hanimmal
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/12/17/deb-haaland-interior-secretary-biden/
President-elect Joe Biden tapped Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) Thursday to serve as the first Native American Cabinet secretary and head the Interior Department, a historic pick that marks a turning point for the U.S. government’s relationship with the nation’s Indigenous peoples.
With that selection and several others this week, Biden is sending a clear message that the officials who will confront the nation’s environmental problems will look like the Americans who are disproportionately affected by toxic air and despoiled land. He has named North Carolina environmental regulator Michael S. Regan to become the first Black man to head the Environmental Protection Agency and Obama administration veteran Brenda Mallory to serve as the first Black chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
While the picks represent a concession to progressives, who launched an unusual public campaign to place an American Indian at the helm of Interior, they also demonstrate Biden’s commitment to addressing the longstanding burdens low-income and minority communities have shouldered when it comes to dirty air and water. All three nominees will play a central role in realizing the president-elect’s promises to combat climate change, embrace green energy and address environmental racism.
“We have individuals coming to these positions who have seen what it’s like on the other side, in terms of communities that have suffered,” said environmental justice pioneer Bob Bullard said in an interview Thursday. “They have been fighting for justice. Now they are in a position to make change and make policy. That, to me, has the potential to be transformative.”
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Haaland just won reelection to a second term from a north central New Mexico district that leans Democratic. If confirmed by the Senate, her party will have a razor-thin margin over Republicans in the House until her seat is filled. Right now Democrats hold 222 seats, pending a recanvassing in a New York race and challenges in Iowa, and Biden has already tapped two other House Democrats to serve in his administration, Reps. Cedric L. Richmond (La.) and Marcia L. Fudge (Ohio).
But Pelosi made it clear Wednesday that she would not stand in the way of Haaland leaving the House, calling her “one of the most respected and one of the best Members of Congress I have served with.”
As a child, Haaland spent summers with her grandparents in a house without running water in Mesita, one of Laguna Pueblo’s small villages in New Mexico.
“As kids we moved a lot because my dad was in the service, but no matter where we were he would take us outside,” she recalled.
“In New Mexico we would hike in Jemez during a rainstorm, or at other military bases we would visit the ocean.”
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With his pick, Biden heeded the call of an eclectic coalition of youth climate activists, tribal leaders, Hollywood celebrities and liberal members of Congress who rallied around Haaland for the Cabinet post, despite her short time in Congress.
Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and helped lead the campaign on behalf of Haaland, said that “any comment that she’s not qualified for the job is wrong, and a cheap shot.” By selecting Haaland, Grijalva added, Biden is helping “begin to rewrite a legacy in this country. And I think that’s good given everything else that’s going on around us.”
Biden’s decision to appoint Haaland to head Interior will hold profound meaning for the 1.9 million Native Americans whose education and health care are often influenced by the department’s decisions.
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Jim Enote, a Zuni tribal member and chief executive of the Native-led Colorado Plateau Foundation, said in an interview that the move signals how much has changed over the last half-century. Native Americans “do not participate in the same channels of influence as other Americans,” he said, and some previous Interior secretaries have held a dismissive attitude toward the country’s first inhabitants.
The legacy of Interior is blemished by instances of federal officials removing Native Americans from their ancestral lands — including from Yellowstone, the first and perhaps most iconic national park.
Years later, in 1972, several hundred tribal activists took over Interior Department headquarters in Washington to draw attention to their plight. A little more than a decade later, in 1983, then-Interior Secretary James G. Watt blamed the problems on U.S. reservations on indigenous culture.
“If you want an example of the failure of socialism,” Watt said in an interview on a satellite radio show based in Tulsa, “don’t go to Russia. Come to America and go to the Indian reservations.”
Biden’s choice comes as the federal government’s relationship with tribes has eroded under the Trump administration, which has removed protections from sacred tribal sites in Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument and allowed oil drillers into Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuges, home to the caribou that Native Alaskans hunt for food.
“The Trump administration has not been kind to Indian country,” Haaland said. “He has thrown tribal consultation essentially out the window.”
She argued that Trump’s interior secretaries, Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, reorganized the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other Interior Department bureaus in a way that has hampered the ability of Native Americans to confer with federal officials. Relocating the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colo., for example, has made it harder for tribal leaders accustomed to traveling to Washington.
“It doesn’t help them that they move one big facet of the Department of the Interior to another state, because that’s not the way that things have been done,” she said.
Chase Iron Eyes, a Native American activist and attorney with the Lakota People’s Law Project, said that while Indigenous people have several champions in Congress, he is relieved to see that the department will be run by someone who’s a tribal member.
“It could not have been in our forefathers’ dreams to have an actual Indian be appointed at the Cabinet level in the agency that is meant to oversee their absorption,” he said.
Charles Curtis, a Republican who was vice president from 1929 to 1933 under President Herbert Hoover, was the first person of Native American ancestry to serve in a Cabinet. He was a member of the Kaw nation.
Haaland bolstered her national profile in 2016 by going to the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation in North and South Dakota to join tribal leaders in opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. “She asked what I needed and what the tribe needed,” said Jodi Archambault, a former special assistant to Barack Obama for Native American affairs and a member of the tribe. Haaland, she said, was able to provide support from some New Mexico labor unions — and tortillas and green chili stew.
“She brought her own cooking things and opened her trunk up, and said this is the best I can do,” Archambault said, adding: “The stew was really good; the tortillas were excellent.”
