At least 11 Native American tribes are calling for reparations from the University of Minnesota
Eleven Native American tribes, including the Red Lake Nation and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, are calling for reparations from the University of Minnesota, the Washington Post has reported. The university’s endowment was funded by “public” land that actually came through the dispossession of Indigenous Nations from their traditional territories, thanks to a law passed a century and a half ago.
The Morrill Act, signed by then-president Abraham Lincoln in 1862, enabled the creation of several land-grant universities. One of them, the University of Minnesota (UMN) received 94,631 acres of land. Most of it was ceded by the Sioux (Dakota) in the Treaty of 1851, while the remainder came from the Treaty of 1847, signed by the Chippewa (Ojibwe) of the Mississippi and Lake Superior.
Today, the 11 tribes contend that UMN is, in fact, a “land-grab” university, because it obtained land taken by the government at a huge discount. For instance, the Dakota tribe was paid $2,309 in the Treaty of 1851—a paltry $0.02 per acre. UMN sold those lands for 251 times that amount. “Not even the world’s most sophisticated Ponzi scheme could promise a 25,000 percent return on investment,” the website for UMN’s Truth Project, which has been researching the impact of the land grab on tribal communities, notes.
The Truth Project is trying to quantify claims for redressal, posing questions such as: “What does the University of Minnesota’s land grab equate to in today’s dollars for the Dakota and the Ojibwe tribes? Can a dollar amount be determined for each tribal nation?” But answers are hard to come by. Even activists are unable to arrive at an exact monetary payout as compensation.
The call for restitution from UMN originated in a March 2020 article in High Country News, which highlighted how a seemingly harmless Civil War-era law stole property from Indigenous peoples to invest it for university endowments.
A month later, the research, conducted by a University of Cambridge historian named Robert Lee and High Country News journalists, was published on a free interactive website. It brought attention to the fact that scores of US land-grant schools, including Yale, Cornell, MIT, Pennsylvania State, Texas A&M, and the University of California, benefited from the spoils of land grabs.
By the early 20th century, these grants had raised $17.7 million for university endowments, with unsold lands valued at an additional $5.1 million. Adjusted for inflation, the grants were worth $596 million in 2020 dollars.
250: Number of tribes from whom land was taken, on the back of...
...160: Violence-backed treaties and land seizures
10.7 million: The area, in acres, of Indigenous land redistributed under the Morrill Act, equivalent to the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined
1.76 million: Land, in acres, sold by California—the largest supplier—via the Morrill Act, primarily between the 1860s and 1880s, to benefit 32 institutions across 27 states
80,000: The number of parcels of land that Lee and other researchers have identified across 24 mostly western states—over 99% of land taken under the Morrill Act. The researchers also identified the land parcels’ indigenous owners, as well as every dollar endowed with profits from this land dispossession in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
$22.8 million: How much money the sale of Indigenous land has raised for 52 universities in the US
“You have these schools that have tens of millions of dollars at their disposal, but they are not looking at any ways they can improve living situations for Indigenous peoples today. Yet their existence as institutions, as schools of learning, are only there today because of everything that was taken.”
—An Garagiola, a descendant of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa
The Morrill Act was named after Justin Smith Morrill, an entrepreneur and a member of Congress from Vermont. The official name of the legislation sponsored by Morrill was “An Act Donating Public Lands to the Several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.”
Morrill’s name features on several buildings on college campuses across the country, including the University of Maryland, South Dakota State University, the University of Vermont, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Nevada.
🔬 Cornell University, which received more than 987,000 acres of land grants across 15 current states, is conducting a research project to account for all the land that it took from Native communities.
🏳 In 2021, the University of Wisconsin at Madison flew the flag of the Ho-Chunk Nation on campus for the first time as an acknowledgement of the land taken from the the tribe.
🎓 The University of California system has pledged free tuition for some Native American students, but this initiative has been criticised as tokenism instead of real, structural change.
🤲 In a 554-page report published in April 2023, the Truth Project called upon UMN to return land to tribal nations; set aside space on each campus for Indigenous people to gather, pray and learn; pay reparations; hire more Indigenous people for staff and leadership roles; and boost support for Indigenous students.
Beyond land grab, the Truth Project also studied the exploitation of Native American children in the name of research. UMN researchers conducted kidney biopsies on Indigenous children, instead of treating them with penicillin. The children were jabbed with a long needle, without the help of an ultrasound to guide the needle’s movements. Researchers failed to obtain proper written consent from the parents of these patients before including them in their experiments, according to Audrianna Goodwin, a member of the Red Lake Nation tribe who researched these medical trials as part of the Truth Project.
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
