The Future of Land-Grab Universities

Abstract

The Land-Grab Universities (LGU) project compellingly conveys how nearly eleven million acres of land were stolen from almost 250 tribes, bands, and communities to establish land-grant universities. 1 In their work identifying nearly all tracts covered under the Morrill Land Grant Acts, the LGU team connected Indigenous nations with their tracts and calculated the financial benefits land-grant institutions reaped from sales of these lands. Placing the Morrill Act into the context of widespread fraudulent and coercive land-seizure practices in the mid-to late 1800s, LGU successfully illustrates how the existence of contemporary land-grant universities is predicated on extractive legal practices backed by threats of government violence.Students, faculty, and staff at land-grants occupy the shadows of these violent, genocidal processes that forcibly expropriated lands from Indigenous peoples and communities. A critical piece of investigative journalism, LGU raises awareness of how land-grant universities not only exist upon Indigenous lands but also have been built with Indigenous lands. 2 Through interactive visualizations that allow users to search by state, institution, and tribal community, readers learn how the Morrill Act provided a financial foundation for contemporary land-grant universities. Supported by an extensive bibliography and links to media coverage of the project, the visualizations provide information on endowments, enrollment (including Indigenous student enrollment), and profits generated from the Morrill Acts. LGU depicts tracts expropriated, grantees, and the total financial gains generated through those lands. Users learn, for example, about the impact of the 1851 Dakota cession, which reassigned nearly 830,000 acres to endow thirty-five different universities, linking one out of every 13 acres redistributed under Morrill to the United States' dispossession of Dakota people across Mní Sota Makoče.