Bill Donovan, a prolific journalist who covered the Navajo Nation for newspapers in New Mexico and Arizona for five decades, has died. He was 76.
Donovan was hospitalised recently for pneumonia and died Saturday night at his Torrance home, surrounded by loved ones, according to his daughter, Kelly Cunningham.
Donovan was a Navajo Nation institution, a reporter who could recall Navajo history and phone numbers with ease. He worked for the Gallup Independent, the Navajo Times, the Arizona Republic, and other smaller publications, sometimes concurrently.
Donovan wrote about a long-standing land dispute between Navajos and Hopis, a hospital takeover, politics, and tribal government reform efforts. No story was more memorable — or terrifying — to him than a 1989 riot in Window Rock that turned deadly in a political power struggle, he said days before his death.
And no reporter was more knowledgeable about the events leading up to the riot or former Navajo Chairman Peter MacDonald, who was convicted of inciting it, than Donovan. He drew on decades of reporting experience to provide rich context for his stories.
“Aside from the ability to write well, one of the most prized qualities that a writer can bring to a story is institutional memory,” Donovan wrote in a December 2018 Navajo Times essay.
Donovan relocated to California in 2018 to be closer to his children, but he continued to write for the Navajo Times under a Los Angeles dateline, an outlet from which he was fired several times for stories critical of the tribal government. Cunningham and Richard Donovan were his two children, and he had two grandchildren.
Cunningham said her father instilled in her the value of a quick wit, patience, and kindness. She recalled a magic show gone wrong when she was in elementary school in Gallup, New Mexico, and Donovan was part of the act. Her father saved her from embarrassment by performing an impromptu comedy show in front of the entire school, she explained.
“Dad always lived in the moment to the fullest, “She stated. “I’ve never seen him angry, critical, or stressed.”
Donovan grew up in Newport, Kentucky, and attended nearby Georgetown College. In his early twenties, he was working the police beat at the Lexington Herald when a Navajo sergeant suggested he go to the Navajo Nation and work as a reporter.
Donovan began his career at the Gallup Independent as a sports editor.
“He didn’t know a damn thing about sports,” said Bob Zollinger, the paper’s publisher. “He didn’t know the difference between a baseball bat and a golf club.” So he read a few books and began writing about sports.”
Donovan was a voracious reader. He’d read at stoplights in his car and during Navajo Nation Council sessions, which he attended so frequently that he was dubbed “the councilman from Gallup.” He donated his massive collection of books to local libraries when he left for California.
Donovan, who liked movies and McDonald’s, wore plaid, dingy button-up shirts and scribbled notes on napkins and scraps of paper. Before turning to those notes, he wrote stories from memory.
Former Navajo President Peterson Zah recalled first meeting Donovan in the 1970s while working as a legal advocate.
“It was his heart,” Zah said. “That’s a promising sign.” In most of these stories, he really wanted the truth to come out.”
His knowledge of the Navajo people, history, and tribal government was encyclopaedic, according to Tom Arviso, the Navajo Times’ recently retired publisher. Donovan wasn’t afraid to take on any subject or anyone, even if it meant being fired from the Navajo Times yet again before it became independent of the tribal government, according to Arviso.
“There were people who didn’t like him because he was biligaana and felt he shouldn’t be writing about Navajo people,” Arviso explained, using the Navajo word for “white person.” “However, Bill was a smart guy, very intelligent and laid-back. He was extremely knowledgeable.”