Waccamaw Indian People · South Carolina
A Waccamaw Life, in His Own Words
A boy who belonged to neither world. A soldier who came home to jeers. The chief who spent more than thirty years making his people impossible to overlook — and who was told, when he asked his own state to see him, that there were no Indians in South Carolina.
In progress · a draft of a life
The arc
He was wrong at home because he wasn’t dark enough, wrong at school because he wasn’t white enough — and he spent the rest of his life building a place where people who had been accepted nowhere could finally be accepted.
In his own words
“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, 2018
“Here was all these people that looked like me… it made me feel like I’m home. 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, 2021
“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.”
Center for Cultural Preservation, 2014
“I have never lied to you, and never stabbed anyone in the back… Thank you for allowing me to serve. I did my best for you.”
His resignation letter, 29 June 2026 — signed “Chief Retired”
From his son
My father stepped down in June of 2026, after more than thirty years as Chief. He has been writing the whole time and hardly anyone knows it — a memoir he typed himself for the Library of Congress, fifty years of letters to his people, essays, newsletters, a kitchen-table afternoon with an elder that he recorded and kept.
I am putting it together, and he is filling in what only he can. Every word of the story is his. That is the one rule.
— Doug Hatcher
He is not finished, so neither is the book. His life and his people already have a home you can visit today.
In the meantime — visit the museum or read more in his words