Interior Secretary Deb Haaland during an interview inside the Department of the Interior headquarters in Washington, D.C., in October 2024.
Maansi Srivastava for NPR
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Maansi Srivastava for NPR
At a farewell speech in Washington D.C. this week, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland reflected on President Biden’s formal apology last October for the U.S. government’s historic assimilation policies and its Indian boarding school system. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, children were separated from families, with no full accounting of those who went missing or died.
“I believe we are in an era of healing,” she told the crowd. “That healing has been among the most important things I have done as secretary.”
Haaland went on to reflect on traveling with Biden to one of the most notorious boarding schools in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, now a national monument.
“As I stood next to the president, I felt the power of our ancestors who persevered through unthinkable odds so that we could all be there that day,” she said.
Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna of New Mexico, says her grandparents and her mother were sent away, a trauma she brought up in an interview with NPR just before the November election. Haaland says her twelve-stop “road to healing” tour across Indian Country – which included listening sessions and reports meant to better account for the missing – was a turning point.
“It’s an important piece of our history that every single American should know about. It’s a painful part of our history,” she told NPR.
Haaland’s term was historic but will be shaped by what comes next
It may be too early to tell what historians will make of Haaland’s legacy leading the Department of the Interior, an agency that experts say came into being in part to manage and control native people.
But it’s for sure historic. She’s presided over the allocation of unprecedented billions of dollars in federal money for tribes going to everything from water and schools to improvements in public safety addressing an alarming human trafficking crisis on reservations.
It’s not clear how the new Trump administration will work with tribes and tribal lands. But agency observers say Haaland made gains working to give tribes a seat at the table on land decisions and to right a legacy of historic wrongs in Indian Country, such as broken treaties.
“People can’t unlearn this history now,” says Robert Maxim, a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. “My worry is that we’re not going to act fast enough to continue responding to the ongoing consequences today.”
Maxim, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, co-wrote a congressionally-funded report after the November election warning that it’s likely now going to be up to states to continue Haaland’s reforms. Maxim says he based much of that analysis by looking back on the first Trump term.
“I’m really concerned about how his administration may choose to slow walk the opening of things like new memorials, choose not to prioritize funding for language revitalization [or] defund programs that are essential to Indian Country like Head Start.”
But on the other hand, Maxim says, Haaland’s likely successor, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum has close relationships with tribes. During a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, Burgum said he intended to get input from everyone on public lands issues.
“My experience as governor and working with the tribes and working with local communities in North Dakota, whether it’s grazing associations, county commissioners, mayors, rural residents, I think the consultation is key,” Burgum said.
The Trump administration vows to drill more
A push for more oil and gas drilling and mining on federal and tribal land is seen as a certainty under the new Trump administration. Some tribes on energy-rich reservations will applaud that for the revenues it will generate while environmentalists warn of climate-warming emissions.
Haaland made conservation a hallmark of her tenure, at one point overseeing a temporary halt in new drilling permits on federal land. She says she made consultation with tribes a priority in every decision she made.
“I feel that in this administration we’ve done a better job of tribal consultation than any other administration by far, that’s been a priority of President Biden,” Haaland says.
But tribes in Nevada blame Haaland for not intervening to do more to stop lithium mines approved on federal land they consider sacred. And there are gaming matters between tribes that still leave hard feelings. On the West Coast, some are angry over a late-hour decision allowing some tribes to open casinos off their reservations.
“When she became secretary, I was very, very excited and that went away very quickly,” says Carla Keen, chairman of the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians.
Keen’s tribe and others sued the Department of the Interior over its approval of another tribe’s off-reservation casino near Medford, Oregon. Keen says it will compete with her tribe’s casino, which funds essential services.
“I wish that she would have came out and visited our homelands when she was invited,” Keen says. “And I wish that she would have taken the time to learn about our tribes and not been so afraid of somebody being mad at her.”
The Department didn’t respond to a request for a comment on the gaming dispute. Secretary Haaland has said there was hardly a day over the last four years when someone wasn’t mad at her for something as she lead an agency that controls a fifth of America’s land and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Indeed, leading the Interior Department — with its multiple-use mission — is a difficult job and at times has competing pressures, says Laura Harjo, chair of the Department of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
But Harjo says Haaland has begun reversing the U.S. government’s legacy of managing native lands more for their resources or as objects.
“We are definitely seeing a level of humanizing indigenous people and I think indigenous people recognize that with many of her major initiatives” Harjo says.
Zooming out, activists in Indian Country generally revere Haaland for respecting their history, a change that may be hard for any future administration to undo.
