New Mexico governor election Deb Haaland first Native American woman governor, Digi Mart USA News (Washington): Democrat Deb Haaland won the New Mexico governor’s race on Tuesday in the midterm elections, becoming the first Native American woman to hold that political post in U.S. history, according to projections from the Associated Press and NBC.
Haaland will take office after serving in the Biden administration as Secretary of the Interior from 2021 to 2025. There she was the first Native American to serve in the Cabinet, the president’s principal advisory body, which at the time included Vice President Kamala Harris and the heads of the federal departments.
Earlier, in 2018, Haaland had already been the first Native American woman elected to the House of Representatives, sharing that distinction with Sharice Davids, who was elected from Kansas in the same election cycle.
According to her campaign team, Haaland’s priorities focus on health, housing and education, as well as addiction, crime and drought, which she describes as challenges that call for solutions different from the usual approaches.
Before entering politics, Haaland worked in catering and ran her own business producing and canning sauces, a job she combined with raising her non-binary son, Somah, as a single parent.
Haaland came from a military family, with a father who was a Marine Corps officer. She attended as many as 13 public schools before graduating from Highland High School in Albuquerque.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in English at age 28 from the University of New Mexico, where she later also obtained a law degree.
As Secretary of the Interior, she led an investigation into the legacy of boarding schools that forcibly enrolled Indigenous children. The effort resulted in two official reports and the ‘Road to Healing’ project.
Focusing on supporting Indigenous peoples, Haaland increased co-management land agreements with tribes from 20 to 300, to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into environmental stewardship.
She also launched the Missing and Murdered Unit, an entity within her department to investigate unresolved cases of violence against women and Indigenous peoples.
