"How much natural gas drilling to allow near the 1,000-year-old architectural ruins of Chaco Canyon, important to many Pueblo people, may not be Deb Haaland’s best-known oil and gas dilemma as Interior secretary. But it is likely her most personal one.
Haaland, of the Pueblo of Laguna, is the first Native American leader of the department. In the past, she’s tried to shield the Chaco landscape, a critical part of her pueblo’s history in northern New Mexico, from further drilling.
“It is a sacred place that should be valued the same way we value other sacred places,” Haaland said in 2019, when she was a Democratic member of Congress from New Mexico and advocated imposing a 10-mile buffer with no oil leasing around the borders of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
But from her perch within the Biden administration, Haaland has to weigh the concerns of oil and gas companies that want to drill near the park with those of environmental advocates demanding retirement of the federal oil program. Amid that tension, Haaland and Interior staff also face tribal governments that disagree about natural resource development in the area."
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