Deb Haaland elected first Indigenous governor of New Mexico, Digi Mart USA News (New Mexico): Democrat Deb Haaland won the New Mexico governor’s race in the midterm elections on Tuesday, becoming the first Indigenous woman to hold the position.
Haaland will take office following her tenure in the administration of President Joe Biden, where she served as Secretary of the Interior from 2021 to 2025. She was the first Native American to serve in the U.S.
Cabinet, the president’s principal advisory body, which at the time included Vice President Kamala Harris and the heads of the federal departments.
Before that, in 2018, the governor-elect was already the first member of Congress of her ethnic identity in the House of Representatives. She shares that distinction with Sharice Davids, the former Kansas congresswoman, who was elected 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, the Democrat 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.
As a young person, Haaland was part of a military family, with a father who was a Marine Corps officer. That led her to attend as many as 13 public schools before graduating from Highland High School in Albuquerque.
She did not earn her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of New Mexico until age 28, and later also obtained a law degree there.
During her time as Secretary of the Interior, she led an investigation into the legacy of boarding schools that forcibly placed Indigenous children, an effort that resulted in two official reports and the ‘Road to Healing’ initiative.
Focused on supporting Indigenous peoples, Haaland increased land co-management 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 unsolved cases of violence against Indigenous women and peoples.
