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.
By her own count, Haaland is a thirty-fifth generation New Mexican. Her Laguna ancestors came south into the Rio Grande Valley in the late thirteenth century, settling along the shale and sandstone mesas of the North San Mateo Mountains, at the tail end of the Colorado Plateau. “You know, when I think about why I am really here,” she told me recently, “it’s like I’m here because the ancestors felt it was necessary. I can’t explain it any other way.”