Vincent Edward Randall, 83, died around 6 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 16, according to his family.
The Yavapai-Apache Nation announced funeral services will take place Friday and Saturday, Dec. 22 and 23.
Randall was an enrolled member of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, Dilzhé’e Apache Culture Director for the Yavapai-Apache Nation and served on Yavapai-Apache Nation Tribal Council as both a council member and as tribal chairman over numerous terms starting in 1962. He also served on the boards of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the Association of American Indian Affairs, the Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona and the Working Group of Allied Apaches for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
Randall was born March 29, 1940, in Clarkdale and lived on the property where his mother built a house in 1911. He lived all his life in the Verde River watershed, which was his ancestral homeland.
“All of my life, I have listened to the oral histories of the Dilzhé’e Apache as told by my parents, my grandparents, my relations, and our Dilzhé’e Apache elders,” he stated in 2015. “I am a native Dilzhé’e Apache speaker and have extensively studied Apache linguistics.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Northern Arizona University in biology and biology science and taught at the Clarkdale-Jerome School from 1963 to 1992. He used his knowledge as a biologist and a teacher to inform Verde Valley residents, state and federal lawmakers and watershed advocates about the importance of the Verde River to the ecosystem.
“I am an Apache historian and I am regularly used as a consultant with local, state and federal agencies regarding proposed projects and their potential to impact important Dilzhé’e Apache cultural, religious and historic sites, many of which are located near springs and rivers throughout Arizona,” he said of himself. “I am often an invited speaker at events throughout Arizona and the United States to talk about Dilzhé’e Apache history, culture and lifeways.”
As a member of the Western Apache Coalition, a gathering of elders united in efforts to maintain and protect Western Apache culture and lifeways, Randall worked with other tribal elders to map over 1,000 traditional Apache place names across Arizona, including names of places within the Verde Valley watershed.
“While working on this mapping project, the elders have shared their ancestral knowledge of the places where we visited, remembering how our families referred to these places, what they looked like, and their significance to us and to our Apache ancestors,” Randall said.
“Our prayers and condolences to the Yavapai-Apache Nation and the family of the late former Chairman Vincent Randall,” White Mountain Apache Tribal Chairman Kasey Velasquez stated on social media. “Former Chairman Randall was instrumental in the Arizona Indian gaming industry, Western Apache [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] Working Group and the preservation of the Apache language and culture.”
He was significantly involved in the work to decommission the Childs-Irving Hydroelectric Power Plant and dam on Fossil Creek, a tributary to the Verde River.
“Having the water finally return to freely flow though Fossil Creek when the plant was decommissioned in 2010 was a happy day for all Dilzhé’e Apaches,” he said in 2015.
Within the Yavapai-Apache Nation’s Cultural Resources Department, Randall and several other staff members collect, review, analyze and archive information about the Yavapai and Apache peoples and the history of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, a political entity that formed in 1934 of two culturally distinct tribes speaking two indigenous languages, Yuman-speaking Yavapai, or Wipuhk’a’bah, and the Athabaskan-speaking Western Apache, or Dil’zhe’e. The two tribes had been forced marched from the Verde Valley in 1875 to the San Carlos Reservation by Gen. George Crook. When the two tribes were permitted to return in 1900, many had intermarried and the two tribes were allotted shared reservation lands in the Verde Valley. The two distinct groups formed a single political entity to manage their lands and resources. The tribe numbers just under 2,000 members today, spread across several reservations in Camp Verde and Clarkdale. The Yavapai and the Apache maintain separate but complementary cultural departments.
“This information is collected from our own Yavapai and Apache people, including our tribal elders, as well as from other sources, including, but not limited to, the National Archives and Records Administration, various federal, state and local agencies and museums, and from personal collections of people who have interacted with the Yavapai and Apache people over the years,” Randall stated in 2015. “Over the decades, I have personally reviewed thousands upon thousands of written records about our people, many of which were created by the United States military and the United States Indian Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I have reviewed written records beginning as early as the accounts of Spanish explorations in the late 1500s and early 1600s and continuing on until present day, including before and at the time of Arizona Statehood in [Feb. 14] 1912.”
“I have been told the oral history of the location of the first Apache siting of a Spaniard in our aboriginal territory, which was near Camp Verde at a bend in the Verde River,” Randall stated. “I have been told the oral history of when my great-grandmother saw her first white man just outside of Flagstaff in the 1850s when she described him as being light-skinned with blue eyes and he had a ‘box that walks’ with him that was pulled by horses and he had some mean and scary looking things with horns. The ‘box that walks’ was a covered wagon and the mean scary looking things were Texas long-horn cattle.”
“For years, I have met with the [Yavapai-Apache] Nation’s elders to talk about the history of our people, along with their and their families’ recollections of past events and observations,” Randall stated. “The elders, including myself, also talk about culturally important matters, including concerns for the health of the Verde River and how the Verde River has been used in the past both by the Yavapai and Apache people, by other tribes, and by the non-Indian new comers to our aboriginal lands. In discussing these matters, they talk to me about their family histories and meaning of the Verde River to them.”
Randall was also a tireless advocate for the Apache and Yavapai peoples and their artifacts. As reported in the New York Times in 2013, Randall was co-party to a dispute involving a major American museum return sacred relics back to the Apache peoples. In 2009, the American Museum of Natural History agreed to return 77 pieces of headwear, feathers, bows, arrows, medicine rings and satchels containing crystals and charms back to the Apache but by 2013 none had been returned because of whether the museum would officially designate them as “sacred relics” that should never have been taken in the first place.
“You have to share your stories,” Randall said in Alyssa Smith’s story from February 2023. “Otherwise, someone else will come along and tell them, someone who wasn’t there, didn’t live it.”
YAN-1_Affidavit-of-Vincent-Randall.
