Deb Haaland — A Voice Like Mine: A Memoir
Former Interior Secretary and first Native American cabinet member Deb Haaland discusses her memoir — from community organizer to Congress to leading a department that manages tribal lands.
Why we picked this
Haaland was the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history and oversaw Interior at a moment of genuine reckoning with federal Indian boarding school policies — her memoir is political history from a perspective rarely heard at this level.
Deb Haaland served as US Secretary of the Interior from 2021 to 2025, becoming the first Native American to hold a cabinet position in American history. Her memoir A Voice Like Mine traces her path from community organizer and tribal councilwoman in New Mexico through Congress and into a cabinet role where she launched a major federal investigation into the Indian boarding school system — a historic reckoning with a century of deliberate cultural erasure.
Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo nation, and her memoir does something unusual in the political memoir genre: it centers Indigenous perspective and experience not as background color but as the analytical framework through which American governance and land policy are understood. Her tenure at Interior involved managing federal lands that include tribal territories, national parks, and resource extraction zones — all of it filtered through a framework quite different from her predecessors.
This is an evening for readers interested in American political history, environmental policy, and what it means when the first of anything takes a seat at the table. Haaland’s account is both personal and structural.