A Voice Like Mine: An Evening with Deb Haaland
Former Interior Secretary and first Native American cabinet member Deb Haaland reflects on her career and memoir at the New-York Historical Society.
Why we picked this
Haaland's career is marked by genuine historic firsts — first Native American cabinet secretary, first Native American woman to chair a state party — and her memoir covers the convictions that made them possible, not just the milestones.
Deb Haaland has built one of the most historically significant careers in recent American public life. A thirty-fifth-generation New Mexican and member of the Pueblo of Laguna, she became one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, and the first Native American woman to chair a state political party. Her four years leading the Interior Department — overseeing federal lands, tribal relations, and climate policy — represented a profound shift in who holds stewardship over the American land.
A Voice Like Mine, her memoir, examines the experiences and convictions that shaped this trajectory: the Pueblo traditions and community values that grounded her, the years of financial struggle and single motherhood, and the political moment that made her candidacies possible. Now running in the 2026 New Mexico gubernatorial race, Haaland brings to this conversation both retrospective reflection and present-tense political urgency.
The New-York Historical Society is a fitting venue for an evening about American political history in the making. Tickets are $35 ($25 for members).