Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM), one of just two Native American women in Congress, appears to be in line to become the next Secretary of the Interior.
She’s being vetted for the job by the Biden transition team, The Hill reported on Wednesday. She’d be the first Native American ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.
“If Haaland is tapped by President-elect Joe Biden, her nomination would be historic,” the Washington website says, “making her the first Native American Cabinet secretary, where she would oversee an agency with vast responsibility over tribal issues and public lands.”
A member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo and former chairwoman of the state’s Democratic Party, Haaland won re-election to Congress two weeks ago. More recently, she dropped out of a 3-way race for vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus.
She said in a recent Huffington Post interview that if the Interior job is offered, she’ll take it.
“There’s no doubt it would be historic,” Haaland told Vox. “It would be symbolic, and it would be profound, especially when we think about how the federal government essentially threw out their federal Indian policies throughout the centuries and tried to exterminate Native Americans across the country.”
The Interior Department is a sprawling agency that oversees one-fifth of all the land in the U.S. — roughly 500 million acres.
It manages the nation’s natural resources and several sub-agencies involved with Native Americans, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which oversees 55 million acres of tribal land, and the chronically under-funded Bureau of Indian Education.
Few, if any, Interior secretaries have claimed to be environmentalists. Haaland would change that.
“Unlike previous secretaries who tend to adhere to the needs of Big Oil, Haaland would apply her lived experience as an Indigenous person to the role of protecting public and tribal lands,” says Vox, citing Nick Tilsen of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota, who is CEO of NDN Collective, a group dedicated to building Indigenous power.
It’s unclear whether Biden’s team is vetting others for the Interior position, but Haaland isn’t concerned with that.
“No matter what happens, Haaland said, she just wants whoever leads the Department of the Interior to ensure that the federal government is meeting the needs of Native Americans,” Vox says.
“I tell people I’m a 35th-generation New Mexican because I am. The Pueblo people migrated to the Rio Grande Valley in the late 1200s, 35 generations ago,” Haaland told HuffPost.
“I think it’s a time in our world ― not just in our country, but our entire world ― to listen to Indigenous people when it comes to climate change, when it comes to our environment.”
