The Last Warrior: Peter MacDonald and the Navajo Nation

MacDonald, the former head of the Navajo Tribal Council, is now in a Navajo jail serving 20 years of combined tribal and federal sentences for election-law violations, bribery and corruption. Ably assisted by Schwarz ( The Hillside Strangler ), he here recalls events that led him, once an engineer with a promising future at Hughes Aircraft, first to leadership of his people and then to disgrace. Returning to work on the reservation in the 1960s, MacDonald wrested the power to administer funds for the anti-poverty programs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As three-term Tribal Chairman, he fought for new federal and private assistance programs outside the control of politics and the BIA. When his efforts to secure mineral leases and water rights threatened the states of Arizona and New Mexico, he ran afoul of Barry Goldwater and others in power. In 1988 three grand juries in turn refused to indict him; in 1989 he was found guilty of the above charges in a trial he convincingly maintains was politically motivated. Acknowledging that accepting donations to his election campaign from non-Navajo sources violated tribal law, MacDonald persuasively argues that other charges were unfairly pursued, e.g., the agency for Navajo Economic Opportunity that he founded and ran was audited more than 100 times in four years. His story is an absorbing account of conflicting cultures and customs. Photos. (Nov.)