According to Indian Country Today Reporter-Producer, Ailyah Chavez (Kewa Pueblo), Secretary Haaland’s first business trip also included a visit to her homelands. On April 6, 2021, she held a listening session with Members of the All Pueblo Council of Governors at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Former Cochiti Pueblo Gov. Regis Pecos described the meeting as a “profoundly defining moment…. Their availability to have this kind of really frank and honest discussion is something I’ve not seen in my 40 years of work in this area.” See https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/deb-haalands-visit-home-grandparents-prayers. Pueblo Governors also expressed their hope that the Interior Department would extend greater protections to the Chaco Culture National Historic Park that is held as sacred by their people. Protecting and Restoring Tribal Homelands In April, Secretary Haaland took decisive action to reverse a course set by the previous administration that harmed the ability of Tribal governments to restore their land base. She announced several decisions to reverse actions that complicated the Indian Reorganization Act’s (IRA) Indian fee to trust process. Indian tribes lost or had taken hundreds of millions of acres of tribal homelands through past policies of Removal, Allotment, and Termination. The IRA provides Tribal governments with a federal process to restore lands to Native communities. The Obama Administration prioritized the tribal land to trust process, approving applications to move more than 560,000 of tribal fee lands into trust status from 2009 - 2017. It has been reported that the Trump Administration approved approximately 75,000 acres into trust from 2017 - 2021. To help expedite the land to trust process, on April 27, 2021, Secretary Haaland issued Secretarial Order No. 3400, which returns review of tribal fee land to trust applications to regional BIA directors. The order reverses a 2017 move to place these decisions under the jurisdiction of department headquarters, where they lingered for years. Secretary Haaland acknowledged, “[W]e have an obligation to work with Tribes to protect their lands and ensure that each Tribe has a homeland where its citizens can live together and lead safe and fulfilling lives.” Secretary Haaland also approved the revocation of past Interior legal opinions that added burdens on tribal governments as they seek to use the IRA’s land into trust process. The decision restored the Obama Interior Department’s 2014 M-Opinion to determine whether a Tribe was “under federal jurisdiction”, a relatively new process that was made necessary due to the Supreme Court’s 2009 Carcieri v. Salazar decision. In October, the Department held a series of formal consultations with Tribal Governments under the title of “Protecting and Restoring Tribal Homelands”. The Dear Tribal Leader Letter listed a set of questions and sought Tribal Government views on the current land to trust process, the BIA’s leasing process, and the protection of sacred sites and treaty rights on federal lands. The deadline to submit comments on these issues was November 5, 2021. The Department will now consider proposed changes to improve these issue areas. Potential next steps include the Department issuing update guidance or engaging in the formal rulemaking process for each of these issues. Moving Forward While Confronting the Past On June 22, 2021, Secretary Haaland announced the Department’s “Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative”, which will investigate the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of residential Indian boarding schools. Agency staff are currently compiling decades of files and records to facilitate a proper review to organize documents, identify available and missing information, and ensure that records systems are standardized.
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