Haaland is right choice at Department of the Interior
On Monday the Senate voted to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee as secretary of the interior, Deb Haaland, a member of Congress from New Mexico. Of greater significance is the fact that she is the first Native American to hold a Cabinet post.
It is very much to Mr. Biden’s credit that he did so, particularly given the Department of the Interior’s history in terms of its reputation for kicking the Native Americans around and, second, for the number of years it took for a Native American to be named to that post.
It is a big job, and Ms. Haaland, a Hopi raised in a pueblo, appears to be fully equipped to carry it out. In addition to its responsibility for 1.9 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the department also oversees millions of acres of public land, waters off our coasts, dams and the well-being of endangered species.
Her primary adversaries will be advocates for oil and gas leases. Her predecessor under the Trump administration had been an oil lobbyist.
Washington’s long record of dealing with Native Americans is
not really something to be proud of. The rest of us, basically all immigrants from the Native Americans’ point of view, took their lands and tried to exterminate them.
I won’t try to gild my own history in that regard. When I dug in the earth of the Ohio Valley as a child, I always kept watch for arrowheads. When I carried papers, I watched for Indian-head pennies in my change. I did sometimes root for the Indians rather than the cowboys in the movies I saw at the Temple Theater. Later it was “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and, finally, the politically correct “Dances With Wolves” — and they didn’t mean the Pennsylvania governor’s family.
Deb Haaland seems about right as secretary of the Department of the Interior.
Native Americans have been heroic. The “code talkers” who assured secure communications among American forces on World War II battlefields by transmitting messages in their native languages are one example.
Jim Thorpe’s story is illustrative. My wife and I lived in a house builtby Native Americans at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, the former Carlisle Indian Industrial Schoolthat Thorpe attended and wherehe first displayed his remarkable athletic prowess.
That was a mixed story, seen from the Native Americans’ point of view, punctuated by the number of Native American children buried in the graveyard there. Brought to Carlisle from the West, the children didn’t have immunity against Eastern diseases and died in Eastern epidemics.
The idea was that the Native American children would learn Eastern skills and habits and then go back and lead their peoples. It didn’t work very well in practice.
I don’t know if anyone else has done a better job of integrating with Indigenous populations than the majority group in the United States has. One thinks of Canada’s First Nations or Australia’s Aborigines or New Zealand’s Maoris or South Africa’s Namas or Khoisan. None of them are complete success stories unless one is prepared to consider complete integration, or disappearance, a “success.”
Otherwise, Ms. Haaland as secretary of the interior can be considered “success,” or progress anyway.
The well-being of America’s native people probably has to take second place right now to the situation at our southwestern border with the flood of unaccompanied children pouring in from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and points south.
There have to be rules. At the same time, if these children’s parents think their situations in their home countries are so bad that they have to let them go by themselves, we have an obligation to let them in. We are, after all, a nation of some 330 million. Why not a few more?