https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities
Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant
university system.
March 30, 2020
n August 29, 1911, a Yahi man known as Ishi came out of hiding near
Oroville, California. He had spent decades evading settlers after the
massacre of his community in the 1860s and had recently lost the last of
his family. Whisked off to the University of California’s anthropology
museum, he was described by the press as the “last wild Indian.” Ishi
spent his final years living at the museum. When he wasn’t explaining
his language to researchers or making arrow points for visitors, he
swept the floors with a straw broom as a janitor’s assistant. In return,
he was paid $25 a month by the same university that sold thousands of
acres of his people’s land out from under him while he hid out in
forests and river canyons.
Ishi may be known in Indian Country and to California public school
students, but his story remains mostly obscure — though considerably
less so than that of the millions of acres of Indigenous land sold to
endow the land-grant universities of the United States.
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which
distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges
across the nation. Now thriving, the institutions seldom ask who paid
for their good fortune. Their students sit in halls named after the
act’s sponsor, Vermont Rep. Justin Morrill, and stroll past panoramic
murals that embody creation stories that start with gifts of free land.
Behind that myth lies a massive wealth transfer masquerading as a
donation. The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from
tribal nations into seed money for higher education. In all, the act
redistributed nearly 11 million acres — an area larger than
Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. But with a footprint broken up
into almost 80,000 parcels of land, scattered mostly across 24 Western
states, its place in the violent history of North America’s colonization
has remained comfortably inaccessible.
We reconstructed approximately 10.7 million acres taken from nearly
250 tribes, bands and communities through over 160 violence-backed land
cessions, a legal term for the giving up of territory.
Over the past two years, High Country News has located more than 99% of
all Morrill Act acres, identified their original Indigenous inhabitants
and caretakers, and researched the principal raised from their sale in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We reconstructed approximately
10.7 million acres taken from nearly 250 tribes, bands and communities
through over 160 violence-backed land cessions, a legal term for the
giving up of territory.
Our data shows how the Morrill Act turned Indigenous land into college
endowments. It reveals two open secrets: First, according to the Morrill
Act, all money made from land sales must be used in perpetuity, meaning
those funds still remain on university ledgers to this day. And
secondly, at least 12 states are still in possession of unsold Morrill
acres as well as associated mineral rights, which continue to produce
revenue for their designated institutions.
The returns were stunning: To extinguish Indigenous title to land
siphoned through the Morrill Act, the United States paid less than
$400,000. But in truth, it often paid nothing at all. Not a single
dollar was paid for more than a quarter of the parcels that supplied the
grants — land confiscated through outright seizure or by treaties that
were never ratified by the federal government. From the University of
Florida to Washington State University, from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology to the University of Arizona, the grants of land raised
endowment principal for 52 institutions across the United States.
[This is a long, well-researched article with many links and images.
Reducing it to text simply does not do it justice. Therefore, in a
conscious break from my usual practice, I am not reproducing all the
text here. You need to visit the Web page and read the article.
https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities
]
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