Deb Haaland Is a Big Damn Deal

I am thrilled that President-elect Joe Biden has tapped New Mexico Congresswoman Deb Haaland to head the US Department of interior, which is responsible for the management and conservation of most federal lands and natural resources outside of our National Forests (which are managed by the US Dept. of Ag.).

The Dept. of Interior ovesees about 20 percent of all land in the US — 507 million acres — which includes 410 national parks, national monuments, national seashores, and 544 national wildlife refuges through the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as 476 dams and 348 reservoirs through the Bureau of Reclamation.

The Dept. of Interior also overseas certain trust aspects of Native American reservations through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, including mining and oil and gas extraction.

Congresswoman Deb Haaland is a Laguna Pueblo and will become the first Native American Cabinet secretary in the history of the United States, and the first Native American to run the Department of the Interior.

Deb has a Juris Doctor from the University of New Mexico School of Law, started her own food company, raised her daughter as a single mother, and is a marathon runner.

Some of America’s most iconic national parks and public lands were created by the systematic expulsion of native American people.

Back in 2015, I wrote about one example, in a post called The Ghosts of Yosemite Valley:

Tonight we are staying at the Ahwahnee Hotel, a posh 1920s-era spread smack in the middle of Yosemite National Park.

The Ahwahnee Hotel is named after the Ahwahneechee Indian tribe that used to live in the Yosemite Valley until they were killed or driven out, beginning in 1850.

The land they used to live and hunt on became a national park by order of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.

When the Scottish immigrant John Muir arrived in the Yosemite Valley, he described it as ‘pure wildness’ where ‘no mark of man is visible upon it.

If that appeared to be the case, it was only because Muir did not understand what he was seeing.

The manicured lands that Muir loved so much were not a product of wild nature, but of controlled fires set by native hands.

Without native Americans to set brush-clearing fires, the meadows and open forests that John Muir admired began to grow crowded with trees and brush, and wildlife began to decline.

The over-crowded landscape created by fire suppression is still with us today. As Scientific American notes:

"After a century of fire suppression in the Yosemite Valley biodiversity had actually declined, trees were now 20 percent smaller, and the forest was more vulnerable to catastrophic fires than it had been before the U.S. Army and armed vigilantes expelled the native population."

Slow we learn, and quick we forget. But will a balance be restored? No doubt, but slowly, slowly.

As for the Ahwahneechee, their remaining descendants are now part of the Paiute tribe in eastern California -- a people treated as ghosts even when they are among the living.”

Deb Haaland replaces the complete and utter corruption that has sat at the top of the Dept. of Interior under Trump.

Ryan Zinke — Trump’s crooked stooge at the DoI — operated as a pawn of the oil, gas, and mining industries even as he robbed the public purse to feather his own nest.

Zinke’s litany of ethical violations were referred to the Justice Department by Interior's Inspector General, at which point Zinke resigned to be replaced by his deputy, David Bernhardt, a lawyer-lobbyist for mining, oil, and extractive industries.

Bernhardt illegally bypassed Senate confirmations for critical appointments at the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, even as he decimated staffing at the BLM by moving it out of Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado, and opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing.