President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland, a congresswoman from New Mexico, to serve as the first Native American interior secretary in a historic pick for a department that oversees the country’s vast natural resources, including tribal lands.

A member of Pueblo of Laguna, the 60 year-old Haaland would become the first descendant of the original people to populate North America to run the Interior Department. It marks a turning point for a 171-year-old institution that has often had a fraught relationship with 574 federally recognized tribes.

The first-term House member, who hails from a top oil- and gas-producing state, has pledged to transform the department from a champion of fossil fuel development into a promoter of renewable energy and policies to mitigate climate change.

Interior, which manages roughly one-fifth of land in the United States, will play a critical role in delivering on Biden’s vow to combat global warming. The former vice president has pledged to halt all new oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters, a daunting task that faces both legal and political obstacles. The extraction of oil, gas and coal in these areas account for nearly a quarter of the nation’s annual carbon output.

“I come from New Mexico. It’s a big gas and oil state. And I care about every single job,” Haaland said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. But she added: “We don’t want to go back to normal, right? We don’t want to go back to where we were because that economy wasn’t working for a lot of people.”

Interior also oversees vast protected areas — including more than 109 million acres of wilderness and 422 national park sites, as well as national monuments and wildlife refuges. It safeguards more than 1,000 endangered species, and manages massive water projects in the West that help sustain farmland and provide drinking water for major cities including Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Democratic Congresswoman Deb Haaland, N.M.-1st Dist., does a PSA for her Twitter account in downtown Albuquerque, N.M. in November. Jim Thompson/The Albuquerque Journal via AP, File

Haaland just won reelection to a second term from a north central New Mexico district that leans Democratic. If confirmed by the Senate, her party will have a razor-thin margin over Republicans in the House until her seat is filled. Right now Democrats hold 222 seats, pending a recanvassing in a New York race and challenges in Iowa, and Biden has already tapped two other House Democrats to serve in his administration, Reps. Cedric L. Richmond (La.) and Marcia L. Fudge (Ohio).

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) has expressed concern about Biden tapping another member, telling reporters last week, “Two is too many, but three would be even more many.”

But Pelosi made it clear on Wednesday that she would not stand in the way of Haaland leaving the House, calling her “one of the most respected and one of the best Members of Congress I have served with.”

“I am so proud that, as one of the first Native American women to have served in Congress, she serves as Chair of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands,” Pelosi said. “Congresswoman Haaland knows the territory, and if she is the President-elect’s choice for Interior Secretary, then he will have made an excellent choice.”

Born in Navajo country in Arizona to a Native American mother who served in the Navy and a Norwegian American father who was an active-duty Marine, Haaland bounced between 13 public schools as the family moved between military bases. She spent summers with her grandparents in a house without running water in Mesita, one of Laguna Pueblo’s small villages in New Mexico.

“As kids we moved a lot because my dad was in the service, but no matter where we were he would take us outside,” she recalled. “In New Mexico we would hike in Jemez during a rainstorm, or at other military bases we would visit the ocean.”

She earned her law degree from the University of New Mexico while raising a daughter, getting by on student loans, food stamps and money she made from a salsa-making business she started. During her run for Congress in 2018, she endeared herself to voters by noting she was still paying off student debt.

“I decided to start a business so I could have my daughter with me and set my own hours,” she said. “It’s those experiences that drive me to work for folks who are just like me.”

Race in America: The Power of Representation with the House’s first Native American lawmakers

Later, as the elected chair of the second-largest tribal gaming corporation in New Mexico, she helped oversee an enterprise with more than 1,100 employees and $200 million in revenue.

After an unsuccessful 2014 bid for lieutenant governor, she began breaking a series of barriers: as the first Native American to head a state party when she took the reins of the New Mexico Democratic Party, and then, as one of the first Indigenous women elected to Congress.

Once in Washington, she served as vice chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, introducing a series of bills meant to address the staggering rate of missing and murdered women in Indigenous communities.

