Thursday, March 28, 2024

50 Years Ago: Council delegate blames rape of Vista volunteer on ONEO

The future tribal chairman of the Navajo Nation spent most of November, 50 years ago, in a media war with a member of the Navajo Tribal Council who was displeased with the way Peter MacDonald was running the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity.

This wouldn’t be the last time that a member of the tribal council publicly criticized him for an alleged failure to do his job but it was the first time that anything negative about MacDonald was reported by the Navajo Times and other papers in the area.

And given the fact that Raymond Nakai would one day become MacDonald’s most persistent competitor, in 1965, the tribal chairman came to MacDonald’s defense in a very unique way.

The criticism of MacDonald came from Frankie Howard, the council delegate from Tolani Lake who was one of the most powerful members of the council as well as a member of the council’s Advisory Committee.

Howard also blamed officials for ONEO for the recent rape of a young Vista volunteer.

“It is unfortunate,” Howard said about the operation of ONEO, ” that so much time and effort has been expended in this apparently unnecessary organizational stage at the expense of effectively carrying out programs which would directly benefit the Navajo people.”

Howard didn’t like any of the programs MacDonald was overseeing at ONEO, saying that they duplicated programs that have been around for years that better helped the Navajo people.

Howard said he had talked to a number of chapters – just how many he didn’t say – and all of those he talked to had serious problems with the way ONEO was doing its job.

ONEO, he said, was bringing in a lot of administrators, coordinators, advisers and volunteers who seem to be “inadequately trained.”

“It seems to be the general feeling,” said Howard, that these programs “could have been more efficiently administered through the existing tribal chapter organizations with the assistance of district councils, grazing committee and land boards.”

Howard said the recent incident at Dennehotso where a Vista volunteer was raped illustrates “total lack of experience of organizing and programming on the part of program administrators.”

He said that the young volunteer was “instructed by her supervisor to stay in an isolated, unprotected hogan,” while a more responsible member of the council, Clark Hadley, and his wife offered the girl better accommodations, which had a door that locked.

Howard strongly suggested that if ONEO was better run and the people who administered its program were better trained, the rape would never had occurred.

MacDonald fought back with a statement that was given to the media the following day, accusing Howard of trying to use tribal politics – Howard was a member of the Old Guard who hated anything new – to destroy something that was benefiting the Navajo people.

“This attack,” said MacDonald, “is actually an attack on the Navajo people.”

For it was the Navajo people who are running the ONEO program by telling MacDonald and others what programs are needed.

“I, myself, have enough confidence in the Navajo people to believe they have the ability and the integrity to fashion their own program and execute it efficiently,” he said.

As for the young girl who was raped, it was pointed out that the girl was the one who insisted that she be allowed to stay in a hogan because while she was on the reservation, she wanted to get the full flavor of what it was like to live as an average Navajo.

In fact, after she was raped and the person who allegedly did the rape was arrested, his victim said she wanted to stay with the program and wanted to continue her efforts to learn first-hand what it was like to live a traditional Navajo lifestyle.

It was the national VISTA program and not ONEO that insisted, however, that she leave the reservation and be assigned to an area where she would be better protected.

But it was Nakai who came through with the most unique way of defending ONEO, a program that he was largely responsible for getting funded.

He said it seemed to him that Howard and those who supported his position were very similar to the immature young people throughout the country who were demonstrating against the Vietnam War and “other matters of which they disapprove.”

He said Howard, in effect, was burning his draft card “instead of pitching in to help win the war on poverty.”

Among those who supported Howard was the tribe’s general counsel, Norman Littell, who was still around and was doing everything in his power to make Nakai look like a fool.

Pointing out that Littell was also against ONEO, Nakai said that ONEO showed the Navajo people, for the first time, that they could solve their own problems “without the help of a highly-paid lawyer whose main contribution has been nothing but gobbledygook and double talk.”

As a separate issue, this press release got a lot of attention from the personnel at the Navajo Times who started a campaign to try and figure how who actually wrote it.

The paper pointed out that “gobbledygook” is not a word that anyone felt was in Nakai’s vocabulary and no one actually believed that Nakai was media savvy enough to be able to compare Howard to someone who demonstrated against the Vietnam War.

If they ever did figure it out, they never wrote an article telling the readers of the paper who was the mystery man behind Nakai’s speeches.


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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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