Ross Swimmer, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, has reassigned Wilson Barber, Jr., currently Navajo area director in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office at Window Rock, Arizona, and James H. Stevens, currently BIA area office director in Phoenix. Barber will be moving to Phoenix and Stevens will take over the area director's job in Window Rock.
"This is a move that will utilize and broaden the management experience of these two professional managers," Swimmer said. "It also will benefit the Bureau and the Indian tribes in the two respective BIA service areas because of the different challenges and problems these individuals will face in their new assignments. Both men have served the Indian tribes well in their current locations, and I am confident that kind of service will continue in their new positions."
Barber joined the Bureau in 1967 as a realty specialist in the Navajo area after having worked seven years for the Navajo Tribe. He received his first assignment as a superintendent at the Cheyenne River Agency in Eagle Butte, S.D., in 1975. He served subsequently as superintendent at Mesca1ero Apache Agency; Northern California Agency, and in Rosebud, S.D., before being assigned as assistant area director for Indian programs in the Aberdeen, S.D., area office in 1984. He has served as the Navajo area director since March 1985.
Barber, 47, a native of Rehoboth, N.M., and an enrolled member of the Navajo Tribe, attended the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University. His new assignment is effective Sept. 11, 1988.
Stevens, area director in Phoenix since 1982, is a member of the San Carlos Band of Apache Indians and holds a B.S. in mining engineering from the University Of Arizona School Of Mines. He worked in that field in California before joining the Bureau in 1963 as a supervisory roads engineer at the Fort Apache Agency. He later held that same position at the Nevada Agency before becoming assistant to the superintendent in 1968. In 1972, Stevens received his first assignment as superintendent at the Spokane (Washington) Agency where he served for nine years before becoming director of the Office of Trust Responsibility in the BlA’s headquarters office in Washington, D.C., in 1981. Stevens, 58, is a native of Holbrook, Ariz. He will take over his new position Oct. 26, 1988.
