BRYNN ANDERSON/AP PHOTO
Deb Haaland has reoriented the Department of the Interior to the needs and demands of Native Americans.
This article appears in the October 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
One of the most remarkable political actors of our generation, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, has reoriented the Department of the Interior into an agency geared to the needs and demands of Native Americans. Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo herself and the first Native American to serve in a Cabinet position, has become the most prominent Native person in arguably the most pro-Native administration in American history. She recently had a prime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.
But while Haaland might have a secure legacy as a pioneer, the ultimate success of her repairing of a troubled agency extends beyond what she could accomplish in four years. First, decades of underfunding by Congress has created massive employee dissatisfaction, with leadership lacking the resources to administer our public lands properly. Second, another Trump administration would likely overturn nearly everything Haaland has accomplished, thus requiring continued Democratic Party governance to solidify reorienting the agency to repudiate its genocidal past and create an equitable future.
FOUNDED IN 1849 DURING THE JAMES K. POLK ADMINISTRATION to administer the nation’s vast public lands during and after the violent eviction of Native Americans who were living there, the Department of the Interior primarily existed initially to find ways to transfer those lands to private holders, whether through the Homestead Act of 1862 or giveaways to railroad companies. During the 20th century, Interior became the steward of valuable natural resources, and mass corruption resulted. Most notably, Albert Fall, secretary of the interior under Warren Harding, leased Wyoming’s Teapot Dome petroleum deposits to oil companies in a sweetheart deal, leading to one of the biggest bribery scandals in American history.
The DOI also took over management of the national parks after the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, giving it both an environmental and tourism mandate. Today, the DOI hosts a collection of important agencies, including the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
As the agency involved with both managing public lands wrested from the Tribes and then running the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the DOI has often operated as a colonial institution. Notoriously corrupt BIA agents often stole money and goods guaranteed through treaties, and led the charge to force Native children away from their parents and into boarding schools, such as the Carlisle Indian School, which in the words of its founder Richard Henry Pratt, would “kill the Indian and save the man.”
These schools enforced this directive through cutting Native children’s hair, banning their religion, and beating them if they spoke their own languages, with sexual abuse and starvation endemic. Indian schools have large cemeteries of the graves of Native children, a symbol of the abuse and genocide of the American experiment. Through the 20th century, the DOI was at best indifferent to the needs of the Tribes, and as Native rights activism developed in the 1960s, the BIA was the target of many large protests from the American Indian Movement and other groups.
Trump’s secretaries of the interior were disasters on Tribal issues and environmental protection.
Given this history, even having someone like Deb Haaland as secretary of the interior is a remarkable moment. But Haaland reorienting Interior as an ally of the Tribes is nothing less than a revolutionary turnaround in our history. On her first day, she told a group of Native journalists that she intended to consult with the Tribes on every issue that affected them, and she has lived up to the promise. She and President Biden worked with Tribes in the American West to create large new national monuments. She advised him on his pledge to restore the boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, both of which Trump had reduced to a sliver of their original boundaries.
Biden pledged to preserve record amounts of land, and while he might not quite get there in one term, he and Haaland worked closely together to achieve this goal through co-stewardship agreements, perhaps the most important transformation of the agency’s relationship with the Tribes. The BLM alone manages 10 percent of the nation’s land, much of it in the arid American West, where dozens of Tribes consider these lands sacred. The Tribes have convinced the Biden administration to fulfill its conservation goals by co-managing these arid lands, now redefined as national monuments.
For example, Biden created a 506,000-acre preserve at the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada, ensuring traditional indigenous use of land that at least 14 Tribes consider critical to their history and culture. The Navajo and Havasupai in Arizona lobbied Biden to create a nearly one-million-acre preserve at the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni National Monument, a decision that has infuriated mining interests and the state’s Republicans.
There will likely be additional national monuments created in this manner before the end of Biden’s term, including Sáttítla in Northern California, where the Pit River and Modoc Tribes have urged action; and Kw'tsán, near the Mexican border, where the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe has supported protections. For the first time, Tribes have an active advocate in a leading government role.
But Haaland has done much more than just protect land. During her time in office, the Biden administration restarted the Tribal Nations Summit, an annual gathering to bring Tribal concerns to the highest pinnacles of power, which Donald Trump predictably had ended. She created the Missing and Murdered Unit in the BIA to help with the enormous wave of crimes against Native Americans, many of which go unsolved. She has also demanded a reorienting of our public history in the National Park Service, telling stories of Native history and starting a theme study of Native history in the 1930s and 1950s, often the first step toward new National Historic Sites. She also has tasked the agency with taking responsibility for the tragic history of Indian schools, and making remembering that part of its mission.
As Adam Sowards, a leading historian of the nation’s public lands and professor emeritus of history at the University of Idaho, told me, “Interior has often been a place where Tribal issues have been neglected and where land exploitation has been facilitated. Haaland has ensured that’s not the case during her tenure. There is more work to do to solidify and extend gains … but the ways Secretary Haaland has reoriented the department have been unmistakable and impressive.”
JON G. FULLER/VWPICS VIA AP IMAGES
Navajo and Havasupai Tribes co-manage a nearly one-million-acre preserve in Arizona.
