The image above is a cropped version of a lithograph published about 1899  In the public domain, it is titled  “U.S. Army-Cavalry Pursuing Indians-1876” and available through Wikipedia.

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You may have seen a statement similar to this one on a university website:

NC State University . . . respectfully acknowledges that the lands within and surrounding present-day Raleigh are the traditional homelands and gathering places of many Indigenous peoples, including eight federally and state-recognized tribes. . . .

Such statements are not purely the result of gracious sentiments. NC State’s acknowledgment and many others were added after a troubling study appeared. It was “Land-Grab Universities,” published in 2020 by High Country News, an environmentally oriented nonprofit  newspaper in the West. [1]

I learned about this report from Stephen M. Gavazzi, a professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University and a strong proponent of land-grant universities. In 2020,  Dr. Gavazzi had just finished co-editing a book about the land-grants’ “virtuous mission of meeting community challenges and solving society’s problems.”[2]

But then he read the High Country News exposé.

. . . the proverbial scales fell from my eyes. Everything I knew about the 1862 Morrill Act, the congressional action that provided parcels of land to states that could be used or sold off to build an institution of higher learning, was turned upside down. As every reader of the Land-Grab Universities report now knows, the noble and virtuous land-grant mission was founded on distortions, violence, and the ongoing suffering of dispossessed people. [3]

If you’re not familiar with the Land-Grab Universities report (I wasn’t), here’s a little background first.

The 1862 Morrill Act started the process of supporting “agricultural and mechanical” studies in the United States. This law led to the creation of land-grant universities. The method of carrying out this law was to give ownership of federal land to the states, which could sell the land to raise money for colleges or, in some cases, provide land for a new school or an expansion. States such as Massachusetts, which had little or no federal land, could obtain in dollars the value of federal land from other states.

The problem was that  in most (if not all) cases, that federal land was, or had been, taken from Indians. As the authors of the 2020 study, Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, report:

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. [4]

Here are a couple of examples, quoted directly from the report.

The 150,000 acres selected for the University of Arizona—once the home of the Pima, Yuman, Tohono O’odham, Navajo and Apache—were nearly all seized without payment at the end of the Apache War [usually considered 1888] and the arrest of Geronimo. While UArizona benefited from tracts in the Grand Canyon State, portions of grants assigned to Auburn University and Pennsylvania State University were redeemed from expropriated Apache lands in Arizona. [5]

. . .

All of the lands funding the University of Missouri, Columbia, for instance, came from just two Osage treaties in 1808 and 1825. Meriwether Lewis offered the 1808 treaty to the Osage as an alternative to their extermination, while in 1825 William Clark demanded Osage land to create reservations for Eastern tribes. Granted an area more than twice the size of Chicago, by the early 20th century the University of Missouri had raised over $363,000 from land that was strong-armed from the Osage for less than $700. Today, the school still benefits from nearly 15,000 acres of unsold Morrill lands. [6]

It’s painful to read about these wars, treaties, and “cessions.” We should keep in mind, of course, that the land grants were sometimes grants of land that had been taken many years earlier (as with the Osage land cited above). Thus, it  is something of a chronicle of land grabs over many years.

Indeed, I have previously pointed out how pervasive Indian/white conflicts were in our history and how little serious attention is given to them.  For example, Grey Lock’s War in Vermont, King Philip’s War throughout New England, and the Peach Tree War in New York  were all fought in the 1600s. The Yamasee War in South Carolina and the Tuscarora War in North Carolina took place in the early 1700s, the Oconee War in Georgia in the late 1700s. There are many more.

Is there a lesson from “Land-Grab Universities”?  Gavazzi and a coauthor, Theresa Jean Ambo, have  proposed closer cooperation between land-grant colleges and native nations, including with tribal colleges, which were given the status of land-grant colleges in 1994. [7]That is probably something the “1862 land-grant schools” should have been doing anyway, given their commitment to outreach (usually called extension).

There is much more to say on this topic. For example, is it fair to blame the land-grant colleges for exploitation, since they saw the grants simply as federal largesse? And is it fair to demand action from today’s administrators for something done long ago? Yet this “land-grab” is emblematic of a great deal of American history and should not be ignored.

Forgive me for relying so much on quotations in this article. But others have said it better than I can.

 

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Read the original article on Janetakesonhistory.org