Deb Haaland

Deb Haaland (born December 2, 1960, Winslow, Arizona, U.S.) is an American public official serving as U.S. secretary of the interior (2021– ) in the administration of U.S. Pres. Joe Biden. A 35th generation New Mexican and an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna, Haaland is the first Native American in U.S. history to hold a cabinet secretary position.

Early life

Haaland was born in Winslow, Arizona, to John David Haaland and Mary Toya, the third of their four children. Haaland’s parents met while stationed at Naval Station Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, California. John Haaland served for 30 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, earning two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for his service during the Vietnam War. Toya was enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve and later had a 25-year career at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Deb Haaland’s maternal grandparents, Helen and Antonio Toya, met at St. Catherine’s Industrial Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an American Indian boarding school. Haaland was close with her grandparents, spending summers with them in their one-room home on the Laguna Pueblo. Her grandparents’ experience in the boarding school system and her grandmother’s stories of the trauma of separation would later inform Haaland’s work as a member of Congress and as secretary of the interior.

Haaland graduated from Highland High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1978. She subsequently worked as a baker and spent a few aimless and self-destructive years (Haaland has been sober since 1988) before enrolling at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she completed a bachelor’s degree in English in 1994. Haaland’s only child, Somah, was born just days after her graduation. Haaland later founded Pueblo Salsa, a business that produced and sold homemade salsa, and started a graduate degree in American Indian studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. When her grandmother became sick, Haaland returned to New Mexico and shifted her academic focus to law. She earned a J.D. in 2006 from the University of New Mexico School of Law.

Congressional leader

While attending law school, Haaland became active in Democratic politics. She was a volunteer on the presidential campaigns for John Kerry (2004) and Barack Obama (2008), and she served as the New Mexico vote director for Native Americans during Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Haaland served as a tribal administrator and casino manager for the San Felipe Pueblo (2013–15) and was the first woman elected to chair the Laguna Development Corporation Board of Directors (2010).

In 2014 Haaland unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor of New Mexico, but in the wake of that failed campaign, she was selected to chair the New Mexico Democratic Party, which made her the first Native American woman to lead a state party; she served as chair for one term (2015–17). On November 6, 2018, Haaland was elected to represent New Mexico’s 1st congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress. (Also elected to the House that day was Democrat Sharice Davids of Kansas, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation.) Haaland was reelected in 2020.

While in Congress, Haaland served on the House Committee on Natural Resources, focused on issues of environmental justice, and advocated for Green New Deal legislation and other climate initiatives. In addition, she cosponsored a “Medicare for All” bill that would have created a single-payer universal health insurance program. In 2020 Haaland worked to secure the release of federal funds to Native American tribal governments to help them address the difficulties their communities experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Secretary of the interior

In December 2020 President-elect Biden announced Haaland as his pick to lead the U.S. Department of the Interior. The department is responsible for most of the country’s federally owned lands and natural resources, as well as managing federal programs related to the United States’ 574 recognized American Indian and Alaska Native groups. Biden praised Haaland as “a barrier-breaking public servant” who will be “ready on day one to protect our environment and fight for a clean energy future.” Several Senate Republicans, however, expressed strong disagreement with Haaland on energy and land-use issues and forced a procedural delay on her nomination. The Senate ultimately confirmed Haaland’s appointment as interior secretary on March 15, 2021, by a 51–40 vote, making her the first Native American to hold a cabinet secretary position.

In a 2024 interview with The New Yorker, Haaland spoke about the importance of having a Native American lead the agency that includes the Bureaus of Indian Affairs, Indian Education, and Trust Funds Administration—three groups that manage the day-to-day relationship between Native groups and the U.S. government. “You know, when I think about why I am really here, it’s like I’m here because the ancestors felt it was necessary. I can’t explain it any other way,” she said. As interior secretary, Haaland was able to implement programs that she was unable to pass through legislation while in Congress, namely establishing the Missing and Murdered Unit in the Bureau of Indian Affairs to investigate the epidemic of unsolved violence against Indigenous people and organizing listening sessions across Native communities to give voice to survivors and descendents of American Indian boarding schools. She has additionally focused on issues related to climate change, including strengthening protections for public lands and endangered habitats as part of the Biden administration’s “30 by 30” plan to conserve 30 percent of U.S. lands and water by 2030. On November 19, 2021, Haaland issued Secretarial Order 3404, a directive to remove derogatory language against Native American women from U.S. place names. In September 2022 the Interior Department announced that the U.S. Board on Geographic Names had updated names for 650 public sites across the United States.