President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team named outgoing North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to lead the agency that manages the nation’s natural and cultural resources. He’s set to replace Deb Haaland, the first Native American Interior Department secretary.
Tribal leaders from across Indian Country shared their thoughts about Trump’s choice to succeed Haaland and their expectations for him ahead of Burgum’s Senate confirmation hearing this week.
A businessman-turned-politician, Burgum grew up in America’s Heartland on a family farm in Arthur, North Dakota, some 30 miles away from Fargo.
He graduated from North Dakota State University with a bachelor’s in University Studies, then Stanford Graduate School of Business with an MBA in hand. Burgum went on to become a venture capitalist, real estate investor and Microsoft executive before pivoting to politics in 2016.
That year, Burgum not only bested the GOP-endorsed candidate — state Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem — in the Republican primary, but he swept the general election to become the 33rd governor of North Dakota.
“Tribal engagement, this is one of the top priorities,” Burgum said during his first State of the State address. “Where are we? We had a long way to go. Trust was very, very low and probably for good reasons.”

North Dakota, which earned statehood in 1889, is home to five federally recognized tribes, with Native Americans making up 5% of its population. Yet, Burgum believes not enough North Dakotans understand their complicated past with the self-described “highly dysfunctional” federal government.
“This tragic history and interaction with the feds and broken promises, and treaty debates that all happened before we got here,” he added. “We need people that really work to understand where we’ve been, so that you can also understand what is the inspirational resolve of our tribal nations.”
And arguably, the Dakota Access Pipeline was Burgum’s biggest political obstacle.
Protests sparked shortly after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers accepted an application filed by Texas-based developer Energy Transfer Partners to construct a 1,172-mile-long underground pipeline transporting crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe claimed this agreement violated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 and could possibly contaminate their water supplies: Oahe Reservoir and the Missouri River.
As the state’s newly minted governor, Burgum spent hours meeting with demonstrators at Cannonball and the Standing Rock, believing that the protests spanning 2016 and 2017 were “peaceful and prayerful” and began with “a powerful spiritual intent.”
Still, hundreds were arrested.
“By the time the last protester left the camp, at 76 days after I took office,” Burgum recalled during his 2018 State of the State address, “in total we were coordinating 175 different partnerships to deal with something that was unprecedented in our history.”
At least 26 protesters were hospitalized, while another 300 suffered injuries stemming from non-lethal weapons — like teargas and water cannons — used by North Dakota law enforcement officials. A few hundred North Dakota National Guard members were deployed to clear out encampments.

Burgum testified last year in federal court during a lawsuit seeking to recoup $38 million spent by the state on policing that he opposed removing demonstrators by force and sought to avoid an armed standoff, like Wounded Knee, an 1890 massacre where the U.S. Army killed up to 300 Lakotas in South Dakota.
Close to a century later, two Native Americans were killed by federal law enforcement during demonstrations at that same site in 1973.
But as a two-term governor, Burgum worked to balance the competing interests of energy and environment — from establishing the state’s Department of Environmental Quality and setting a statewide carbon neutral goal by 2030 – to defending the oil and gas industries.
“I say, the Biden energy policy is written by China. It has to be,” Burgum said during the inaugural 2023 American Energy Security Summit in Oklahoma City. “If the drive of our energy policy is to somehow help the environment, why would you outsource our future to the world’s biggest polluter?”
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources will hold its confirmation hearing for Trump’s Interior nominee on Thursday. Pending Senate approval, Burgum could oversee roughly 60,000 employees, 500 million acres of public lands and trust responsibilities with the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes.
Trump also tapped him to address the domestic energy dilemma by chairing the newly formed National Energy Council, granting Burgum a seat on the White House’s National Security Council.
Larry Wright Jr., a member of the Ponca Tribe in Nebraska, is executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. This nonprofit serves as the leading voice of tribal issues not only on Capitol Hill, but throughout the nation’s capital. He’s worried that profits will soon be prioritized over public lands.
“We know there are going to be some policy shifts,” Wright said. “This [incoming] administration has given us some indication: ‘Drill baby drill.’ So that’s a concern. How those may impact sacred sites is something that we’ll continue to advocate against.”
The protection of sacred sites from drilling and mining interests has been a key priority under Haaland’s Interior Department. Even if Burgum and Haaland don’t see eye to eye, she had nothing negative to say about him.

“He’s always been very nice to me,” she said. “I’ve met him since I’ve been in this position. Of course, we are working doing our best with the transition, and we will make sure that we are absolutely doing everything that’s required of us.”
Neither did Assistant Interior Secretary Bryan Newland, who once shared a stage with Burgum to tackle issues of public safety in tribal communities.
“And I found him to be earnest in his work and his desire to do something positive,” said Newland, adding, “I’ve heard good things from tribal leaders in North Dakota about his tenure, and so, that gives me hope.”
Mark Fox is among them.
For the last decade, he’s been chairman of North Dakota’s Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation — or the Three Affiliated Tribes — and has known Burgum for his entire governorship.
“I’ll be honest with you initially, I prayed and hoped that Governor Burgum was going to be selected,” Fox told KJZZ News. “And then you got a secondary blessing of this new National Energy Council, then I [was] greatly elated, because he understands bureaucracy, but he likes to cut that red tape and say that’s nonsense.”
Behind Texas and New Mexico, North Dakota is the third-largest oil producing state, and Fox’s tribe has been an oil behemoth – with its 988,000-acre Fort Berthold Reservation once churning out more than 300,000 barrels a day.
The nearly 17,500-member-tribe generated $188 million revenue from oil and gas in 2020 alone. At the same time, Fox is convinced that Trump’s Interior pick cares about the environment.
“There’s only about 10 tribes in the U.S. that have chosen the same path that we have, which is to make a deliberate, bold and sometimes contentious decision,” Fox explained. “We stepped out on a limb to develop our trust assets of oil and gas. It has value today. Tomorrow, it may not.”
“Yes, it is controversial. It is a hard decision, because if you don’t do it responsibly, you can cause a lot of hardship to your environment, a lot of hardship to your people.”
From the Great Plains to the Southwest, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren shared optimism to find common ground with Burgum.
Navajoland is rich with oil and natural gas across the Four Corners. Once home to some 500 wells — many now orphaned — the Nation has produced more than 440 million barrels of oil since the 1950s.
“When Trump first got elected, I was hoping that he would at least put someone in that has government experience working with tribes, and I think that with those boxes that are checked,” Nygren told KJZZ News. “I’m looking forward to meeting with [Burgum] and seeing what kind of opportunities we can do to work together.”
That includes reversing a two-decade ban on new oil and gas leases around Chaco Canyon National Historical Park in New Mexico.

Fajada Butte is a butte in Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
When Haaland went to celebrate that Interior Department decision at the UNESCO World Heritage Site in the summer of 2023, Navajos blocked the road into the park.
Her action had even come under scrutiny by the House Natural Resources Committee in a 2023 letter, outlining possible conflicts of interest and potential ethics violations while helming the Interior Department.
“It had nothing to do with hurting the Navajo Nation,” said Mark Mitchell, chairman of the All Pueblo Council of Governors, who represents 20 pueblos in New Mexico and Texas. “It was everything to do with protecting the landscape of our ancestors, and the footprints that are left.”
Thousands of tribal allottees within the 10-mile buffer zone are estimated to lose $194 million in royalties during the moratorium, according to the nonprofit trade association Western Energy Alliance.
“It necessarily didn’t stall my relationship with the secretary,” added Nygren. “There’s a lot of wins that we’ve had since then. But again, that was all about respecting tribal sovereignty.”
“I didn’t support it. The Navajo council didn’t support it. The communities that lived there didn't support it. We’re going to reset the table and figure out what avenues that we can discuss."
To Chairman Fox, Haaland and Burgum are indiscernible: “I don’t think you’re losing anything in compassion and dedication to trying to make a difference.”
“Despite their outward appearances being different, despite the fact that Governor Burgum is not an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, yeah, he’s got a lot of compassion. He just does, and when you get to know him, you’re going to see that.
This story was produced by KJZZ, the public radio station in Phoenix, and published by KNAU as part of the Arizona Public Media Exchange.