With his pick, Biden heeded the call of an eclectic coalition of youth climate activists, tribal leaders, Hollywood celebrities and liberal members of Congress who rallied around Haaland for the Cabinet post, despite her short time in Congress.

Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and helped lead the campaign on behalf of Haaland, said that “any comment that she’s not qualified for the job is wrong, and a cheap shot.” By selecting Haaland, Grijalva added, Biden is helping “begin to rewrite a legacy in this country. And I think that’s good given everything else that’s going on around us.”

Biden’s decision to appoint Haaland to head Interior will hold profound meaning for the 1.9 million Native Americans whose education and health care are often influenced by the department’s decisions.

Rocket’s red glare and protests: Sioux leaders protest Trump’s Mount Rushmore visit

“It’s symbolic, but it just cuts to the core of Indian culture,” University of Colorado Boulder law professor Charles Wilkinson said. “The Department of Interior has almost unlimited power over tribes. And by the way, that is power to do good or bad.”

“It’s called plenary power,” he added, and Native people jokingly call it, ‘plenty power.’”

Jim Enote, a Zuni tribal member and chief executive of the Native-led Colorado Plateau Foundation, said in an interview that the move signals how much has changed over the last half-century. Native Americans “do not participate in the same channels of influence as other Americans,” he said, and some previous Interior secretaries have held a dismissive attitude toward the country’s first inhabitants.

The legacy of Interior is blemished by instances of federal officials removing Native Americans from their ancestral lands — including from Yellowstone, the first and perhaps most iconic national park.

Years later, in 1972, several hundred tribal activists took over Interior Department headquarters in Washington to draw attention to their plight. A little more than a decade later, in 1983, then-Interior Secretary James G. Watt blamed the problems on U.S. reservations on indigenous culture.

“If you want an example of the failure of socialism,” Watt said in an interview on a satellite radio show based in Tulsa, “don’t go to Russia. Come to America and go to the Indian reservations.”

That sentiment was “appallingly wrong,” Enote said, adding that it made sense to break with the past. “Why not a Native person? We are not our grandparents, or our great-grandparents’ Native Americans. We are now the deans of law schools, trusted surgeons, heads of museums, businesspeople, entrepreneurs and CEOs of influential foundations.”

Biden’s choice comes as the federal government’s relationship with tribes has eroded under the Trump administration, which has removed protections from sacred tribal sites in Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument and allowed oil drillers into Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuges, home to the caribou that Native Alaskans hunt for food.

“The Trump administration has not been kind to Indian country,” Haaland said. “He has thrown tribal consultation essentially out the window.”

She argued that Trump’s interior secretaries, Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, reorganized the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other Interior Department bureaus in a way that has hampered the ability of Native Americans to confer with federal officials. Relocating the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colo., for example, has made it harder for tribal leaders accustomed to traveling to Washington.

“It doesn’t help them that they move one big facet of the Department of the Interior to another state, because that’s not the way that things have been done,” she said.

Chase Iron Eyes, a Native American activist and attorney with the Lakota People’s Law Project, said that while Indigenous people have several champions in Congress, he is relieved to see the department to be run by someone who’s a tribal member.

“It could not have been in our forefathers’ dreams to have an actual Indian be appointed at the Cabinet level in the agency that is meant to oversee their absorption,” he said.

Charles Curtis, a Republican who was vice president from 1929 to 1933 under President Herbert Hoover, was the first person of Native American ancestry to serve in a cabinet. He was a member of the Kaw nation.

Haaland bolstered her national profile in 2016 by going to the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation in North and South Dakota to join tribal leaders in opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. “She asked what I needed and what the tribe needed,” said Jodi Archambault, a former special assistant to Barack Obama for Native American affairs and a member of the tribe. Haaland, she said, was able to provide support from some New Mexico labor unions — and homemade tortillas and green chili stew.

“She brought her own cooking things and opened her trunk up, and said this is the best I can do,” Archambault said, adding: “The stew was really good; the tortillas were excellent.”

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.

« Previous

Next »

Related Stories