The gym at Eva B. Stokely Elementary, in the town of Shiprock, New Mexico, site of today’s Northern Navajo Agency Council meeting, has the points of the compass marked on each of its four walls. That makes it easy to see, early on this crisp, blue-sky morning, that Deb Haaland has arrived from the east. She’s accompanied by three workers from her gubernatorial campaign and a few trays of pastries—gifts to add to a long table of food. Attendees roaming the gym recognize President Biden’s former interior secretary, though she tends to make no assumptions. “Hi,” she says, brightly and forcefully. “I’m Deb Haaland.”

She chats, poses for pictures, speaks to health workers at a uranium-testing table—about a quarter of Navajo women, in a federally funded study, measured for high levels of uranium in their bodies, a result of hundreds of abandoned Cold War–era uranium mines on their lands. In 2019 Haaland pushed to expand radiation compensation as a congresswoman from New Mexico. Now, at 65, she’s making her case for an even bigger job—governor—and her opponent in the Democratic primary, Sam Bregman, is here to object, making for tension in the gym. Tall with a circle beard, he wears a blazer, cowboy hat, and cowboy boots. Haaland is in jeans and a paisley blouse, a tan blazer, and silver earrings, decorated with a symbol for clouds and rain. As the meeting begins she grabs a banana, sits with an old friend, whose relatives live nearby, and insists she will stick to her allotted five minutes. “They are very serious about time,” she says.

It’s day two of four long days on the campaign trail, and, all told, Haaland will travel about 1,000 miles on this swing, through the northeastern mountains that Georgia O’Keeffe painted as geologic dreamscapes; past Santa Fe, where spas dot the Sangre de Cristo foothills; and south on I-25 alongside salt flats where the first atomic weapon was exploded—and where new military devices continue to be tested today. She’ll hear about farmers worried about water and energy companies ready to drill, and she’ll visit the border with Mexico—borders, in 2026 America, being our most contentious sites.

New Mexico is a state that is particularly American—in the midst of battles over housing and public safety, gripped with questions about wealth and taxes and the extent to which fossil fuels will move us forward or overheat our future. It is also a place that puts America’s 250th birthday in perspective. The American revolution of 1776 wasn’t the continent’s first successful rebellion. That would be the Pueblo Revolt, which erupted here in 1680 when Spanish settlers were expelled by Haaland’s ancestors. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, and would be the country’s first Native American woman to be elected governor, becoming the executive of a territory that generations before her have managed and maintained.

Much is made of generations in New Mexico, something Haaland told me she began to notice in 2018, when she was elected to Congress. “I was in a six-way primary,” she remembers, “and some of my opponents would say, ‘I’m a 13th-generation New Mexican,’ or, ‘I’m a 17th-generation New Mexican.’ And I thought, I wonder how many generations I am? So I googled ‘generation,’ and then I multiplied and multiplied, because my ancestors came to the Rio Grande Valley in the late 1200s. And in my next speech, I said, ‘I’m Deb Haaland and I’m a 35th-generation New Mexican.’ Everyone just kind of started laughing.”

New Mexico’s current governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, is a Democrat. Odds are the next one will be too, making the primary a clash of anti-Trump strategies. Haaland, in her new memoir, A Voice Like Mine, out in June, frames her path from an Albuquerque bakery to graduate school at UCLA as a single mom’s adventure in determination and hard work. She writes of her parents’ divorce and two of her own, in 1992 and then 2025, and of her new campaign as a personal restart. On the trail she’s presenting herself as reenergized after DC, a steady, experienced hand, while Bregman, a county district attorney, has attacked the “radical left,” as well as “MAGA extremists,” in law-and-order ads, saying they have hijacked politics—“leaving everyday New Mexicans in the dust.” Haaland is ahead in the polls, but not taking anything for granted.

At the council meeting, she begins by describing how she felt entering town along the San Juan River, where the great volcanic plug for which Shiprock is named sits like a stone sail on the horizon—in Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language, Tsé Bitʼaʼí means “rock with wings.” “I feel like I’m home,” she says, describing how she spent childhood summers visiting cousins here. As the council’s clock ticks, she moves quickly. “I was raised in a military family,” she says. Native Americans are more likely to serve in the military than any other demographic group in the US, and Haaland’s mother was in the Naval Reserve, and her father, a Norwegian American from Minnesota, was a decorated Marine in Vietnam. Both were lifelong Republicans—​but politics, she writes in her memoir, were not discussed at the table. She’d attended 13 schools by high school graduation.

Haaland speaks of her plan to help children read earlier, to give teachers the tools they need, bringing home her campaign themes. “Right now, people can’t afford anything,” Haaland says, “and people have to wait six months to see a doctor.”

Next up is Bregman, who announces, “I’m running for governor of the great state of New Mexico.” He thanks the people who congratulated him on his son’s success as a third baseman for the Chicago Cubs. “Any Cubs fans here?” Then he introduces a Navajo supporter who presents Bregman’s positions, speaking in Diné. Bregman steps away, smiling, watching the room.

