America's first Native American cabinet secretary says she's righting historical wrongs

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The cavernous Stewart Udall Department of Interior Building may be just off the National Mall in Washington but it feels like a window into the Old West.

Past the nostalgic if peculiar Indian Craft Shop, there are striking New Deal-era murals of firefighting and farming, and an Ansel Adams photograph of the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. It’s just a few miles from where Deb Haaland spent much of her childhood at her grandmother’s rock home in Mesita Village, Laguna Pueblo.

“Our people were farming the desert for thousands of years,” Haaland says, in her corner office upstairs.

As the department’s first-ever native secretary, Haaland says she thinks about her elders and the U.S. government’s historical policy of assimilation every day.

“My grandparents worked on the railroad for 45 years because of that,” she says. “They were trying to get Indians out of their communities and into mainstream America.”

America's traumatic boarding school legacy

With the next election just days out, it’s still too early to say what historians will make of President Biden’s legacy. But he will be remembered as the first President to appoint the country’s first-ever indigenous cabinet secretary, and for making a formal apology this month over the U.S. government’s historical forced assimilation policies in Indian Country.

Haaland traveled to the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix Friday for the apology and has been unusually public lately giving interviews and making a closing pitch to tribes in swing states particularly, which she says are benefiting from a once in a generation federal investment.

Haaland has led the massive Department of Interior for close to four years now. One of Biden’s main directives to her hasn’t been an easy one to fulfill: righting the U.S. government’s historical wrongs in Indian Country. But Haaland, who also oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, says she’s proud of what she’s accomplished so far, especially the recent conclusion of a nationwide healing tour focused on Indian boarding schools, at the heart of the president’s apology.

“It’s an important piece of our history that every single American should know about,” she says. “It’s a painful part of our history.”

Haaland’s grandmother was sent to a Catholic boarding school as a little girl. School children were punished for speaking indigenous languages. Many were abused or worse and there’s still no full accounting of those who died.

“I think of that every single day, those voices resonate with me every single day, it is very, very painful,” she says.

Interior's huge mandate

Haaland has also led Interior at a time of seemingly monumental social and environmental change in the West, where the DOI controls about a half billion acres of public land, including the national parks and monuments, cattle ranges and oil and gas fields.

On public lands management, Haaland hopes she’ll be remembered for her work righting the historical wrongs by bringing long-ignored tribes to a seat at the table on decisions.

She’s increased tribal co-management agreements tenfold since 2021.

“Tribal folks, they were our first land stewards. I feel we’ve done an excellent job of lifting up Indian affairs and making sure that, across the board, it’s important to our entire department,” Haaland says.

'Department of Intense Irony'

The irony of Haaland now leading Interior is not lost on her or historians. They point out that the agency was created after this country had fought off the British colonizers, only to then begin colonizing the American West.

“You could almost call it the Department of Intense Irony and still keep the same initials,” says Patty Limerick, a western historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “There’s no question that the Department of Interior comes into being to manage, direct and control Indian people.”

But Limerick says Deb Haaland’s appointment will mark an important turn.

“This is proof that we are not stuck with a historical legacy. This is proof that we have the power to say, ‘let’s change this,’ ” she says.

Indeed, across Indian Country, her appointment to lead federal agencies that long deprived native people of their wealth and power means a lot.

“Her legacy is that she empowered Indian Country,” says Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, one of America’s biggest tribes. “She gave hope to a generation of young natives who look at a powerful native woman in a position of great power demonstrating strength.”

Tribes are not a monolith

Haaland’s appointment came with huge expectations. She herself points out that America’s 574 federally recognized tribes are no monolith. And she’s faced criticism for everything from tighter oil and gas drilling rules on the Navajo Reservation, to not intervening in a lithium mining boom in Nevada, on land tribes consider sacred.

Here’s how the longtime chairman of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony Arlan Melendez framed it, before retiring late last year: “We want her to come out here at least to explain to the tribes as to what she can do, you know, besides remaining silent on it.”

Haaland says she’s learned it’s nearly impossible to be all things to everyone, and jokes that every day at least half the country is mad at her.

“With respect to some of these projects, they didn’t start with this administration,” Haaland says. “There were past administrations that were working on some of these things.”

She also found herself on the defense more recently over the Not Invisible Act, which she got passed as a member of Congress in 2019. It created a commission to advise the Interior and Justice departments on their failure to solve missing persons and murder cases in native communities. Some members criticized her for not acting fast enough. Haaland is pleading for patience, saying native women have been trafficked since colonization, for 500 years.

“Can things happen faster? Of course things can always happen faster,” Haaland says. “But we are moving forward on this issue when before, nobody cared about it.”

Haaland won’t say whether she’d stay on if a potential Kamala Harris administration were to ask. Donald Trump would likely roll back most of the Biden agenda, particularly a controversial new rule that allows public land to be leased for conservation instead of drilling.

But Cherokee chief Chuck Hoskin says Haaland has raised the bar such that future presidents will appoint leaders who empower Indian Country, not ignore it.

“We have seen over the decades progress, and then some level of retreat.” Hoskin says. “I think overall we’re on a path of progress in this country that’s beyond party lines.”

Secretary Haaland points to the historic $45 billion the administration set aside for tribes - for everything from clean water to schools to bringing electricity to homes that still don’t have it.

“We’re proud that tribes have had this once in a generation investment to make their communities better,” she says. “You know there are tribes like the Hopi Tribe in Arizona who are able to electrify homes with solar power for the first time ever.”

Haaland says she and the Biden administration have done things that will change native people’s lives forever, no matter who’s in charge next.