The slur is his memoir’s, softened here.
“One of them … threw an apple at me over the top of the car. It hit me in the side of the face and it hurt. They were yelling at me ‘Get out of the road, [n——].’ I was hurt and scared … so I ran into the diner. Ms. Inez wiped the apple off of my face and asked me why I was crying. … I told her (I’m so regretful now but I did it) Ms. Inez, I’m not a [n——], if I were a [n——] it would be alright but I’m not … You are a [n——].”
He found one school where the cruelty stopped:
“In Conway, I was enrolled in a community school and no one despised me there. I went through … Waccamaw Elementary with no hate problems.”
And a caution from his own father, which he spent the rest of his life refusing:
“Yes you’re an Indian, but you don’t need to tell anybody.” — his father, recalled to MyHorryNews, 2021
The line that holds the whole childhood — and the reason the tribe exists:
“I was wrong at home because I wasn’t dark enough. I was wrong at school because I wasn’t white enough.” — Center for Cultural Preservation oral history, 2014
Finding home
He was seven or eight when his mother took him to Cherokee — and in a store there, an older Cherokee woman treated him as one of her own.
“Here was all these people that looked like me… it made me feel like I’m home. This is where I’m supposed to be. I have a place to be now. And that’s the way I feel about the tribe… it’s a place where people that have not been accepted into the full society of this country can be accepted.” — oral-history interview, 2021
“I had been an outsider everywhere I was, home or in school or whatever, my whole life.” — oral-history interview, 2021
The soldier
He typed the war down plainly, the way he lived it.
“One day I was driving home and passed an Army recruiting office and decided to join the Army. A week later I was on my way to Fort Bragg.”
In Vietnam he was a machine gunner and a tunnel rat with the 82nd Airborne. This is the action that earned him the Bronze Star — in his own words:
“We were down on the third level when the lead man got shot and fell. He had the flashlight and whenever I reached for it they would shoot at my hand. The guy behind me took off. … I wanted to but I had the urge to bring the lead man with me. I have no logical reason but that is how I felt. So, I wrapped my hands into his pant legs … and started dragging him a little at a time toward what I thought was the way out. … I pulled him out but his head was opened by the shot he took. I didn’t know that he was dead until I saw him in the light. … I don’t know what it was but they gave me a Bronze star for it.”
Even the sniper who wounded him got his gallows humor:
“I was on guard duty and I smoked … so I was playing and smoking when I got hit. I never met the guy who shot me. I suppose it was a sniper firing at my cigarette. It might have been because he didn’t like Country Music or maybe my version of country music.”
“I was evaced to the field hospital … and when I awoke, I had my Combat Infantryman’s badge, My Bronze Star and my Purple Heart along with a Vietnam Unit medal … pinned to my pillow.”
He came home to jeers, not a parade:
“We were sent via C-141 to Scott Airforce Base in Illinois. There we were welcomed by people calling us names and such.”
And after a jump he’d been ordered to make against medical orders ended his airborne career, he made a quiet vow:
“They classified it as a termination of Airborne status and removed my wings in ceremony. I never put them back on.”
“During my military time I got educated and got off of the bottom rung.”
All memoir passages: Library of Congress, Veterans History Project — the Harold Dalton Hatcher Collection, in his own hand. He retired a Chief Warrant Officer (WO‑3) in 1988.
The people
Ask him who the Waccamaw were and he’d start two centuries back, at the settlement.
“The Waccamaw people came from what is now known as the Dimery Settlement … a community of Native American people that … established their own school, their own church … and they lived together on that little piece of land for … almost a hundred years.”
“In 1813 a fella named John Dimery, which is kin to me … gathered together a bunch of his friends, collected some money, and they bought 300 acres of land back from Mr. Lewis. And that land is what became the Dimery Settlement.”
His grandfather’s fight — the one that runs in the family blood:
“In 1935, Horry County decided they … combine the black and Indian school, and they told the Indian people to go to the colored school. … So my granddaddy — his name was Vander Hatcher — … took them all to the white school, and they wouldn’t let them in. … a group of white parents came out, beat the kids, and ran them away. So … my granddaddy sued the county.”
“They sent a group of learned people out to look at each child individually and decide, based on skin color … whether or not they would go to a black school or a white school. And we had — one of my uncles went to the black school, and his sister went to the white school. Same mother, same father.”
On the name, and the old ways:
“Actually the Waccamaw is the name of a river, not a people. … We called it Blackwater. Waccamaw. So we became Blackwaters when the white people got here.”
“We didn’t have a word that meant hunt. Our word meant making meat, and we felt like the only reason to take a life was to sustain life.”
His theology, told through a marble and an anvil:
“Everything that is alive is rolled into a big ball or marble. … if you put that marble on an anvil and you hit it with a hammer and it flies into a thousand different pieces, it doesn’t matter how small of a piece it is, and it doesn’t matter how far away from the anvil it flies. It’s always a piece of God, nature.”
And the eagle’s feather — the thing the law would not let him have:
“Traditionally we like to put an eagle’s feather in the casket of all of our dead people to lead their spirit back to God. Unfortunately, if you’re not a federal tribe you can’t legally own an eagle’s feather. … But my mother died about two years ago. She was ninety-eight years old, and I gave her an eagle’s feather. … Even though I’m a combat veteran … I’ve got a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. And I can’t practice the religion of my choice.”
“A four-in-hand tie was a way they used to lead slaves … they could carry four in each hand. … I don’t wear them now. I’ve been a slave long enough, and I’m not going to be a slave anymore.” — all: Center for Cultural Preservation oral history, 2014
The fight
“When I was retired from the Army in 1988, I bought a company and I wanted to register it as a minority-owned company. I thought that I had paid the dues. I drank out of the colored water fountains. I had sat in the balconies at theaters. I had eaten off of paper when other people ate off glass. … But the state of South Carolina at that time said there were no Indians in South Carolina, so I ended up suing the state and I won.”
“I want it to be that I at least made it a little bit more palatable in South Carolina for Indians to be known to have lived here, that we are human beings.”
On the law he changed so a chief could marry his own people:
“I had a politician tell me, ‘Just go get you a Notary Public seal and you can notarize it.’ No, I’m not going to do that. My signature as a chief ought to suffice.”
On being told what he could and couldn’t do, by people who were never there:
“Because when I was in Vietnam there were none of these damned politicians there. When I got the bullet holes in my belly there was none of them there. And now they’re telling me what’s right and what’s wrong? I don’t buy that.” — oral history, 2014
“We don’t ask for anything better, but we think we should at least get the same.” — WBTW, 2022
He never stopped naming the cost of not being federally recognized:
“There’s 600 sets of human remains now on shelves in South Carolina that we can’t put back in the ground.” — WBTW, 2022
The goodbye
“I have never lied to you, and never stabbed anyone in the back. I do nothing under the table… I don’t perceive problems other than growing pains, and the disruption that any change of command would bring. Please give your loyalty to Chief Cail, I believe she will lead ably and honestly… Thank you for allowing me to serve in this AWSOME position. I did my best for you.” — tribe-wide resignation letter, June 29, 2026, signed “Chief Retired”
And the way he ended nearly every conversation — a handshake and an open hand:
“Take my hand like an Indian. Good to meet you, sir. If I can help you somehow you let me know.” — oral history, 2014