Excellent, Important Read: Deb Haaland Confronts the History of the Federal Agency She Leads

Back in 2019, @SecDebHaaland and I made history as the first two Native women sworn into Congress. Now, she’s the first Native person to lead @Interior. I’m grateful for her profound impact, not just in Indian Country, but across our entire nation. https://t.co/z1BUwGjreq

— Sharice Davids (@sharicedavids) April 30, 2024

Posting this now, so you can plan to read it over the weekend if necessary. (It includes many fascinating details about Secretary Haaland’s bio.) By no means an easy read, but every word is worth it — especially given our fundraising program! From Casey Cep, at the New Yorker:

When they would not let their children be taken, they were taken instead. A hundred and thirty years ago, nineteen men from the Third Mesa of the Hopi Reservation, in Arizona, were arrested for refusing to surrender their sons and daughters to soldiers who came for them armed with Hotchkiss guns. For years, the United States had been trying to make the Hopi send their children to federal boarding schools—the children sometimes as young as four, the schools sometimes a thousand miles away. The intent and the effect of those boarding schools was forced assimilation: once there, students were stripped of their Native names, clothing, and language and made to adopt Christian names, learn English, and abandon their traditional religion and culture…

Haaland grew up hearing about St. Catherine’s not only from her grandmother but also from her mother, who was sent there as well. Each generation had stories of hardship and separation. Now Haaland has made listening to similar stories a central part of her job. In the summer of 2021, just months after being sworn in as Secretary of the Interior, she launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to investigate the schools—at the time, there was not so much as a comprehensive list of them, let alone a full roster of students—and to consult with tribes about how to make amends for the harm that the schools caused. After releasing an initial report, in 2022, Haaland decided that archival research and internal investigations were not enough, and began convening listening sessions in Native communities around the country so that survivors and descendants could share testimony. Each session opened with Haaland acknowledging a bitter irony: “My ancestors endured the horrors of the Indian boarding-school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.”

Most Americans, if they think about the Department of the Interior at all, likely think first of its natural-resource agencies: the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But, to Haaland and the nearly four million other Native Americans in this country, it is best known for the Bureau of Indian Education, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, which handles the billions of dollars the federal government holds in trust for tribes, a financial arrangement dating back to some of the earliest negotiations of the Committee on Indian Affairs, led by Benjamin Franklin during the Continental Congress. In 1849, when Interior was founded, it took over management of those treaty and trust obligations, and it still manages the nation-to-nation relationships between the United States and its five hundred and seventy­-four federally recognized tribes.

In the long, tragic saga of this country’s relations with its first peoples, almost no federal entity has been more culpable than Interior. Just fifteen years before Haaland’s nomination, a federal judge, who had been appointed by Ronald Reagan, called the department “the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago,” denouncing it as “the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.” In taking over the department, Haaland, like all her predecessors, was tasked with overseeing one of the most diverse and unruly agencies in the federal government, so sprawling that it is sometimes called the Department of Everything Else. She has also embraced a possibly impossible challenge: not only running the Department of the Interior but redeeming it….

More than sixty thousand people work for Interior, nearly nineteen thousand of them in the National Park Service alone. The agency manages more than twenty per cent of this nation’s land—all told, more than half a billion acres, plus two and a half billion that are submerged beneath the oceans on the outer continental shelves. Sally Jewell, the Interior Secretary during Barack Obama’s second term, told me that running the department was “like studying for a final every night.” Some of the pressures are external. “There were thirty-five hundred lawsuits with my name on them,” Jewell said. But many are internal. The agency has eleven bureaus, which have widely different and sometimes dissonant mandates, leading to what Jewell called “massive conflicts within your own agency.” By way of example, she cited a clash over the Klamath River involving the Bureau of Reclamation, which managed a dam at the river’s headwaters; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which monitored the Chinook-salmon population; and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was attempting to uphold its trust and treaty obligations with tribes including the Klamath, the Yurok, and the Karuk. Jewell initiated the removal of four other dams on the river, one of the biggest water-restoration efforts in American history. “We finally got that over the finish line,” she said. “But definitely it can feel like losing a battle to win a war.”…

