Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland secured the Democratic nomination for governor of New Mexico on Tuesday, moving one step closer to the unprecedented milestone of a Native American woman being elected to oversee a rigidly defined administrative polygon carved out of her people's former continent.
Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland secured the Democratic nomination for governor of New Mexico on Tuesday, moving one step closer to the unprecedented milestone of a Native American woman being elected to oversee a rigidly defined, 121,590-square-mile administrative polygon carved out of her people's former continent.
Election officials called the race shortly after 9:00 p.m. local time, confirming that Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, had successfully navigated the state’s partisan primary system to win the right to seek executive authority over a jurisdiction her ancestors managed for several thousand years without the use of mail-in ballots. If successful in November, she would become the first Indigenous woman in United States history to be formally permitted by the federal government to command the state police and sign zoning legislation on land previously owned outright by her relatives.
Secretary Haaland’s victory tonight is a testament to the progress we have made as a democracy, proving that anyone, regardless of their background, can eventually campaign for the privilege of administering the tax code on the exact terrain where their civilization was subjugated.
Haaland’s general election campaign is expected to focus heavily on modernizing New Mexico’s electrical grid, protecting groundwater resources, and convincing a narrow majority of the state’s 2.1 million residents—a significant portion of whose families arrived via the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in the 1920s—that she possesses the requisite geographical familiarity to hold the office.
Following her victory speech in Albuquerque, campaign aides confirmed Haaland will spend the next five months traveling the state to ask current property owners for their democratic consent to let her temporarily reside in the governor’s mansion, a Spanish Colonial Revival structure constructed in 1954 on unceded Tewa territory.