50 Years Ago: WR police building 50 years old; A rape gets a lot of attention

It’s probably something no one wants to celebrate but this month the Window Rock police and court building will be celebrating its 50th anniversary.

The tribal police and court system began using the building in July 1965 – its grand opening would be celebrated in August – and, according to the Navajo Times, everyone in the government was extremely pleased on how well the building came out.

The cost was a princely sum of $775,000 and this was the seventh facility of its kind build on the reservation in the previous three years at a total cost of $2.6 million. This would indicate that the Window Rock facility was far bigger than the ones built in Tuba City, Chinle, Navajo Springs, Lupton, Shiprock and Tohatchi.

The building, as it does now, consisted of a jail on one side on the first floor, police administrative offices on the other side and the courts on the second floor.

It also included a police training building behind it (now headquarters for police records).

It may be hard to believe now but the Times said the academy included a dormitory, classes and a kitchen to accommodate up to 50 officers in a training class. There was also a five-alley 50-foot pistol range in the basement.

The academy would remain there for more than 15 years before it was moved to Toyei, where it existed for another 25 years before that was closed because of the discovery of asbestos in many of the buildings used by the academy.

Construction of the building began in the fall of 1962 and according to news reports of that time, it held a record for many years as the building on the reservation that took the longest to build.

One of the big stories throughout July 1965 centered around an investigation by federal authorities of four Navajos who were accused of raping an 19-year-old Massachusetts girl who had come to the reservation that summer to work on an antipoverty program for the country’s VISTA program.

The four – Wilson Gray, 20; Wesley Gray, 18; James L. Frank, 22 and Tully Tsosie, 30, – would later by indicted by a federal grand jury for the crime.

The victim’s name was never released. The four were accused of assaulting the girl as she was sleeping in her quarters in Dennehotso.

According to news reports at the time, the four confessed to the crime and after their conviction by a Prescott jury, their attorney tried to get their prison sentences overturned because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared such confessions inadmissible if the defendants were not advised of their rights.

The U.S. district court judge in the case, Walter E. Craig, was lenient with three of the defendants, saying they came from good families.

Wilson and Wesley Gray, as well as Frank, were given a sentence not to exceed six years in a federal youth correction institution. The fourth, Tsosie, who was the oldest, was given 15 years.

The media reported that during the trial, Craig, out of the blue stated that the “Navajos don’t need Massachusetts girls coming to give them lessons in cooking either, but that’s beside the point.”

As for the girl, she told VISTA officials that she wanted to stay on the reservation since she got to know the Navajo people and had made a lot of friends but the program said they had to follow their policy and transferred her to another site.

Because of the incident, VISTA changed its policies on the reservation, no longer sending female volunteers to a community alone. Instead, a policy was implemented for the future to require at least two volunteers to any community on any Indian reservation.

In other news, Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai announced plans by the tribe, with the cooperation of the federal government, to set up a garment-sewing plan in Winslow in October.

The interesting aspect of this project was that the federal government got involved because of reports that Navajos – because of their training as weavers – were skilled in high-speed sewing.

The federal government wanted to test this premise so they gave the tribe some $50,000 to set up the training program, which would last eight weeks and would train Navajos to sew as fast as they could.

The announcement for the program said the company that was overseeing the test, BVD, was planning to establish a permanent manufacturing facility on the Navajo Reservation if it was proven that Navajo women had the gift of high-speed sewing.

This whole thing would take a new twist about a year later when BVD indicated the test was very successful and they wanted to establish a plant to hire as many as 200 women on a permanent basis.

Tribal officials got very excited and the Navajo Tribal Council passed a resolution agreeing to spend $1.6 million of tribal funds to build the plant in Fort Defiance.

Then came the winkle.

DVD officials said they wanted to build the plant in Winslow and said they were talking to officials on the Hopi Reservation to help with the funding, in which case Hopi women would be hired rather than Navajo.

There were reports that officials for the U.S. Interior Department also, for reasons that were never explained, also favored the Winslow site and didn’t seem to mind that the whole thing was causing more tension between the Hopis and Navajos.

There were some rumors that the Interior Department was being lobbied heavily by officials from Winslow who wanted the plant in their city for economic reasons but this was denied by Interior officials.

BVD officials, on the other hand, denied rumors that they wanted to go with the Hopi because of the Navajo Tribe’s reputation of trying to control a project if the tribe funded it. The Hopis were saying that they would not interfere with the company’s plan to put the plant where they wanted.

That led to the Gallup Independent writing an editorial on July 9, 1966 saying the Interior Department “should keep its politically motivated paws off the weaving loom.”

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