Haaland could become the nation's most powerful Native American leader
More than a dozen years ago, Alvin Warren's phone rang. He was handling Indian affairs for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and knew all the key people in his field.
“She said her name was Deb Haaland,” Warren recalled. “I'd never heard of her.”
Haaland was volunteering for the presidential campaign of a senator named Barack Obama, and she wanted Warren to travel to the Laguna Pueblo, the Native American enclave Haaland hailed from, to speak to locals about the election's importance.
When Warren arrived, he found pot luck food and 20 people. Haaland apologized for the low turn out. He waved her off, impressed by the unknown activist' s embrace of grassroots politics.
If Haaland, 60, is confirmed next month as President Joe Bid en' s next Interior Secretary, the Democrat New Mexico congress woman, who took office in 2019, will become not just the most powerful Native American politician in the nation, but also the first one to run a department whose centuries of broken promises has contributed to the slow erosion of Indigenous culture.
Ha al and senses the magnitude of the moment.
“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of the Interior ,” she tweeted after her nomination. “It' s profound to think about the history of this country' s policies to ex terminate Native Americans and the resilience of our ancestors that gave me a place here today.”
Haaland has a hardscrabble, mixed-race, military-family backstory. Four days after graduating college at age 33, she gave birth to her only child, daughter Somáh,whoi snow an activist in her own right supporting Native and LGBTQ causes.
The single mother struggled financially, bunking with friends when money ran short. Then in her 40 sand50s, selfrealization: increasingly important political roles that led to Congress.
“She' s not in it for the f ame or the glory,” said New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. “She's in it to see real results.”
From selling salsa to the halls of Congress
Debra Anne Haaland, known as Deb, was born December 2,1960, in Winslow, Arizona.
Haaland's sense of service was seeded by her parents. Her mother, Mary Toy a, was in the Navy, while her father, John David,was a 30-year Marine who was awarded the Silver Star for saving six lives in Vietnam.
Although Ha a landis proud of her father' s Norwegian heritage— The Norwegian American trumpeted her 2018 Congressional win with the headline “Norwegian American Deb Haaland makes history ”— her mother's Pueblo Indian roots are foundation al to her identity and were reflected in the elaborate turquoise, black and r ed outfit Haaland wore for her swearing-in ceremony.
Many Native Americans were marched at gunpoint by federal troops off their land and onto reservations that held no his torical meaning. But Pueblo Indians have a history of resistance — including the infamous Pueblo Revolt in 1680 that temporarily chased the Spanish from New Mexico — that has kept t hem on ancestral lands for the past 7,000 years. Haaland often says she is a 35th generation New Mexican.
A combination of a duty to serve and a dedication to her people quickly came to define Haaland's life.
Although Ha al and was an English major, political science professor Fred Harris, who led the Democratic National Committee in the late `60s and ran for president in the early `70s, sensed alike minded soul when they met in his politics class at the University of New Mexico.
“You could tell right away this was a very smart and very committed person,” said Harris, who successfully convinced Haaland to apply to law school a few years later.
More lean times followed as she worked her way through graduate school doing a variety of jobs, including making and selling Pueblo Salsa. At one particularly dire juncture, she and Somáh were sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate .
After volunteering for Obama's first campaign by getting out the Native vote, she landed top jobs at both the Laguna and San Felipe Pueblos, where she oversaw tribal gaming and implemented environmentally friendly business practices such as recycling. In 2012, she helped Obama win re- election as the state's vote director for Native Americans, and then served as Native caucus chair for the state Democratic party.
Ha a land' s horizons, once clouded by financial and housing in security, were becoming as vast and inviting as the great desert plains of her home state.
Why run for office? `Why not?'
In 2014, Ha al and decided to run for New Mexico lieu tenant governor alongside gubernatorial hopeful and state Attorney General Gary King. Native activist Warren, who stayed in touch with Haaland after their meeting at the Laguna Pueblo, remembers asking her why she had decided to run for a state leadership post.
Ha al and looked at Warren and said simply, “Why not?”
