A Notable Nomination: Haaland for Secretary of the Interior

The first two Native American women ever were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. One was Sharice Davids of Kansas City, from the 3^rd congressional district of Kansas.* The other was Deb Haaland of New Mexico.

Now, Rep. Haaland is poised to become a member of President Biden’s Cabinet. 

Who is Deb Haaland?

Debra Anne Haaland was born in Arizona 60 years ago last month. She is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, a Native American people group who has lived on the land that is now the state of New Mexico since the 1200s.

Haaland identifies herself as a 35th-generation New Mexican, her mother being a Native American woman. Her father, however, is a Norwegian American.

(It’s interesting how Haaland is Native American because her mother was, but Obama was never considered White even though his mother was.)

Haaland was 28 when she started college at the University of New Mexico, and she gave birth to a daughter, Somáh, four days after graduation in May 1994.

As a single mother, Haaland was sometimes dependent on food stamps. Still, she went on to law school and earned her J.D. in Indian law from University of New Mexico School of Law in 2006.

Haaland’s rise to political power began when she was elected to a two-year term as the chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico in April 2015.

To What Was Deb Haaland Nominated?

On Dec. 17, President-elect Biden announced that he was nominating Haaland as the next Secretary of the Interior. As such she would be the first Native American to serve in the President’s Cabinet.

Secretary of the Interior isn’t a particularly ostentatious position, but it is an important one. According to this website, the Department of Interior (DoI) is

a federal executive department of the U.S. government. It is responsible for the management and conservation of most federal lands and natural resources, and the administration of programs relating to Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, territorial affairs, and insular areas of the United States, as well as programs related to historic preservation. . . . The department was created on March 3, 1849.

Seal of the DoI

Why Is Deb Haaland’s Nomination Notable?

The infamous Indian Removal Act was promulgated in 1830 and especially from then until the “Indian wars” ended in December 1890 (as I wrote about in my Dec. 26 blog post), there were sixty years of repeated cruel treatment of the Native peoples in U.S. territory.

Moreover, most Native Americans did not or could not become U.S. citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act was signed into law in 1924. And even after that, it was not until 1957 that Native Americans were allowed to vote in all states.

While things are better for Native Americans now than they were 130 years ago or 97 years ago, many of those who want to maintain their ethnic identity still have to face discrimination and “second-class” citizenship.

So, after all these years, it is notable that Biden chose a Native American, who is a sitting U.S. Representative, to be the new Secretary of the Interior, responsible for “the administration of programs relating to Native Americans.”

In addition, since environmental issues are a major concern of the new administration, Haaland, consistent with her Native American heritage, is a strong advocate for environmental justice—and has been openly criticized for that by Representative Pete Stauber (R-Minn.).

I hope Rep. Haaland’s confirmation as Secretary of the DoI will be smooth and that she will do well as a member of the Cabinet.

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* The church June and I are members of is in that district, and Rep. Davids (b. 1980) was strongly supported by most of our fellow church members in the 2018 election and in 2020, when she was re-elected.