‘We won’t have anyone like him’

Posted by Arlyssa Becenti | Feb 22, 2018 | News |

Long-time reporter moves away, will continue to write

Navajo Times | Donovan Quintero
Bill Donovan still has a book on Indian sign language he brought with him from Kentucky to the Navajo Nation in the 1970s.

WINDOW ROCK

When Bill Donovan was first told in jest that Navajos don’t speak English but know sign language, he believed it.

So before the 23-year-old trekked to the Navajo Nation from Kentucky in 1970 to cover and report on the largest tribe, he brought with him a picture book “How Indian Sign Talk” by Iron Eyes Cody, which he studied as he drove into the Southwest.

Donovan reminisced that, working as a cops reporter for the Lexington Herald, he would hang around the police station and one night he was talking to a Sgt. Triplet, who was in fact Navajo. This is when Donovan was given the idea to cover a Native American tribe he wasn’t familiar with and who spoke a language that is near impossible to learn if you aren’t familiar with it. “(Triplet) said, ‘Why don’t you work on the Navajo Reservation because no one is covering Navajos?’” said Donovan. “We talked about it and he said, ‘You get to cover the government, the culture. It’s like being in a different culture,’” he said, “and I thought that sounded great.

“Then (Triplet) said, ‘You realize Navajos don’t speak English?’” said Donovan. “He said only a few speak English, but if I went out there I would have to speak Navajo and he started speaking Navajo. I said, ‘I’ll never learn that. Never in a million years.’ He said, ‘That’s all right because all Navajos speak sign language.’” Nearly 50 years later, on his last day in Gallup before moving to California, Donovan showed that he still had the sign language book.

But even though the Navajo sergeant was kidding with him about Navajos communicating through sign language, he was honest about Donovan being able to cover the Navajo government and culture, which Donovan did happily for the rest of his journalistic career.