The gym at Eva B. Stokely Elementary, in the town of Shiprock, New Mexico, site of today’s Northern Navajo Agency Council meeting, has the points of the compass marked on each of its four walls. That makes it easy to see, early on this crisp, blue-sky morning, that Deb Haaland has arrived from the east. She’s accompanied by three workers from her gubernatorial campaign and a few trays of pastries—gifts to add to a long table of food. Attendees roaming the gym recognize President Biden’s former interior secretary, though she tends to make no assumptions. “Hi,” she says, brightly and forcefully. “I’m Deb Haaland.”
She chats, poses for pictures, speaks to health workers at a uranium-testing table—about a quarter of Navajo women, in a federally funded study, measured for high levels of uranium in their bodies, a result of hundreds of abandoned Cold War–era uranium mines on their lands. In 2019 Haaland pushed to expand radiation compensation as a congresswoman from New Mexico. Now, at 65, she’s making her case for an even bigger job—governor—and her opponent in the Democratic primary, Sam Bregman, is here to object, making for tension in the gym. Tall with a circle beard, he wears a blazer, cowboy hat, and cowboy boots. Haaland is in jeans and a paisley blouse, a tan blazer, and silver earrings, decorated with a symbol for clouds and rain. As the meeting begins she grabs a banana, sits with an old friend, whose relatives live nearby, and insists she will stick to her allotted five minutes. “They are very serious about time,” she says.
It’s day two of four long days on the campaign trail, and, all told, Haaland will travel about 1,000 miles on this swing, through the northeastern mountains that Georgia O’Keeffe painted as geologic dreamscapes; past Santa Fe, where spas dot the Sangre de Cristo foothills; and south on I-25 alongside salt flats where the first atomic weapon was exploded—and where new military devices continue to be tested today. She’ll hear about farmers worried about water and energy companies ready to drill, and she’ll visit the border with Mexico—borders, in 2026 America, being our most contentious sites.
New Mexico is a state that is particularly American—in the midst of battles over housing and public safety, gripped with questions about wealth and taxes and the extent to which fossil fuels will move us forward or overheat our future. It is also a place that puts America’s 250th birthday in perspective. The American revolution of 1776 wasn’t the continent’s first successful rebellion. That would be the Pueblo Revolt, which erupted here in 1680 when Spanish settlers were expelled by Haaland’s ancestors. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, and would be the country’s first Native American woman to be elected governor, becoming the executive of a territory that generations before her have managed and maintained.
Much is made of generations in New Mexico, something Haaland told me she began to notice in 2018, when she was elected to Congress. “I was in a six-way primary,” she remembers, “and some of my opponents would say, ‘I’m a 13th-generation New Mexican,’ or, ‘I’m a 17th-generation New Mexican.’ And I thought, I wonder how many generations I am? So I googled ‘generation,’ and then I multiplied and multiplied, because my ancestors came to the Rio Grande Valley in the late 1200s. And in my next speech, I said, ‘I’m Deb Haaland and I’m a 35th-generation New Mexican.’ Everyone just kind of started laughing.”
