By Nicole Maxwell, New Mexico Political Report
A second Trump administration and how it will transition into power is a discussion happening across various governmental departments. One of those, the U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary, New Mexico’s own Deb Haaland, who discussed the transition Tuesday night on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.
“We’re going to do our best to make sure that whoever comes into the Department of the Interior knows what we’re working on,” Haaland said. “You know, we can tell them what’s meant a lot to us and how we’ve managed the department. But don’t forget, there will still be 65,000 career staff there who don’t leave when I leave, and they will continue to do the really wonderful work that they have been doing for decades and decades.”
Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo, is the first Native American woman to serve as Department of Interior secretary. She also served as a Democratic congresswoman for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District.
“The department that I now lead once had the job of working to assimilate Indians, moving Native Americans out of their communities, away from their families, to assimilate them into mainstream society and one of the ways they did that was to essentially steal children and ship them off, sometimes 1,000s of miles away from their homes, to attend Indian boarding schools,” Haaland said. “And so when I got to the department, we thought about, ‘What can we do to make a difference in the future of our Native communities across the country?’ One of the ways was to be honest about our country’s history. It’s a history that not a lot of people, not a lot of Americans, realize.”
One of the ways the DOI worked to bring attention to that history was by poring over 103 million pages of documents to create reports as part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.”
The short interview concluded with Haaland answering a question about Native American philosophy and how it can be applied to the current times.
“I don’t know about Native American quote, unquote ‘philosophy’, but I’ll tell you some words I live by every single day,” Haaland said. “My auntie — God rest her soul, Auntie Anne — her advice to me was, ‘Be nice to everyone, just be kind.’ And I feel like sometimes kindness might be in short supply in our country right now, but if we all followed my aunt’s advice, then we might be better off.”