After the council, Haaland is heading south to spend the night in Albuquerque. One of her campaign workers has a new Ford pickup with a nice stereo—​an F-150 nicknamed Sabrina. The campaign staff share a playlist for longer drives, one that ranges from Bad Bunny to Tracy Chapman to Haaland’s contribution: Raye Zaragoza, the young singer-​songwriter who wrote the protest anthem “Driving to Standing Rock.” They’re traveling hard, sticking to a tight schedule, even though she’s about 20 points ahead of Bregman in polls. “Some of the best political advice I ever got was to run like you’re 20 points behind,” she says.

Haaland’s campaign pulls into an already-crowded church in Las Cruces, a city Forbes called among the best places to retire in the US, thanks to some 320 days of sun a year and a relatively low cost of living—though the cost of everything is rising, like the temperature. It is approaching 100 degrees for the second straight day, and people are taking their seats, “No Kings” T-shirts everywhere. “It’s not supposed to be this hot,” one man says.

Haaland takes to the lectern to speak: “No kings, right?” Applause, cheers. “What a horrible batch of headlines that we have to wake up to every morning…. Governors are the first line of defense against the worst policies coming out of this administration. I want to make sure that people can afford to live. That we can lower costs, that we can move our state’s clean energy transition forward. That we can get to 100 percent clean energy. That we can ensure that those utility costs go down as we do that. I want to make sure that we raise the minimum wage—$12 is too low.”

In New Mexico public safety is a big issue—a reason Bregman has police lights flashing in his ads—but Haaland tacks toward safety as care. “People don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods,” she says. Heads nod. “We need to make sure that law enforcement has the tools they need…. And we need to address the root causes of crime. Substance abuse disorder, I think, is one of those root causes. We need more rehab centers. We need more of our behavioral health dollars to ensure that people can find the help they need when they need it.”

And then the windup: “We have to win this election, and that’s why I’m working so hard. The primary’s coming up on June 2. We need to show the Republicans that we’re ready to win in November. We scare them in June and we win in November.” The crowd cheers again.

Later, during questions, she is asked about her policies around substance abuse. “Just so everyone knows, and I’ve been very transparent about this,” she says, “I’ve been sober for 30 years. I went to treatment for alcoholism over 30 years ago. And that’s why human beings—I think we can do good in the world. Some people, they need help to become better citizens, and so I want to make sure that the state is stepping up.”

Over pie after the event, the analysis is that Haaland’s answers drew everyone closer. Attendees liked when Haaland talked about her past, showed her vulnerabilities, remembered the free parenting classes she found advertised at the grocery store when she was a single mother with a baby. “They even had childcare at the time so I could take my kid with me,” Haaland had said.

The experience of raising a child on her own is central to how Haaland thinks about politics; a future built around young people is the idea to which she returns again and again. It so happens that Haaland’s daughter, Somah Haaland, now 32 and living in Brooklyn, is due to visit later that week. Somah teaches theater to senior citizens in New York and writes poetry. “I was a theater mom for years,” Haaland says of Somah’s childhood. “It’s kind of like, once a theater mom, always a theater mom.” For Somah’s high school graduation, Haaland made a cake in the shape of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

“I was obsessed with Oscar Wilde,” Somah says, “and the cake was shaped like an open book.”

Cake-baking is a big thing for Haaland. “Like, wedding cakes,” Somah explains. “If someone’s getting married, my mom’s making the cake, my auntie’s doing the flowers. We’re very DIY.” (Baking was an underreported hallmark of Haaland’s tenure at the Interior Department: for staff birthdays, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, all from scratch.)

When I meet up with Somah, who goes by she/they pronouns, it is in Manhattan, at the Chelsea Hotel. Somah is wearing a hat beaded by their close friend Taylor Uchytil, who is Paiute (“You’ll see Yankee caps around town that she beaded,” Somah says), and several layers of shirts: one designed by Diego Medina, a Piro-Manso-​Tiwa artist; another commemorating the Pueblo Revolt; the third extolling the Republic of Ireland. “Derry Girls is my favorite TV show,” Somah says. “We share a history of resistance.”

Somah tells me about living for a time in LA, their mom trading childcare for rent. One day, Somah, then about eight, and Haaland were collecting signatures outside a supermarket to support a youth theater program that Somah loved and was endangered by city budget cuts. “So I remember being there with her, and me with my little clipboard and pen,” they say. It was Somah’s introduction to angry taxpayers. “Mom has always really empowered me to use my voice in every way possible, and I learned from a young age what is possible if you speak up and use your willpower.” I ask Somah to make an endorsement of sorts. “No one person’s going to fix everything,” they say. “But I think she just brings a deep care to the table that I have never seen any other politician do.”

Nearing the halfway mark on the four-day campaign tour, I sit down with Haaland at Las Cruces’s Hotel Encanto to discuss what has prepared her to be governor. She talks about her efforts in Congress to bring awareness to missing and murdered Indigenous people. “I mean, 30 women would go missing from a community in a matter of months,” she says. We talk about the history of a federal policy around Indian boarding schools, a troubled legacy of Native children shipped away from their homes, denied their languages in federally run and parochial schools. “This happened in our country,” Haaland tells me. “It happened to Native American families and communities, and non-Native people were the ones perpetuating this horrible thing.”

