In these dire political times, as corrupt leaders in Washington fuel backlash politics and undermine basic rights, Deb Haaland’s campaign for governor of New Mexico offers a powerful counterpoint. Haaland, a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, was elected to Congress in 2018 and in 2021 became the first Indigenous person to serve in a Presidential Cabinet when Biden appointed her Secretary of the Interior. The Interior Department oversees federal lands and manages U.S. relations with American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.
Even before she led the Interior Department, Haaland was achieving significant and lasting change for Indigenous peoples as a member of Congress. In November 2018, she and Sharice Davids — a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation from Kansas — were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Soon after, in January 2019, Haaland and Davids introduced two bills — Savanna’s Act and the Not Invisible Act — to improve the federal response to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, who face disproportionately high rates of violence in the United States. According to the National Criminal Justice Training Center, Indigenous women experience murder at ten times the rate of women from all other ethnicities. Both bills were signed into law in 2020.
As Secretary of the Interior, Haaland played a key role in implementing these laws. Shortly after taking office in 2021, Secretary Haaland announced the formation of a new Missing & Murdered Unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Justice Services to lead cross-departmental and interagency efforts involving missing and murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives.
Later that year, in June 2021, Secretary Haaland turned to another pillar of federal violence against Indigenous peoples, launching the formation of a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. This initiative seeks to recover the history and address the harms of the U.S. government’s policy of taking Indigenous children from their families and communities and relocating them to distant residential facilities. In these institutions, many suffered from physical, sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse and neglect. As a first step toward accountability under this initiative, Secretary Haaland traveled across the country on a “Road to Healing” tour to hear from Indigenous survivors of the federal Indian boarding school system and connect communities with trauma-informed support.
After an extensive investigation exposing the scope and devastating legacy of this system, the Interior Department released a report in May 2022 that, for the first time, identified all federally operated Indian boarding school sites and associated marked and unmarked burial sites. The report includes maps showcasing school locations across states and profiles of each institution. To document the experiences of the generations of Indigenous people who were forced to attend the federal boarding schools, Haaland launched an oral history project in September 2023 to gather first-person survivor narratives.
Together, these efforts culminated last October in a groundbreaking formal apology delivered by President Biden on behalf of the United States at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. Before an assembly of Native American leaders, Biden apologized for the genocidal impact of 150 years of U.S. Indian boarding schools, which sought to erase Indigenous people, culture and languages. “I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did,” said President Biden. “It’s long overdue.” After 150 years of silence, Biden became the first president to apologize for the atrocities of the federal boarding school system.
Haaland’s push for accountability extended beyond the boarding school system. Among other advances, she also worked to remove racist language from federal lands. In November 2021, Haaland issued an order formally declaring the word “squaw” a derogatory term and creating a Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force to rename more than 650 valleys, lakes, creeks and other sites on federal lands that carried the slur. In the original Algonquian language, the word “squaw” simply meant “woman,” but settler colonists weaponized it as a slur for Native women as early as the 1600s.
The Interior Department did not mince words about the necessity of this change: “The term has historically been used as an offensive ethnic, racial, and sexist slur, particularly for Indigenous women,” the department explained in a press release. “Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands,” said Haaland. “Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage — not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression.”
In January, Donald Trump ousted Haaland as interior secretary and appointed Doug Bergman, a fossil-fuel billionaire intent on opening public lands to drilling. If elected governor of New Mexico, Haaland would be the first Indigenous woman governor of a U.S. state.
Haaland has long argued that the front lines of democracy are in state and local efforts. “Local and state governments are the last line of defense against Donald Trump’s cruel policies, a Republican Party who doesn’t care, and their dysfunctional federal government,” she said after the election victories of Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey. “It’s up to us to lower costs, improve education, make our communities safer, and protect health care access.” Democratic women governors, like our own Maura Healey, are a key bulwark against the Trump administration and the Republican Party’s attacks on rights, public lands, and democracy itself. I urge you to expand their ranks and strengthen the pipeline for future Democratic Presidential administrations by supporting Deb Haaland for New Mexico governor.
Carrie N. Baker is a professor in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Smith College and a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine.