As solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Hilary Tompkins is the chief general counsel for an agency that oversees vast swaths of U.S. lands, waters, and wildlife, as well as relations with 567 American Indian and Alaska Native tribes. For Tompkins, who is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, the position aligns her legal training with her heritage and culture.

“There’s a concept in Navajo culture called hozho, which means beauty and harmony,” says Tompkins, JD ’96. “I feel as though I’ve attained hozho at this stage of my life. The path I’ve taken hasn’t always been easy, but it’s been a blessing.”
The Interior Department—so named because it originally controlled everything associated with U.S. internal development—manages national parks and wildlife refuges, grazing lands, trust territories, offshore energy development, federal hydropower projects, and protection of endangered species. Tompkins heads a staff of more than 300 attorneys in Washington, D.C., and across the country.

“It’s a very diverse legal practice handling many statutory responsibilities,” she says. “There are new legal questions every day.” Major initiatives that Tompkins has worked on include authorizing the first renewable energy projects on federal land; creating two new agencies to manage offshore oil and gas production after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill; designing a conservation plan that spans 11 Western states to protect the greater sage-grouse; and designation of two dozen new national monuments.

Initially, however, Tompkins focused on resolving an enormous backlog of tribal trust suits—more than 100 lawsuits filed by Indian tribal governments, contending that the federal government had mismanaged natural resources and funds on Indian lands. When Tompkins became solicitor in 2009, some claims had been brewing for more than a century. Over the next six years Interior settled claims by approximately 90 tribes for a combined $2.8 billion.

Tompkins also helped negotiate a $3.4 billion settlement of the Cobell lawsuit, a class action brought on behalf of more than 300,000 individual plaintiffs—one of the largest and most complicated cases ever filed against the U.S. government. The suit stemmed from the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up many tribal communal land holdings into small parcels and assigned them to individual Indians, with the U.S. government retaining authority to lease the lands for grazing, mining, or energy production. Plaintiffs argued that federal agencies had failed to account accurately for revenues from those activities, which were supposed to be paid to Indian landowners.

“We inherited a conflict-laden relationship between the United States and Indian country when President Obama took office,” says former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who headed the department from 2009 to 2013. “The U.S. government had not shown any inclination to address those claims, but we made the decision to right them.  Hilary took the lead and did a very effective job of correcting many historical wrongs.”

While it might seem that Tompkins was born to play this role, her path to Interior was anything but direct. She was born at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico in 1967 to a Navajo family who struggled with the social ills and poverty that existed on the reservation. The Indian Child Welfare Act, which reversed a long-standing practice of removing Indian children from their traditional homes and cultures, would not become law for another decade. As a result, when her birth mother put her up for adoption, Tompkins was adopted by a Quaker couple and raised in southern New Jersey.

While her adoptive parents were supportive—“They gave me the life that my birth mother wanted me to have,” Tompkins says—she did not return to the Navajo reservation until after college and through early adulthood had few opportunities to learn about her culture. “I’ve always felt like an outsider because of that experience,” she says.

“I distinctly remember visiting the Natural History Museum here in Washington, D.C. as a young child and seeing a display of Navajo Indians behind a pane of glass,” she told senators at her 2009 confirmation hearing. “I wanted to climb into the scene spread out before me and become a part of it, but at the same time I felt like it was foreign.”

Tompkins attended Dartmouth College, which enrolls several dozen Native American students in each incoming class (fulfilling a directive in the school’s founding charter). After graduation she worked as a paralegal in New York City for a year, then moved to Window Rock, Arizona, to work for the Navajo Department of Justice. She spent three years there, during which she passed the Navajo Bar Exam and worked as a lay practitioner in Navajo courts.

“The Navajo system is based on Western law but infused with Navajo traditions,” Tompkins says. “Being able to school myself in it was a kind of homecoming for me, and it shaped my decision to go to law school.”

At Stanford, Tompkins continued integrating Native American issues into her studies. She invited Navajo judges to visit the campus and teach a class on tribal law. “It was very supportive for me when Stanford recognized that different legal system of tribal law. It made me feel welcome there,” she recalls. “Professors supported my search to find a place with my Navajo tribe and also to be the best lawyer I could be,” she says.

“I think law school was a pivotal time for Hilary in figuring out her identity and who she was going to become,” says classmate Kristen Finney, JD ’96 (BA ’92). “She taught me a lot about issues that affect Native Americans and people of color. I traveled to the Navajo reservation with her, which was eye-opening.”

Tompkins also stumbled across some unexpected connections at Stanford. A classmate told her that he had an adopted sister who was also Navajo. “She turned out to be my blood sister. What are the odds of that?” says Tompkins. And during her last year of law school, she was contacted by her birth mother’s sisters and eventually reunited with her family.

“Native American people have very interesting experiences in this country. Families can be disbanded and reunited later,”
Tompkins observes.

After law school Tompkins worked as a trial lawyer for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, handling civil prosecutions in environmental cases. She then helped launch a branch office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Sonosky, Chambers, Sachse, Endreson & Perry, a national firm specializing in Native American law. From 2003 through 2008, she worked as deputy counsel and then chief counsel to New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, handling a wide range of legal and policy issues. She was teaching at the University of New Mexico law school after the birth of her first child when she received a call inviting her to interview for the solicitor position at the Department of the Interior.

“I strongly encourage law students not to have too firm a career map in their minds, because opportunities can come up unexpectedly,“ she says. “My Quaker dad used to tell me, ‘A way will open,’ and it’s true.”

Her New Mexico experience is helpful for working with Western states, where federal control over millions of acres of public lands often breeds resentment. “We’re very engaged with Western states, and we try to have open dialogue and positive communication. I worked for a Western governor, so I have a sense of their perspective and try to keep it in mind,“ Tompkins says. But, she emphasizes, there is no place for actions like the six-week occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year by armed anti-government militants.

“They had very extreme views and were occupying federal buildings illegally and threatening violence,” Tompkins says. “The rule of law has to prevail, and we need to protect federal employees who are doing their jobs faithfully on public lands. The legal process provides a forum for people to express their views by commenting on rules and a place to resolve disputes in court.”

Beyond resolving disputes about federal lands and resources, what really drives Tompkins is her passion for conservation—rooted in the Navajo belief that people should respect and live in harmony with the Earth. “We need to make decisions that take a long-term view and get young people outdoors to learn about our country’s great special places,” she says. “These places are theirs, and it’s important for them to learn how to protect them and balance resource development with preserving national treasures. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”  SL

Jennifer Weeks is a freelance writer specializing in environment, science, and health whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and other national publications.