Friday, March 29, 2024

50 Years Ago: MacDonald takes on U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater

Peter MacDonald was back in the news this week when he decided that as the director of the Navajo Office of Economic Opportunity, he would support the U.S. senator who criticized the amount of money the federal government was spending on the poor, saying more should be given to Indian programs.

Paul Fannin, a Republican (like MacDonald) senator from Arizona wanted Congress to rein in President Johnson’s poverty program because it was costing too much; and besides, the “Indians weren’t getting enough of the economic opportunity money.”

“Indian citizens deserve a greater share of federal attention in the war against poverty,” Fannin said.

MacDonald released a statement agreeing with Fannin.

Congress needs to provide more money, he said, for “All Americans who live in poverty.”

Yes, the BIA has spent billions of dollars educating Indian children but “often the Indian have benefited very little by these expenditures,” he said.

The money that the Indian people are getting from the anti-poverty program, he said, “should lead to the road of self-sufficiency rather than the road of continued handouts.”

This was probably the first time at least in the Navajo Times, that MacDonald was showing he was not afraid to speak on national issues.

And while he was supporting a U.S. senator in this case, MacDonald seemed to be just at ease with going after a senator who he felt was working against the interests of the Navajo people.

He would show this courage later in his political career when he would take on U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater over Goldwater’s support of the Hopi in the land dispute between the two tribes.

But although the two had a lot of political differences, MacDonald would later – when he became chairman of the tribe – show a compassion for Goldwater that surprised a lot of people.

Goldwater submitted a request to MacDonald in the late 70s to name a landmark in the western portion of the reservation in memory of his wife, saying she deeply loved that place. MacDonald agreed to support it and the tension between the two cooled, at least for a little time.

Goldwater would often go into rants about MacDonald and his government. One of Goldwater’s main objections to MacDonald was that he was in bed with the AFL-CIO, which provided funds to his Democratic opponents.

MacDonald had entered into a deal with the labor union in which the union agreed to support the Navajos in the land dispute in exchange for the tribe’s effort to register Navajos to vote the Democratic ticket.

This angered Goldwater that at the next election when he saw the tribal members going to the polls in record numbers to vote the Democratic ticket that he accused the union and the MacDonald administration of handing out beer coupons to tribal members for voting for Democrats.

This was also a week that a big scandal broke on the reservation over what a member of the Navajo Nation’s powerful advisory committee said or didn’t say to a couple of non-Indians.

The fight was over the dismissal by the school board over the dismissal of a principal at one of the schools in the Window Rock School District.

Two of the most vocal people in this dispute were members of a group called the Citizen’s Committee for Better Education.

The actions of Bill Gaston, the chairman of the committee and Ray Stanton, one of the committee members, got an unnamed member of the Advisory Committee so mad that he lashed out at them.

According to information given to the Navajo Times, someone who said he was representing the Advisory Committee told the two men that if they don’t get their families off the reservation immediately, “you will be handcuffed and thrown off bodily.”

The Times checked with the members of the Advisory Committee and could find no action by the committee itself on this action. In fact, as far as the Times could determine, the committee had not even discussed the two men in any way.

Navajo Nation Chairman Raymond Nakai was quoted as saying he knew nothing about the matter and he wasn’t going to get involved.

So was this one tribal official who was getting off some anger issues despite the fact he had no power to do anything.

Well, the El Paso Natural Gas Company, which employed both men, apparently didn’t want to take a chance that the threat was factual.

Two days after the threat was reported, both men were transferred off the reservation to other parts of the company’s operations.

A company spokesman said the company got permission for the two men to stay on the reservation for three days to get their things together which is an interesting statement due to the fact that the Navajo Times could find no one in any kind of official capacity who was trying to get the two men thrown off the reservation.

The two men would not name the person who threatened them and no one came forward claiming to be the person.


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About The Author

Bill Donovan

Bill Donovan wrote about Navajo Nation government and its people since 1971. He joined Navajo Times in 1976, and retired from full-time reporting in 2018 to move to Torrance, Calif., to be near his kids. He continued to write for the Times until his passing in August 2022.

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