Last week marked 18 months since Deb Haaland was sworn in as Secretary of the Interior, the first-ever Native American to hold the position. We did a brief sketch of all that falls within the department’s purview during Haaland’s confirmation process (see “Into the Interior: The Department of Everything”) and the likelihood of her failing to meet the expectations put upon her by social movements looking for rapid change. Now seems as good a time as ever to take a look at how it’s all been going, especially as Public Lands Day is coming up this Saturday.
There’s a lot to cover, so I’m breaking this up into a few different pieces. Today’s post takes a look at some of the initiatives and changes that have been taking place both at the Department of the Interior and also in partnership with Haaland and Interior elsewhere throughout the Biden administration. Missing from below, as I feel it deserves a post to itself, are the many efforts Haaland has been making on issues of repatriation and intergenerational healing, including the Federal Boarding School Initiative. And in upcoming pieces we’ll also look at some of the issues where Interior has been drawing critique, such as oil and gas leasing (both inland and offshore).
Representation Matters—Both In and Outside the DOI
“Representation matters” is a favorite phrase of Haaland’s. She broke down what this means to her in a talk earlier this year at SXSW, called “Auntie Deb’s Guide to Equity & Inclusion”:
Haaland has followed through on this point, further expanding Indigenous representation with appointments such as Bryan Newland (Ojibwe) as Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs and Charles Sams (Cayuse and Walla Walla) as the Director of the National Park Service.
One key and swift success Haaland achieved—certainly marking the importance of representation—is the removal of a derogatory word from hundreds of place names around the country. How many people outside of the Native community understood that this word was offensive until Haaland’s tenure? While debate about the origins of the “s-word” and just how offensive it is to how many people have been taking place slowly for some time, it took less than a year from Haaland declaring the word officially derogatory to go through a process of public input and Tribal consultation to officially rename hundreds of locations. You can view place name changes near you and around the country on this map.
With a focus on inclusion that goes beyond the Indigenous community, we might not be surprised to learn that the one new addition to the national park system thus far during Haaland’s tenure is the Amache National Historic Site near Granada, Colorado, marking the location of a mass incarceration camp for Japanese Americans during WWII. “Tell All Stories” instructs the headline at the top of the NPS website for Amache, calling it “a place to reflect, recommit, and further the pursuit of freedom and justice.”
But this focus on representation and inclusion expands beyond the DOI into the rest of the Biden administration, in a manner that could have material effects. During Haaland’s first month, the administration resumed the White House Council on Native American Affairs, a body that had been created during Obama’s second term but which ceased to meet after 2016. This is in addition to the Secretary’s Tribal Advisory Committee, begun in the fall of last year to provide Tribal leaders with direct access to Secretary Haaland. Both are intended to create forums for nation-to-nation discussions and further improve the quality and scope of interactions with tribal leaders at the executive level.
More recently, the Office of Management and Budget created a new Tribal Policy Advisory position, a permanent staff member focused on advocating for Indigenous communities within the budgeting process. Elizabeth Carr (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians) is the first appointee to the new position. And just last month, FEMA came out with a five-year “National Tribal Strategy” meant to create stronger relationships and familiarity between the agency and Tribal Nations and their leaders.
Other agencies are meant to follow suit, with new advisory bodies, appointments, and initiatives. There’s even plans for a new Interagency Working Group on Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge. This is all in alignment with the flurry of memoranda issued at last November’s White House Tribal Nations Summit. Will memos and new positions and strategy documents achieve the administration’s stated goal of fulfilling all treaty rights and obligations, which have often been neglected? We’ll see. Recent reports from the Government Accountability Office (which also has a new Tribal Advisory Council) have noted that programs focused on Tribal Nations can be fragmented and overlapping, and that agencies fail to gather data allowing for better coordination and understanding of their impact. Will the blossoming of a thousand advisory councils allow for improved coordination and representation or just more tangled bureaucracy?
From Representation to Co-Management
But what if administrative initiatives and innovations can, in fact, be innovations in governance? A question the U.S. Supreme Court has taken to some interesting places recently, in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and one we might want to consider more carefully, especially if those innovations threaten the access of the extractive industries to land. That might be an apt way to describe the co-management practices gaining traction at DOI.
The ability for Interior and other federal agencies (like the Forest Service, within the Department of Agriculture) to enter into co-management agreements with Tribal Nations actually has clear congressional authority, after legislation enacted in the mid-1990s. Yet few such arrangements have taken place; until this year, only four national parks or monuments were co-managed. But under Haaland, and notably under Chuck Sams at NPS, those arrangements are expanding. Here are four that Interior highlighted in a recent news release:
Bears Ears National Monument in Utah: On June 18, 2022, the BLM, U.S. Forest Service, and five Tribes of the Bears Ears Commission formalized their partnership for co-management of the Bears Ears National Monument. The BLM and U.S. Forest Service will provide resources to each Tribe through a separate process to support the work that the five Tribes will perform under this agreement and through their representatives on the Bears Ears Commission.
Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Bison Range Restoration in Montana: On January 2, 2022, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) assumed full management of the Bison Range. The FWS and CSKT continue to partner together to ensure the land and resources are managed at a high-level including prioritizing much needed improvements to address deferred maintenance to enhance safety to the public and wildlife.
Rappahannock Indian Tribe’s Homeland Restoration in Virginia: On April 1, 2022, the Rappahannock Tribe’s re-acquired 465 acres of their ancestral homelands at Fones Cliffs, a sacred site to the Tribe and a globally significant Important Bird Area for resident and bald eagles and other migratory birds. The land is located within the authorized boundary of the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge; the parcel will be owned by the Tribe and be publicly accessible and held with a permanent conservation easement conveyed to FWS.
Dworshak National Fish Hatchery Transfer to the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho: On June 16, 2022, the Department transferred fish production at Dworshak National Fish Hatchery to the Nez Perce Tribe. The FWS will continue to provide support to the hatchery through the Idaho Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office and Pacific Region Fish Health Program.
On cue, the state of Utah sued the Biden administration over the expansion of Bears Ears not long after the co-management plan was finalized. Part of Utah’s argument is that the expansion came without appropriate measures to handle the increased visitation that will result. A bad faith argument for land no longer as easily available for drilling or grazing? Maybe, but it will be interesting to see if and in what ways the new co-management agreement gets litigated or discussed in conjunction with the case.
Regardless of that particular case, co-management practices represent a governance strategy that is in line with the spirit of LandBack, as the Rappahannock example above certainly suggests. If you’d like to learn a bit more about the approach of the Interior and the National Park Service specifically on co-management, I found Chuck Sam’s statement this spring to the House Committee on Natural Resources to be informative.
Funding Indian Country
If you comb through the press releases being put out by the Department of Interior this last year and a half, you begin to notice some themes. And one of those themes is the prevalence of the phrase “President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.” You could play a kind of Mad Libs with these stories:
[Name of DOI Leader, i.e. Haaland or Newland]
visits [Name of rural county/Tribal Nation/western state/giant piece of federal infrastructure]
to announce investment of [Number, must be $1 million or higher]
in order to [Verb: synonym for restore or protect]
the incredibly important [Name of water source, critical infrastructure, or treasured landscape],
a feat made possible by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”
It’s pretty standard stuff, of course, but you can see Interior trying to make their point loud and clear: “we’re getting you money to do important things.” That includes not only Indian Country, which has been receiving investments for everything from broadband access to drinking water infrastructure, but many Republican-leaning states that host a fair amount of the industry related to energy production.
Recent funding went to 24 states for the expressed purpose of capping and mitigating damage from old oil and gas wells (over 10,000 of them), which can leak methane and contaminate groundwater. A program like this threads a fine needle: it reduces a more potent greenhouse gas; it’s an environmental justice win, benefitting communities living near the wells who have been harmed by them; and at the same time it manages to get reluctant states and local jurisdictions to take action by giving them the money to do so—arguably action they should have taken, long ago, paid for by the oil and gas companies themselves, yes—but the point is they’re getting it done.
It’s the type of program that is necessary, is aided by federal coordination, but doesn’t necessarily garner a lot of news attention on its own. And that, I think, is in part why you get the redundant headlines coming from Interior and other agencies: they are trying to hammer journalists over the head with the improvements in the works as a result of these bills. That small towns might have faster internet and cleaner drinking water once the infrastructure funds get fully spent are not stories that people seem to really know right now, but they’re happening.
The Takeaway
I was absolutely bored with (and somewhat concerned about) Biden as a presidential candidate back in 2020, but I’ll admit there are times when boring is not a bad thing—like when it comes to restoring the basic functions of a large and complicated administrative body such as the DOI, and the mess that it was left in post-Trump. (Trump’s first Interior Secretary is still dealing with fallout from ethics violations, and he failed to confirm a National Park Service Director during his entire term.) And under Haaland, the DOI administrative apparatus is being rebuilt with a different ethos, one more attuned to issues of treaty rights and Indigenous sovereignty.
Yet how much of this can remain in place after the next presidential cycle? The problem with all those executive agency memos, of course, is that they’re not legally binding; they can be easily neglected by whomever takes office next, regardless of party affiliation. But in the meantime, all that physical work—capping, building, repairing, restoring—will be taking place, and with greater Tribal input than we have really seen before (even if there’s still a very long way to go on this front). I’ll give Haaland and Biden credit for that, certainly.
If you also dig the idea of hands-on improvement over symbolic change when it comes to public land, this weekend is a classic time for volunteering. Find an NPS event near you or check to see if your local parks are hosting an opportunity.
More on other work at Interior—the good and the bad—coming your way soon.
Until next time,
Meg