BUT IT IS IN THE “MORE WORK TO DO” WHERE THE FUTURE of Haaland’s successes gets tricky. On non-Native issues, Interior remains rife with problems, stemming mainly from a lack of investment by Congress.
In 2020, environmental historians James Skillen and Leisl Carr Childers wrote that both political parties have abandoned Interior’s core mission. Republicans see Interior as little more than a repository of natural resources to mine, log, and fish, blaming “liberals” and “environmentalists” for the boom-and-bust cycle of natural resource economies. Since the Reagan administration’s support of the Sagebrush Rebellion, far-right extremists have made hay on these beliefs, including the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by Cliven Bundy and his fellow anti-government activists in 2016. Meanwhile, Democrats see the public lands largely as a place for their urban supporters to play, supporting trail building, mountain biking, and wildlife protection, but doing a very poor job of making connections with the economically marginal people of the rural West.
Both positions have added to the general gridlock over the role of the federal government in leading a widely underfunded agency. In the more bipartisan postwar decades, the most powerful members of Congress from the American West made sure they controlled key committees on public lands. Whether Colorado’s Wayne Aspinall or Idaho’s Frank Church, powerful Western politicians created their legacy over public land management. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) presently chairs the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. He’s a good senator, but hardly a dominant force in the body. The House Natural Resources Committee, Aspinall’s power base, isn’t even led by a Westerner, but rather Arkansas’s Bruce Westerman, although Arizona’s excellent Raúl Grijalva would retake the chair if Democrats can win the House.
Regardless of who leads the committees, in today’s hyper-politicized environment, few of the nation’s most powerful members of Congress use their clout to push federal resources to DOI programs. As with the rest of the regulatory agencies, Republicans want to privatize or eliminate them, while Democrats often seek to overcome gridlock by turning services over to public-private “partnerships,” subcontracting, and outsourcing.
Morale in most of the DOI remains extremely low. In a recent government-administered survey, only 45 percent of employees at the National Park Service, long suffering with frustrating leadership and charges of mismanagement, believe that “senior leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity,” while a full 32 percent of employees answered no to a question about whether they “can disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule or regulation without fear of reprisal.” National parks face billions in maintenance deficits, and not even environmentally minded presidents like Obama or Biden have prioritized the agency in federal budgets.
Attitudes at the Bureau of Land Management are generally better than at NPS, partly because of the work BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning has done to reform the agency under Haaland. But it will take decades to rebuild the funding, staffing, and work culture to make the DOI a functional agency again. For as superb as Haaland has been, she has not convinced Congress to fund Interior’s missions properly or create better leadership cultures at many DOI-administered agencies.
In fact, the Biden administration’s work with the Tribes in creating the new national monuments has some roots in the devolution impacting so much of government in the last half-century. Co-managing these resources with the Tribes has a strong moral component, and doing so protects these largely desert lands for traditional uses, while limiting or eliminating uranium mining, gas drilling, and other devastating extractive industry. What it also does is reduce administrative costs for the agency, and reinforce the idea that the federal government does not need to take the lead in regulating public goods.
Haaland’s administration of Interior has broken new ground and reset the agency’s relationship with the Tribes. But she cannot accomplish everything needed to make Interior the robust agency the American public deserves. We cannot overlook the desperate need for real investment from Congress and seriousness from political parties about public lands policy, while also continuing to build on Haaland’s legacy.
Democrats need to understand that smart politics can accomplish both of these policy goals at once. Interior must be a priority in funding; the generally popular national parks can be used as a tool to put pressure on Republicans to fund the agency. Putting powerful Western Democrats in charge of key committees can move things forward in Congress. Committing to appointees who build on Haaland’s legacy on Native rights can do more than almost any tool we have to fight for Native justice at the federal level.
Almost everything Haaland has accomplished depends on Democrats winning in November. Trump’s secretaries of the interior, Ryan Zinke and then David Bernhardt, were disasters on Tribal issues and environmental protection. Project 2025 would roll back even more protections for public lands and the Tribes, including prioritizing petroleum production on the reservations. Trump’s disinterest in policy-based agencies such as Interior would mean his farthest-right advisers would get to select the new secretary.
A Harris administration needs to build on Haaland’s work. First, Haaland should be asked to remain on as interior secretary. The Biden administration has already seen record-low turnover in Cabinet positions, and the possibility of a hostile Senate means there’s a good chance that many Biden appointees will stay on for a Harris term. If Haaland does not, Harris should consult with the Tribes about her replacement. Perhaps National Park Service director Chuck Sams, a member of the Cayuse and Walla Walla Tribes, would be a good option.
Second, Harris needs to rebuild employee morale by listening to NPS and BLM workers about their concerns and acting internally to implement them. Third, Harris must prioritize proper funding of Interior’s missions. This requires working with a potentially hostile Congress, but that is true of every agency, and unfortunately Democratic presidents of the recent past have avoided potentially fruitful politicization of Republicans’ reticence to fund the national parks. The public lands are America’s playground. Create a successful politics around it.
As with much of modern governance, progress under Democratic governance may be limited, but Republican governance explicitly promises to repeal everything decent. For the Tribes, this is the difference between continued acknowledgment of them as partners in managing their lands and a return to the genocidal policies of the past.
