The Celebration Over, Deb Haaland Now Faces a Long To-Do List at Interior

With so much land under federal control in the West, it's long been said the secretary of the interior has much more of a direct affect on most people's lives than the president. This experience could arguably be multiplied tenfold on reservations.

In her confirmation hearing earlier this year, Deb Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, nodded to the fact that the department she now leads was historically used as a tool of oppression toward tribes.

"This moment is profound when we consider the fact that a former Secretary of the Interior once proclaimed his goal to, quote, civilize or exterminate us," Haaland said quoting an Interior report from 1851, under then Secretary Alexander H.H. Stuart. "I'm a living testament to the failure of that horrific ideology."

Haaland, the former Democratic congresswoman, made history Monday by becoming the first indigenous interior secretary. She's promising to begin repairing a legacy of broken treaties and abuses committed by the federal government toward tribes. It's one pillar of a long and ambitious to-do list of reforms the administration is planning at the sprawling agency that is the federal government's most direct contact with the nation's 574 federally recognized — and sovereign — tribes.