Haaland (New Yorker)

If Deb Haaland has any plans to run for governor--and all signs say she does--an encyclopedic profile from the liberal but authoritative New Yorker Magazine on her life, times and trials and tribulations will only ramp up the pressure on Sen. Martin Heinrich to publicly put aside any '26 gubernatorial aspirations he harbors.

The over 9,000 word piece (you read that number right) is a gift for Haaland, 63, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior in the nation's history who remains noncommittal about her future even as her friends and operatives here appear to be laying the groundwork for her to seek the Democratic Guv nomination in 2026. Ditto for Heinrich.

The powerfully written profile of Haaland comes close to canonizing her as it details her difficult early life, her jagged path up the power ladder and the milestones achieved as the overseer of a department with sweeping powers over the American West.

Unfortunately, Haaland was not asked directly about the governorship or, if she was, it was not included. Here's what did come out: 

Haaland is committed to staying at Interior through the election in November, but she is circumspect about her plans after that, even if Biden is reëlected. A few months after her term began, she married her boyfriend, Skip Sayre, a widowed gaming-and-hospitality executive who was then the marketing director for the Laguna Development Corporation. They own a condo not far from Haaland’s office, along with an adobe home outside Albuquerque, where they have two rescue dogs, Winchester and Remington. Haaland, now sixty-three, still runs marathons, and the pair enjoy hiking together. It is harder, these days, for Haaland to return to her ancestral home in Mesita, but she was there after her mother died, during her first year at Interior, and she sees her family often. She still hopes to get her ­master’s degree from U.C.L.A. and recently finished her thesis. She has spent more than three hundred and sixty-five days on the road during her time as Secretary.

The New Yorker finds her tenure as Interior Secretary as vindication of long-ignored Native American rights and as instrumental in redefining its mission to include social justice for Natives--most of whom live on federal lands controlled by Interior.

In taking over the department, Haaland, like all her predecessors, was tasked with overseeing one of the most diverse and unruly agencies in the federal government, so sprawling that it is sometimes called the Department of Everything Else. She has also embraced a possibly impossible challenge: not only running the Department of the Interior but redeeming it. 

That redemption includes Haaland establishing a Missing and Murdered Unit in the BIA, pursuing justice by forming the Federal Indian Boarding School initiative to investigate horrible wrongdoing against  Native youths and being "an integral player in a conservation plan pushed by Biden, called “30 by 30”—an attempt to conserve thirty per cent of the country’s land and water by 2030."

PERSONAL POWER

It's the unarguably compelling personal history of Haaland that has the most political punch in the magazine's elongated narrative as it unpacks that background with a simplistic force sure to resonate on any campaign trail Haaland chooses to step onto:

Mary and John were married in 1958, and the third of their four children, Debra Anne, was born in 1960, while her father was stationed in Okinawa. He went on to earn two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star in Vietnam. During his deployments and temporary duty assignments, Haaland’s mother would bring the children back to her parents—at first to a house in Arizona, but soon to her mother’s ancestral homeland, in Mesita, where they all lived together in a one-room stone dwelling. That house, which is smaller than the office where Haaland and I were talking, is one of the few places she has ever thought of as home. Throughout her extremely peripatetic childhood—she attended thirteen public schools in as many years—she spent summers and other long spells getting a different kind of education from her grandmother on the Pueblo of Laguna. She and her siblings helped chop firewood, bake bread in a mud oven, cook huge pots of beef posole and deer stew, and pluck worms from the stalks of corn in the fields during the summertime. Whatever the season, they bathed in a galvanized washtub with water they heated on the stove after carrying buckets from the only well in the village, and they sometimes slept together on the floor. Before bedtime, their mother would do last call for the outhouse. Once they were ready for bed, their grandmother would turn out the only light in the house.

Heinrich has already come under pressure from his GOP opponent, Nella Domenici, for not knocking down rumors that, if re-elected, he will turn right around and run for Governor. And if he wins, he would then appoint Gov. Lujan Grisham to his vacant Senate seat. 

That meme is menacing for Heinrich as he faces Domenici's unanticipated and well-funded challenge. Now there's this glowing article giving Haaland's halo extra luster that may have his own party applying pressure on him to back off from any Guv run. 

The 9,000 plus words take much weight from Haaland's shoulders not by glossing over her foibles but by effectively placing them in the context of her entire life's journey. The mountain of verbiage is easily translated into political language and thus places much weight on the shoulders of the state's senior senator. Stay tuned.

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