Secretary of the Interior is not one of the sexier Cabinet positions. Unlike the Secretary of State, it isn’t a stepping-stone to the presidency; the position has neither the prestige of Defense nor the quiet power of the Treasury. Most Americans don’t even tend to be aware of who their Interior Secretary is, even when the bureaucrat happens to screw up so spectacularly that he briefly earns himself a “scandal tracker” on the website of Outside magazine.
It was unusual, then, when New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland made national headlines after becoming the first Native American to be confirmed to any Cabinet post. For many environmental– and social-justice-minded onlookers, the appointment of Haaland — a “35th generation New Mexican” and Pueblo of Laguna tribal member — to lead the department that oversees about one-fifth of the stolen land that makes up the United States was an important and long-overdue landmark.
But to Haaland, representation alone isn’t the be-all-end-all of her mission in the unassuming department. Last week, she announced that for the first time, the United States will search the grounds of its former Indigenous boarding schools for the remains of children who for over a century were forcibly taken from their families and brutally stripped of their culture (including Haaland’s grandparents). The move will mean a serious national reckoning among non-Indigenous Americans about the cultural genocide in our not-so-distant past, and the revelations, conversations, and policies that could ensue set Haaland up to be one of the most consequential Interior Secretaries in modern history.
The horrors of the boarding school system are an open topic in Canada where, earlier this year, the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in a mass grave at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. That sickening announcement was followed last week by the report of an additional 751 unmarked graves of children found near a residential school in Saskatchewan. Already this week, another 182 graves were found at a former school east of Vancouver, Canada. In total, an estimated 6,000 children are thought to have died at schools in Canada, while “it’s likely that the number of students who died in the United States is much higher,” Christine Diindiisi McCleave, the executive director of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), told High Country News.
Only, our government hasn’t started looking yet. Canada is “probably over a decade ahead of us on this, trying to build some sort of public acknowledgment of just how horrific these schools were for the children who were forced to go there,” Nick Martin, a member of the Sappony tribe, explained to The Takeaway recently. And while it now falls under Haaland’s jurisdiction to shine…
Read More: The investigation that will change how America thinks about its past