Deb Haaland Reflects On Her Legacy — And Whether It Can Survive 4 Years Of Trump

In an exit interview with HuffPost, the interior secretary celebrated progress in protecting public lands and righting past wrongs against Native Americans.

WASHINGTON — Deb Haaland made history when she was confirmed as President Joe Biden’s interior secretary in 2021, becoming the country’s first-ever Native American Cabinet secretary.

As an enrolled member of the Pueblo Laguna tribe in New Mexico, she brought a unique perspective to leading the massive federal agency that oversees roughly one-fifth of all land in the country — an agency that once forcibly removed tens of thousands of Indigenous people from their ancestral homes.

Four years later, Haaland’s legacy is largely defined by her efforts to boost conservation of public lands and right past wrongs against Native Americans by the federal government.

In a Friday exit interview, the interior secretary reflected on some of her proudest accomplishments, including her early work with Biden to restore protections to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, both of which had had their boundaries changed under former President Donald Trump.

She also singled out her department’s new Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a sweeping official review of the U.S. government’s little-discussed legacy of stealing thousands of Indigenous children from their families and forcing them into nightmarish Indian boarding schools, to try to assimilate them into “civilized” white culture.