End of Trail May Change for Imprisoned Navajo Leader

Every morning, medicine man Jim Mason steps out of his dirt-floored hogan and faces the sun rising over the red mesas and desert sage of the Navajo Nation.

He closes his eyes tightly, raises his arm over his head and rubs a pinch of corn pollen between his fingers. The golden dust rides on the morning breeze.

With this sacrifice, the medicine man prays in his native tongue for the return of a man once considered the most powerful Indian in America.

Peter MacDonald, the 68-year-old former leader of the Navajo Nation, spends his days in a federal prison, recovering from a heart attack. He has served four years of a 14-year sentence for instigating a bloody riot to regain power that left two people dead. He also was convicted of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks--charges that shamed a nation mired in poverty and yearning for respect.

But after much dissension and soul-searching, the Navajo Nation has forgiven its fallen leader. Now it wants the U.S. government to do the same.

“The Navajo people have a tradition of forgiveness and respect for former leaders,” says Navajo President Albert Hale, who was elected two years ago after campaigning heavily in support of MacDonald’s freedom.

“I want him to be home so he can spend the rest of his days at home with his family and in the community.”

Former President Jimmy Carter and MacDonald’s old nemesis, former Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, have joined the tribal campaign to free MacDonald. Both have written to President Clinton urging that MacDonald’s sentence be commuted. The request is under consideration, according to a Department of Justice spokesman.

But not all Navajos are ready to forgive. Tom LaPahe, a tribal council member who helped throw MacDonald out of office seven years ago, says his corruption made the Navajo Nation a “laughingstock.”

“He sold his people,” LaPahe says. “You can’t get lower than that.”

Over LaPahe’s objections, the tribal council last year officially pardoned MacDonald, who was convicted by both federal and tribal courts.

If Clinton doesn’t commute the sentence, tribal members fear MacDonald will suffer the same fate as the infamous Apache chief Geronimo, who died a prisoner of war in 1909 at Ft. Sill, Okla.

For an Indian, there is little else as humiliating.

“He’s dying physically and mentally,” says Vern Lee, the Navajo leading the campaign to free MacDonald. “If you take him away from his land, he begins to wither.”

As is Navajo custom, MacDonald’s umbilical cord was buried where he was born--in the Carrizo Mountains of Arizona during a spring sheep drive in 1928--forever tying him to his homeland.

His parents named him Hoshkaisith, for “he who clasps with power.” Schoolteachers Americanized his name, but he didn’t lose his native language. In World War II, he was trained to stump the Japanese by using Navajo as code.

When he returned from war, MacDonald earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of Oklahoma and worked for Hughes Aircraft in California before returning to the reservation in the mid-1960s. He rose quickly through the tribal ranks, and in 1970--amid a national groundswell of Indian pride--was elected to his first of four terms as chairman of America’s largest Indian tribe.

A mesmerizing, passionate orator, especially in his native tongue, MacDonald lambasted federal paternalism as oppressive and a threat to tribal sovereignty. During one of many battles with the federal government, he threatened to have agents shot on sight if they tried to usurp tribal police authority.

“For 12 years, it was Peter MacDonald versus the federal government. Practically every speech he made, he said, ‘We are fighting the federal government and we are winning,’ ” says Bill Donovan, a reporter for the Navajo Times who has covered him since his election in 1970. “People liked that.”

At the same time, millions of federal dollars were streaming in under the “War on Poverty” program--money that MacDonald said was owed to the Indians. He demanded that energy corporations pay taxes on their oil and coal mining operations, believing that they had been taking advantage of the Navajos.

The tribal government budget tripled under MacDonald’s authority, from $19 million to $57 million, and the number of tribal employees more than doubled. Housing, roads, hospitals and shopping centers began springing up across the reservation. “The Giant Is Waking,” one newspaper headline declared at the time.

But MacDonald’s power began to crumble as allegations surfaced that he was taking bribes in exchange for corporate contracts on the reservation. His contention that he was simply following a Navajo custom of accepting gifts did little to satisfy his accusers.

He lived lavishly, with fancy cars, an expensive home, private school for his children and jet-setting vacations. It was quite a contrast to many Navajos, who still had no running water or electricity.

“There was a lot of Richard Daley in him,” Donovan says, comparing MacDonald to the late Chicago mayor. “Under the Navajo system, there was a lot of opportunity for patronage--and he went for it hook, line and sinker.”

“People who were getting the money regarded him as the greatest leader the Navajos ever had,” Donovan says. But “a lot of people referred to him as a Third World dictator.”

In the winter of 1989, corporate executives testified during a U.S. Senate hearing that they had given MacDonald cash and gifts, including free limousines for his inauguration, a BMW and an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.

Even MacDonald’s own son, Rocky, testified against him, saying MacDonald used the term “golf balls” as code words to demand money from a middleman in a multimillion-dollar real estate deal. Each golf ball meant $1,000. “Peter MacDollars,” his critics called him.

Outraged by the congressional revelations, the tribal council threw MacDonald out of office.

Five months later, on July 20, 1989, he ordered his former police chief to “assist with the orderly restoration” of his administration. On that summer day, his supporters, some armed with baseball bats and two-by-fours, marched to the tribal headquarters at Window Rock. A melee broke out, and two of MacDonald’s supporters were killed.

Although MacDonald was home during the riot, he was convicted by a federal jury in 1992 of instigating it. But first, a tribal court jailed him for bribery and ethics charges stemming from the Senate hearings. Another federal jury convicted MacDonald of fraud, racketeering and extortion over a deal with a computer company operating on the reservation.

MacDonald, who declined to be interviewed, is now at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, a low-security prison where he was transferred because of his poor health. Without a presidential commutation, he faces 10 more years in prison.

Many of his supporters, especially the elders, believe MacDonald is innocent, a victim of overzealous federal authorities trying to silence the outspoken leader.

In their minds, he remains the greatest Navajo leader of all time.

“When he returns,” says Mason, the medicine man, who keeps a picture of MacDonald in his hogan, “we will have a feast and give him gifts of everything he has lost and put him back in purple robes.”