It’s her experience as head of Interior that she returns to, a department of 70,000 employees before being decimated in the Trump era. She ran to work in DC to train for the Boston Marathon with her security detail in tow. Running has become a big part of her life. In a piece for The Boston Globe in 2021, she drew a line from the city’s race to her history: “Traditional foot races in our Pueblo villages honor those who were strong and fast,” she wrote. “I run because my ancestors gave me this ability.”

The past is not so past for Haaland. She tells me stories of summers on the pueblo: traditional dancing, her grandfather growing food, her grandmother cooking and canning. She lights up when I ask her about Somah’s poetry and remembers favorite readings from her own college poetry class (she majored in English at the University of New Mexico). To a question of the viability of the Democratic Party, she says, “I am going to die a Democrat. It’s going to be on my gravestone. And look, I know that people get frustrated with the Democrats. I’m not saying that Democrats are perfect…. But I still feel that our values win the day for the most vulnerable people in our country—the first people any politician should ever think about.”

Morning in Las Cruces, a day that will feel like a 10K gubernatorial listening tour, starting with a brisk walk through the campus of New Mexico State University, to visit the school’s Autism Diagnostic Center, its energy labs, its STEM center, as well as a facility that is exploring ways to reuse brackish water drawn from underground aquifers—a golden ring in a state heading into its third drought year, in a West that is out of water. Sam Fernald, director of the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute, talks to Haaland about conserving water in agricultural settings. “One of the biggest problems isn’t that we have less rain,” Fernald tells her. “It’s that we have more evaporation, because the temperatures have gone up.”

Haaland asks about deep-root irrigation, something she learned about at Interior.

“Yes, that is one of the solutions,” Fernald says. “Otherwise the water evaporates and goes to Texas and the rest of the world, and we want to keep it in New Mexico.”

“Absolutely!” Haaland says, laughing.

Another stop is in Santa Teresa, at the border, for a meeting orchestrated by Jerry Pacheco, a businessman who grew up just north of Santa Fe and who came down here in the 1990s. Over sandwiches and PowerPoint presentations, Haaland and her team take notes on proposed industrial facilities. Down here a community is being pieced together, with housing and parks to serve those who will work the factories, some crossing from Juárez to do so. The militarization of the border is seen as a business-killer by Pacheco.

Haaland is looking to grow jobs. “My main concern about New Mexico is making sure that our children have opportunities here,” she says. “That’s really our charge as the adults in the room—making sure that we have opportunities for our children.”

We drive through desert grasslands dotted with vast factories, past US Army Jeeps and soldiers, their dark green uniforms and guns out of place against shrubs and heat-adapted grasses. We pass Project Jupiter, a hotly debated AI data center where Oracle and OpenAI estimate they will spend up to $165 billion.

Resistance to data centers is increasingly bipartisan in the US. Will this one drain the aquifer beneath the border? Will it devalue jobs—like a hyper-speed NAFTA—or provide them in abundance? Will it rewrite the idea of the border? Nobody really knows. “They need 1,500 people,” says Pacheco. That’s to staff the operation.

Sabrina is waiting, and soon Haaland will be driving home to Albuquerque. “So what are you thinking about the desalination?” Haaland asks Pacheco. “If you are able to successfully process that brackish water, would it be a boon to this area?”

A huge boon, Pacheco argues. “I’m talking generational. We have so much water. I think a report says you could easily supply water from under the ground for a hundred years.” Haaland, a veteran of the Green New Deal, stays quiet. Earlier when I had asked her about aquifers, she told me about her water fears, and she spoke about them at the church in Las Cruces. “People ask me what keeps me awake at night,” she says. “Climate change does. And it worries the heck out of me. We do not have water to spare.”

A few days later and the polls still have her up, way up even, though not yet over the finish line. She gets a package in the mail, a shirt made by Margo Sorrell, a designer she met in Shiprock, at the flea market, where, sure, she was campaigning but also shopping, because—well, it’s a particularly great flea market. Haaland likes to highlight Indigenous designers and places. “This is really supporting the local economy,” she says.

Sam Bregman’s supporters are still around, and her stance on local mining and drilling is far from universally admired among Native Americans or anyone else. As interior secretary, Haaland worked with President Biden on a 20-year ban on new oil and gas leases around Chaco Canyon, an area with historical sites meaningful to contemporary Native communities. President Trump is threatening to roll back those protections, a reversal Haaland seems to take seriously. “Right now, Donald Trump is putting one of the most sacred landscapes in our country at risk,” she has declared. “Chaco is not for sale.” There has never been an Indigenous governor in the American West, much less an Indigenous woman who is governor. The question Haaland’s campaign poses is: What might that mean?

Haaland frames representation in terms of generational thinking. “If it’s not good for our kids, then it shouldn’t happen in our state,” she says. “I think that’s a good way for us to look at things because we’re responsible for future generations. It’s what my ancestors did for me.”

In this story: hair, Erin Brooke Borrego; makeup, Stephanie Ellis.