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.
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.
Notes (Comments follow the notes).
[1] Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News, March 30, 2020,https://www.hcn.org/issues/52-4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/.
[2] Stephen M. Gavazzi, “Reckoning with the Original Sin
of Land-Grant Universities: Remaining Land-Grant Fierce While Insisting on Contrition and Repentance,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 8, no. 1 (2021)., 157–161, at 157.
[3] Gavazzi, 157.
[4]–[6] Lee and Ahtone.
[7] Theresa Jean Ambo and Stephen M. Gavazzi, “Native Nations and Land-Grant Universities at the Crossroads: The Intersection of Settler Land Acknowledgments and the Outreach and Engagement Mission,” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 28, no. 1, (2024), 45–61.
What none of the land acknowledgement statements are based on is a good title search. A good search would include where the last tribal occupier had obtained the land, and where the occupier before that one obtained it. The search, of course, would have to be from archeology, genetics, and oral history. Very few, if any, tribes occupied land that the first people in the Americas occupied. They acquired it in the same way the Europeans acquired it–by conquest.
With the European conquest began written and recorded titles. However poorly and dishonestly the Europeans honored the first century or two of titles, the system began to work and tribes began to successfully defend their titles and many now possess land with per tribal member values far far greater than most non-natives can claim.
In an earlier blog I gave the example of the Hualapei whose members, fewer than 2,000 as I recall, own over a million acres on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, including the Sky Walk, a restaurant, and a profitable zip line, not to mention cattle land and mineral reserves like lithium.
Other tribes own valuable timberlands and oil and coal reserves as well as tourist attractions and casinos. Land acknowledgement statements are in the service of virtue signaling and the racist stereotype of the “noble savage.”
Native Americans and all the rest of us should give thanks that together we ended the Age of Conquest that continues in other parts of the world.
Please read the Williams et al. article (I am a co-author) on “Paying Our Debts.” It will assist readers in avoiding the too often relied upon statement that “this was in the past.”
https://tribalcollegejournal.org/paying-old-debts/
The main takeaway from this article is that there is a PRESENT (and future) impact that the wealth transfer from Native Nations to LGUs is having (and will continue to have) on Native American communities. And because the wealth transfer connection is so clearly documented in the Land Grab Universities Report (a must-read if you are going to have any passing familiarity with the specific cases involving the LGUs specifically instead of the more general US history of land seizures).
Within 20 years after the Norman conquest of England, very small and small landowners fell from 22% of land holdings to 2%. Mid-sized landlords went from 22% to 11%, while large landlords increased their share of land holdings from 44% to 64% (hint, it wasn’t the same landlords pre-conquest). The king’s share of land rose from 12% to 23% after the conquest. Basically, William and his cronies seized control of 87% of the land. The unequal distribution of land still exists in Britian to this day, where 1% of the population owns 70% of the land. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/2022/01/04/from-norman-conquest-to-norman-yoke/
In the post-war (WWII) era, has not the Town & Country Act and entailments appertaining to royal largesse impeded the modern re-development — i.e., subdivision — of some of these estates, and thus raised the cost of housing, by restricting the availability of land?
First, many thanks for covering this topic!
Second, and perhaps most importantly for now, I would like to make the recommendation that people wishing to know more about the PRESENT and FUTURE ramifications of the “land grab” history surrounding land-grant universities — and not just the past injustices — should doing some additional reading. For the sake of simplicity and easy access, I would suggest the following 3 resources:
https://www.aaup.org/article/confronting-wealth-transfer-tribal-nations-established-land-grant-universities
https://tribalcollegejournal.org/paying-old-debts/
https://tribalcollegejournal.org/let-us-tell-the-story-of-our-land-and-place-tribal-leaders-on-the-seizure-and-sale-of-territories-benefiting-land-grant-universities/
There is no order of importance to these readings, but I would be very interested in hearing (and responding) to people who take interest in these resources.
Johnson v. McIntosh,[a] 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), also written M‘Intosh, establishes the “right of discovery,” similar to the right of conquest (by military force). Thus, Chief Justice Marshall established that when it declared independence from the Crown, the United States government inherited the right of preemption over Native American lands. The legal result is that the only Native American conveyances of land that can create valid title are sales of land to the federal government. Johnson remains good law. Further, where tribes unsuccessfully defended some lands, they lost any property rights under the law of conquest. There may be moral concerns about how native tribes have been succored by the U.S.; well, not “may be,” there are such concerns. But “land grab” sounds bad yet was not a “grab” but merely a distribution of federal land to states – entirely legal.
I believe you should read the actual Land Grab Universities Report! It is freely accessible, most informative, and can be found here:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/52-4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/
Why read this article? Among other things, readers need to differentiate the land-grant university (LGU) history most specifically from the more general history of the United States. There is plenty of documentation to support this specific focus on the foundational accounts of LGUs. Regardless of what you think about what the US government did to Native Americans more generally, there is a highly documented connection between specific Native territories given to states, their sale, and subsequent use in founding the LGUs.