United States President-elect Joe R Biden on December 19, 2020 nominated Debra Anne Haaland, a Congressional representative from New Mexico and a Native American, to lead the country’s Interior Department.

Haaland would become the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, and also the first indigenous person to lead the department, whose jurisdiction includes tribal lands. It is another step in the spirit of Biden’s promise of a cabinet which looks like America.

According to the New York Times, Haaland said in a statement, “It would be an honour to move the Biden-Harris climate agenda forward, help repair the government-to-government relationship with Tribes that the Trump Administration has ruined and serve as the first Native American cabinet secretary in our nation’s history.”

The 60-year-old New Mexico representative is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, one of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States. She was born to a Native American mother and a Norwegian-American father. Haaland once made history in 2018 as one of the first two Native American women ever elected to the US Congress.

Haaland first came to national attention in 2018 when she was elected to the House of Representatives. She was one of the two Native American women elected to Congress for the first time in US history. Now she will be the first-ever indigenous person to hold a Cabinet-level position.

She said that Mr. Biden and vice president-elect Kamala Harris know that “issues under interior’s jurisdiction are not simply about conservation and that they are woven in with justice, good jobs, and closing the racial, wealth, and health gaps.”

“I will be fierce for all of us, for our planet, and all of our protected land,” she said.

To say that Native American politician Debra Anne Haaland’s appointment as Secretary of the Interior of the US would be historic is an understatement. If confirmed by the Senate, Haaland will take office in early 2021 as the first Native American head of the sprawling government department that manages the US government’s relations with indigenous communities and oversees the country’s national parks and millions of acres of public lands, most of which were once controlled by Native Americans.

In urging Biden to choose Haaland for the position, prominent environmental and climate activist Bill McKibben said, “It would be a remarkable plot twist in the American story for an indigenous person to run interior. A gesture cannot repair much of the damage that has been done, but it can serve as a constant reminder of the debt still to be repaid.”

Native Americans did not all cheer when the US Congress in 1924 declared that those born in the country will be American citizens. Clinton Rickard, the chief of the Tuscarora people (who now live in the US state of New York and Canada’s Ontario province), said: “By its provisions, all Indians were automatically made United States citizens whether they wanted to be or not. This was a violation of our sovereignty. Our citizenship was in our own nations. We wished to remain treaty Indians and reserve our ancient rights. There was no great rush among my people to go out and vote in the white man’s elections.”

During the racial reckoning that has been taking place in the US over the past months in the current year, Black Lives Matter activists have drawn attention to the mistreatment of all “communities of colour”. But the protests have also dramatized the uniqueness of the challenges facing Native Americans. Unlike all other exclusions in American society, at the core of America’s problems with indigenous communities lies the question of land, a lot of which falls within the mandate of the Department of Interior. It has become commonplace to talk of slavery as America’s original sin. But this narrative elides the story of the US as a settler colony from which native Americans were forcibly removed before white settlers could use slave labour to cultivate those lands.

Biden had promised a Cabinet that “looks like America”. Perhaps a Native American Secretary of the Interior will bring America a step closer to recognizing its settler based colonial past and present. If that happens, Haaland’s appointment will prove historic above and beyond its intended short-term political goal.

The author is a student member of Amity Centre of Happiness