When they would not let their children be taken, they were taken instead. A hundred and thirty years ago, nineteen men from the Third Mesa of the Hopi Reservation, in Arizona, were arrested for refusing to surrender their sons and daughters to soldiers who came for them armed with Hotchkiss guns. For years, the United States had been trying to make the Hopi send their children to federal boarding schools—the children sometimes as young as four, the schools sometimes a thousand miles away. The intent and the effect of those boarding schools was forced assimilation: once there, students were stripped of their Native names, clothing, and language and made to adopt Christian names, learn English, and abandon their traditional religion and culture.
Hopi parents had tried placating the authorities, saying they would enroll their children soon, then hiding them whenever the soldiers returned. Indian agents, meanwhile, had tried withholding food and water from Hopi families to force their compliance; when that failed, they turned to physical force instead, sending soldiers onto tribal lands to round up all the school-age children. But some parents continued to resist, and, in the fall of 1894, the U.S. Army made the arrests. The nineteen men, who were from Orayvi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America, were marched, with their hands bound, a hundred and fifty miles to Fort Wingate, in New Mexico, then transported by horse, train, and ferry to California, where they were imprisoned for nearly a year on Alcatraz Island. In a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs recommended holding “those Indian prisoners in confinement at hard labor until such time as in the opinion of the said military authorities who might be in charge of them, they should show beyond a doubt, that they fully realized the error of their evil ways and evinced in an unmistakable manner their determination to cease interference with the plans of the government for the civilization and education of its Indian wards.”
The Hopi were not alone. After annihilation and dispossession failed, the effort to “Americanize” Indians through the federal boarding-school system targeted every tribe in the country—a vast family-separation policy that deliberately deracinated generations of children. As one Indian school superintendent wrote in a report, “Only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents can he be satisfactorily educated.” From 1819 to 1969, the United States took hundreds of thousands of children away from their parents, sending them to four hundred and eight schools across thirty-seven states. By 1926, more than eighty per cent of school-age Indian children had been removed from their families.
The schools where those children studied were marked, from their founding, by reports of disease, physical abuse, sexual violence, and financial exploitation, as students were forced to work for neighboring farmers, homesteaders, and businesses. At least five hundred children died while attending the schools, and at least fifty-three of the schools have burial sites, filled with the bodies of children who were never returned to their families. An extensive network of religious institutions also participated in these travesties: the Catholic Church operated more than a hundred Indian boarding schools; dozens of others were run by the Society of Friends, the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Church, and the Episcopal Church. The founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Pennsylvania, one of the earliest federal institutions, told a conference of social reformers, “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
The boarding-school system affected virtually every Indian family in the country, including that of Deb Haaland, the fifty-fourth Secretary of the Interior and the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary. Haaland’s grandmother Helen was eight years old when a priest from Mission San José de Laguna, in New Mexico, gathered children in the village of Mesita, some fifty miles west of Albuquerque, and put them on a train to Santa Fe, more than a hundred miles away. In the five years that Helen spent at St. Catherine’s Industrial Indian School, a family member was able to visit her only twice—her father, who worked as both a farmer and a tribal policeman, left his fields and flocks, loaded up his horse and wagon, then rode for three days each way to check on his young daughter.
“Rob, this is not the time to show off your chin-ups.”
Cartoon by Joe Dator
Haaland grew up hearing about St. Catherine’s not only from her grandmother but also from her mother, who was sent there as well. Each generation had stories of hardship and separation. Now Haaland has made listening to similar stories a central part of her job. In the summer of 2021, just months after being sworn in as Secretary of the Interior, she launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to investigate the schools—at the time, there was not so much as a comprehensive list of them, let alone a full roster of students—and to consult with tribes about how to make amends for the harm that the schools caused. After releasing an initial report, in 2022, Haaland decided that archival research and internal investigations were not enough, and began convening listening sessions in Native communities around the country so that survivors and descendants could share testimony. Each session opened with Haaland acknowledging a bitter irony: “My ancestors endured the horrors of the Indian boarding-school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.”
Most Americans, if they think about the Department of the Interior at all, likely think first of its natural-resource agencies: the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But, to Haaland and the nearly four million other Native Americans in this country, it is best known for the Bureau of Indian Education, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, which handles the billions of dollars the federal government holds in trust for tribes, a financial arrangement dating back to some of the earliest negotiations of the Committee on Indian Affairs, led by Benjamin Franklin during the Continental Congress. In 1849, when Interior was founded, it took over management of those treaty and trust obligations, and it still manages the nation-to-nation relationships between the United States and its five hundred and seventy-four federally recognized tribes.
In the long, tragic saga of this country’s relations with its first peoples, almost no federal entity has been more culpable than Interior. Just fifteen years before Haaland’s nomination, a federal judge, who had been appointed by Ronald Reagan, called the department “the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago,” denouncing it as “the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.” 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.
By her own count, Haaland is a thirty-fifth generation New Mexican. Her Laguna ancestors came south into the Rio Grande Valley in the late thirteenth century, settling along the shale and sandstone mesas of the North San Mateo Mountains, at the tail end of the Colorado Plateau. “You know, when I think about why I am really here,” she told me recently, “it’s like I’m here because the ancestors felt it was necessary. I can’t explain it any other way.”
“Here” means, among other things, her office, where we are sitting and talking one rainy winter afternoon. The office is enormous: an oak mansion inside the main Interior building, Federal Public Works Project No. 4, a seven-story limestone behemoth constructed in 1936. It takes up two city blocks just a few hundred feet from the White House, its prodigiousness and proximity the result of the politicking and savvy of Harold Ickes, the head of Interior under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ickes not only got himself the largest office of any Cabinet secretary but also got the building more than three dozen New Deal-era murals, the first radio studio in any government agency, an entire museum on the first floor, and air-conditioning. He even finagled an address to honor his department’s founding: 1849 C Street.
Haaland, affable and unassuming, still seems surprised to find herself occupying the office that Ickes built. But, in ways both obvious and subtle, she has made it her own. Paintings, photographs, sculptures, and handicrafts that Haaland chose from the collections of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Interior Museum fill the otherwise austere room like sunlight. “Pretty much every artist in here is Native American,” she said. After brewing tea in the sticker-covered travel mug she takes everywhere, and making sure for the second time that I didn’t want any myself, she settled us into a sitting area near the fireplace and began telling me about her family.