The Long Fight — five generations
Some families hand down land. This one handed down a lawsuit.
Before the paper: Blackwater. The Waccamaw enter the written record in 1521 — among the first peoples of the continent Europeans wrote down. The name itself is the river’s, not theirs: “Well, you know 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.” In the early 1700s, when Waccamaw bands struck back at traders who cheated them, the colony answered with what history calls the Waccamaw War — “they came in and killed about 100 men, women, and children, and the rest ran off and joined the Catawbas.” Even that last clause the chief contests, citing King Hagler of the Catawba, summoned to Charleston and asked to contain the Waccamaws: “And Hagler says, ‘I can’t get them to mind me either.’ So the history book that said we joined the Catawbas probably is inaccurate.” A people who survived by not being governable — it is the oldest thread in this story.
1813 — buy it back. After the Revolution, South Carolina granted the land the People were living on to a man named Josiah Lewis — who had them removed. John Dimery, Chief Hatcher’s great-great-great-grandfather, pooled money with friends and bought back 300 acres near Dog Bluff. That purchase became the Dimery Settlement — two churches, a school, and almost a hundred years of a community the state didn’t have a word for.
1935 — the schoolhouse door. Horry County, unwilling to fund three school systems, closed the Indian school and ordered the settlement children into the colored school. Chief Hatcher tells what his grandfather did next:
“So my granddaddy — his name was Vander Hatcher — … took them all to the white school, and they wouldn’t let them in. As a matter of fact, according to the newspapers, a group of white parents came out, beat the kids, and ran them away. So my granddaddy sued the county … and demanded they build proper facilities.”
The county’s answer was to sort the children one by one, by skin:
“They sent a group of learned people out to look at each child individually and decide, based on skin color and certain traits, 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.”
1988 — the state says you don’t exist. Vander’s grandson came home from the Army — twenty years, Vietnam, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart — bought a company, and asked South Carolina to register it as minority-owned:
“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.”
2005 — the state says your name. Within a few years of that suit he had founded the modern tribal organization and begun a recognition campaign he worked “with every governor from Carroll Campbell on down” — twenty-some years, ending on February 17, 2005, when the Waccamaw Indian People became the first tribe recognized by the State of South Carolina.
Recognition wasn’t an ending; it was admission to the table. The record fills with the follow-through: delegate appointments to the state’s Native American bodies, a seat on the Minority Affairs advisory committee held by the retired chief, letters to Congress, a federal recognition committee — the quiet machinery a small nation builds when the loud part of the fight is won.
2017 — the fight, typed. The machinery ran on a typewriter. His papers from these years fill with letters — to committee chairmen, to commissioners, to colleagues — each one the same two-century argument in administrative dress. When the SC House Oversight Committee took up the state Commission for Minority Affairs in October 2017, he watched the hearing “via the Internet” and mailed the chairman his verdict on who should hold the state’s definition of “Indian” — and on the recognition standard he had spent his life meeting (his spelling and punctuation are preserved as typed, here and throughout):
“While I cannot deny that Indian recognition is evil, it is a necessary evil for those of us who seek to protect and preserve the true Indian Culture of our state. If this control is not monitored and properly administered, non-Indians will be registering companies, gaining earmarked monies, corrupting cultural activities and even the history of the true Indian people of the state.” — letter to the Hon. Weston Newton, Chairman, SC House Oversight Committee, 2017
“Simply claiming to be ‘recognized’ does not make it true.”
And, on his own office:
“I am elected as the Chief of the Waccamaw and I take that designation seriously. I will not surrender to the CMA my authority as the Chief and will not blame them until they refuse to help me pursue my goals.”
Around the same time, asked privately what the Commission could actually do for Indians, he typed out a whole reform program in a note to a colleague — signed simply “Buster”:
“Indians are the only ethnic group they service that has their own governments. We are elected by our people to do what we think are in the best interest of our people. However, CMA often think themselves supervisors of the Chiefs.” — note on the Commission for Minority Affairs, c. 2017
“I have asked for and been denied time to speak on issues that I thought were important to my people. However, I did manage to get it in, anyway.”
His fixes were practical down to the dollar: hear the public before the vote, not after — “Its too late after the vote”; keep group leaders off the boards that judge rival petitions — “There should be no group leader sitting on a review board for any tribe seeking recognition”; and pay the poorer chiefs’ way to the table, "$50 or so" for gasoline, because some “cannot afford to attend … because they cannot afford the gasoline.” One committee at a time.
2018 — a letter to the President. On June 5, 2018, he took the argument to the top — as he had done before. The letterhead changed with the administrations; the sentence at the core of it never did:
“The Native people of this country serve more, per capita, to defend our freedom than any other ethnic group. Our people have died in every conflict fought by this country, to earn and to protect the freedoms of all of its citizens, even including the Revolutionary war.
We are the only faction of this country’s population that are not immigrants, but we are also the only faction treated as outsiders, even in a country we fight to protect.” — letter to President Donald J. Trump, June 5, 2018
“Federal laws deny our people many of the rights and freedoms that even non-citizens enjoy in this country. These denials even include the constitutionally guaranteed right to practice the religion of our choice.”
It was not his first letter to a White House — he had pressed President Clinton on the same issues in the 1990s, and he told the new president so:
“I ask you to listen to your non-federal Native American citizens, who no one before you, had the guts to hear because of political pressure. … You might remember me from working with President Clinton on the same issues.
I await your answer, Mr. President!”
2022 — the fight continues. The federal petition is filed. The remains of some 600 ancestors sit warehoused in institutions, awaiting a recognition that would compel their return. The land, the school, the registry, the name, the bones: it has been the same argument since 1813 — we are here, and we are human beings. Or as the chief put it, asked what he wants his legacy to be:
“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.”
The fight is also cultural
The lawsuits are the loud part. The quiet part is a running list of things the law would not let a non-federal Indian do — and what the tribe did about each:
Bury the dead properly. “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. So when we bury our dead, we’re compelled to slip it in and hide it. But my mother died… She was ninety-eight years old, and I gave her an eagle’s feather. She’s buried with one… Even though I’m a combat veteran from the Republic of Vietnam… I can’t practice the religion of my choice. Something’s wrong with that concept.” The documentary The Right To Bury Our Own carries this fight forward, alongside the return of some 600 ancestors’ remains warehoused in institutions.
Sell your own art as your own. Federal law (P.L. 101-644, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act) makes it illegal to sell craft as Native-made without state or federal recognition — “We’re the only people in the country that have such a rule to live with.” Recognition, again, as the key to ordinary life.
Marry your own way. Told by a politician to “just go get you a Notary Public seal,” the chief refused: “No, I’m not going to do that. My signature as a chief ought to suffice.” South Carolina’s law was changed (2008) so Native leaders can perform marriages — done the Waccamaw way: “we tie the left hands together and the right hands together and put the blanket over their backs.”
Wear what you are. He does not wear a four-in-hand necktie: “A four-in-hand tie was a way they used to lead slaves… I wore one when I was in the military. I don’t wear them now. I’ve been a slave long enough, and I’m not going to be a slave anymore.” He wears a choker.
And the wins keep accruing: Indigenous Peoples’ Day now stands where Columbus Day stood in Myrtle Beach and Conway — argued for, like everything else here, one meeting at a time. The fight’s last chapter — federal recognition — is unfinished, and now belongs to the tribe today.