When Biden was elected, Haaland was serving her first term in Congress, representing New Mexico’s First District. She had endorsed Elizabeth Warren during the Democratic primary. She might never have been seriously considered for Interior were it not for activists such as the writer Julian Brave NoiseCat. In the summer of 2020, NoiseCat—who would later earn accolades for “Sugarcane,” his documentary about the abuse and disappearance of Native children from St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, in Canada—was working for a left-wing think tank, which asked him to put together a list of potential progressive Cabinet nominees should Biden win. “This was a pie-in-the-sky list,” NoiseCat told me. He had come to know Haaland during her congressional campaign, and knew she supported the Green New Deal and opposed drilling and fracking on federal lands. “I put Deb’s name on for Interior, and we joked it was like choosing the Lorax to be E.P.A. administrator,” NoiseCat said…

If Haaland’s rise seemed sudden to outsiders—from a freshman member of Congress to a Cabinet secretary in less than three years—to Native observers it was decades in the making, the result of a steady marshalling of forces that Haaland had not only benefitted from but had helped shape. Although Natives constitute less than three per cent of the American population, they are a potent voting bloc in some states: more than ten per cent of New Mexicans, roughly thirteen per cent of Oklahomans, some twenty per cent of Alaskans. Native issues have always been bipartisan—too far under the radar, for most Americans, to have become particularly polarizing—and, historically, Native voters have not been strongly aligned with either party…

This year is the centenary of Native American enfranchisement. Native people did not get the right to vote until 1924, with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, and those living on reservations in New Mexico were not allowed to vote until 1948. Even after that, the same voter-suppression techniques that existed in the Jim Crow South, from literacy tests to poll taxes, kept generations of Natives away from the ballot box. One of Haaland’s personal heroes is Miguel Trujillo, a marine from Isleta Pueblo who returned home from the Second World War and sued for his right to vote. She often told his story in the early days of her political activism, when she would take pots of homemade chile to pueblo recreational halls and encourage Natives to register…

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When campaigning, Haaland appealed to voters with stories about the hardships that had defined her life. She talked about being in recovery and how difficult it was to be a single mother; she invoked the overdraft fees that drained her checking account and the shame of having to return food to grocery-store shelves after discovering in the checkout line that she didn’t have enough money to pay for it. Although Haaland is most consistently positioned as Native American, she identifies just as strongly as working class. Those identities often overlap: more than one in four Native Americans live below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate on some reservations is higher than fifty per cent. When Haaland was elected, she became one of the poorest members of Congress—she owned no home, had no savings account or investments of any kind, and was paying down tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

Haaland also became one of the first two Native women ever elected to Congress, along with Sharice Davids, a Ho-Chunk woman who flipped Kansas’s Third Congressional District during that same election cycle. After their swearing-in, to which Haaland wore her traditional Pueblo clothes, more than thirty tribes and Indigenous organizations sponsored a joint celebration at a Washington hotel, where a Ho-Chunk drumming group nearly drowned out Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was delivering remarks in the ballroom next door.

Pelosi, in an e-mail, praised Haaland’s “immense empathy and invaluable experience” in addition to her skills as a manager and an administrator, noting how quickly she became the chair of the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands, a rare feat in a first term. Haaland co-sponsored more bills than any other freshman in Congress, and compiled one of the most liberal voting records. But she also earned a reputation as a pragmatic legislator with an unusually self-effacing approach, ushering three bills into law. Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma and a member of the Chickasaw Nation, told me that he and Haaland have next to nothing in common politically (he describes the Green New Deal as “socialism masking as environmentalism”) but that she reminds him of his mother, a pioneering Indigenous politician. “Deb’s a force of nature,” he said. “A very excellent legislator—innovative, active, instinctively bipartisan, although certainly very progressive.”…