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….