Self-Government

Most people never see a constitution get written. The Waccamaw wrote theirs three times in sixteen years — 2000, 2008/09, and the 2016 constitution in force today — each generation a snapshot of what the tribe had learned about governing itself. (The 2008/09 rewrite followed the most turbulent chieftaincy years; constitutions get rewritten when their gaps get found.)

Three branches

• Executive — a Tribal Chief (elected at large, four-year term, genealogical ties to the Dimery Settlement required), a Vice Chief elected as running mate, up to two appointed Second Chiefs. The Chief runs everything external and holds a veto, overridable only by five of seven Council votes.
• Legislative — a seven-seat Tribal Council plus an elected Chief of Tribal Council. Everything internal. Seats staggered against U.S. presidential years.
• Judicial — two Tribal Judges, an Associate Judge, and a seven-member Council of Elders who review every ordinance for constitutional conflict and run all elections.

The safeguards

• The three-readings rule — nothing affecting the membership passes until read three times in open meetings. Even waiving the rule takes a resolution — which gets its own paper trail.
• Initiative and referendum — thirty percent of registered voters can force any question onto a ballot, over the government’s head.
• Succession by law, not by fight — when Chief Hatcher resigned in 2026, the office passed to the Vice Chief automatically, under Article VII. No interregnum.
• Votes from anywhere — online/phone voting rules adopted in 2009; by 2026 the Council routinely voted by email, each tally read into the record.

The elegant detail: Article XI, the saving clause, keeps every prior resolution in force “to the extent consistent” with the current constitution — twenty-five years of tribal law flowing forward through each rewrite. Which is why the tribe keeps a verified archive of all of it (about this museum).

The chieftaincy, from the signatures

No master list of chiefs survived — so the archive reconstructed the succession from the signature blocks of the tribe’s own resolutions:

A record that shows its work

The archive keeps the paper as faithfully as the law. On the signed originals, the handwriting is history: an election certification where the tallies are corrected by hand — 69 struck through, 70 written above; a resolution where a confirmation threshold is amended in ink in the margin; reading dates fixed, months corrected, “passes” circled. The archive preserves every emendation verbatim, because on documents like these, the hand-corrections are the record of a small government doing its work honestly.

Constitutional design is usually studied in nation-states. It’s worth seeing what it looks like when a community of a few hundred does it for themselves, carefully, for a quarter century.