“So many of us, especially Native women, have had the message delivered to us that we aren't the ones who run for office,” said Warren. “But Deb said `I won't let that restrict me.'”
It is a message she has been keen to pass along to a new generation of activists. While running for lieutenant governor, Haaland received an email from a college student who was inspired by seeing a Native American woman aiming for high office. The student, Paulene Abeyta, asked how she could help.
Haaland replied immediately. “She told me, `You can run for office, too,' So I did,” said Abeyta, who went on to win a school board seat. She is now a third-year law student at the University of Arizona and president of the National Native American Law School Students Association.
“There's tons of us she's inspired, she' saw akened,” said Abeyta, who is Navajo.
Haaland lost her bid for lieutenant governor, but instead of retreati ng she successfully set her sights on leading the state's Democratic Party. The two-year term often found her visiting the state' s 33 geog rap hically distant counties to increase Democratic voter rolls alongside vice-chair Juan Sanchez.
He bore witness to her kindness toward strangers, something often observed by the congresswoman' s friends. One cross- state trip started at 4 a.m., and by the time the pair stopped at a filling station in the town of Truth or Consequences, they were famished.
As gas filled the tank, Haaland stocked up on Cheez-Its and Chex Mix.
“I was so excited to eat,” Sanchez recalled. “As we pulled out, we saw a guy with a sign, `Hungry, anything helps.' Deb stopped, gave him all our food and four hours later we finally ate. That's just who she is.”
In 2018, she ran against five Democrats in the state's 1st Congressional District, which is 68% white. With a progressive platform that included Medicare-for-all ,$15 minimum wage and renewable energy, she won 40% of the vote.
She then handily beat Republican counterpart Janice Arnold- Jones for the congressional seat — in doing so becoming only the second Native American woman in Congress after Kansas DemocratS ha rice Davids, who hails from Wisconsin's Ho- Chunk Nation.
In a few Instagram posts last fall under the name CoffeeQueer, daughter Somáh shared photos of her mother washing the family dogs ahead of Election Day.
“You guys, my mom is working so hard every single day,” she wrote of her mother's campaign fundraising efforts. “On top of all this she somehow finds time to do things like cook dinner and bake cakes and gives the pups a trim. She genuinely cares so much and she would do absolutely anything for her community.”
Haaland can train a spotlight on Native issues
On Capitol Hill, Haaland has become known as someone who will not be ignored.
“She' s very, very respectful and pleasant to work with, but she wasn't going to wait for her turn to speak up ,'' said Florida Rep. Lois Frankel, co-chair of the Democratic Women' s Caucus, where Haaland is caucus vice-chair.
If Ha al and becomes the nation's next Interior secretary, many Native American leaders say that she will face great expectations tempered by the historical reality.
“We know these problems we' ve had with the federal government can' t be solved overnight, because they' ve been going on for 400 years ,” said Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indian sand Quinault Tribal Nation in Washington State.
Haaland's hearing will reveal whether she can garner the necessary support f rom Republicans, said Frank Maisa no, a partner in Br ac ewell' s Policy Resolution Group, which represents energy sectors from oil and gas to renewables.
“She has to perform at her nomination hearing. She can't dodge all questions,” he said.
About a dozen House Republicans have already voiced their opposition to Haaland and have asked Biden to recall her nomination. Their January 26 letter says Haaland, a vicechair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is a “direct threat to working men and women and a rejection of responsible development of America's natural resources.”
Sometime next month, Haaland, perhaps dressed again in the Native American fine ry of her Laguna Pueblo, will si t before her Congressional peers and make her case for a Cabinet position.
Not far from where she'll be questioned sit statues and paintings of the people — overwhelming male and white.
Months ago, just before the start of a hearing of the National Parks, Forests and Public Lands subcommittee, U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, a Democrat from Nevada and first vice-chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, was talking with Haaland, who chairs the panel, about the portraits of the past chairman that lined the walls.
Horsford remembered Haaland pointing out the frontiersmen and other white men being honored in the room.