Land-Grab Universities
A High Country News Investigation
By Robert Lee, Tristan Ahtone, Margaret Pearce, Kalen Goodluck, Geoff McGhee, Cody Leff, Katherine Lanpher and Taryn Salinas.
How the United States funded land-grant universities with expropriated Indigenous land.
Introduction
Nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous land. Approximately 250 tribes, bands and communities. Over 160 violence-backed treaties and land seizures. Fifty-two universities. With the information provided below, you can untangle the powerful and painful strains of myth and money behind the land-grant university system, which broadened access to higher education in the United States.
It was all part of Abraham Lincoln’s creed: “The right to rise.” And though generations of land-grant graduates have exercised that right, few have thought to ask who actually paid for the opportunity, and how it was done. It came through the transfer or violent seizure of Indigenous land. Meanwhile, to this day, Indigenous people remain largely absent from student populations, staff, faculty and curriculum.
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. The Morrill Act worked by turning land taken from tribal nations into seed money for higher education. That land became available in three ways:
What the Morrill Act Did
“You can point to every treaty where there's some kind of fraud, where there's some kind of coercion going on”
— Jameson Sweet, Rutgers University
The Morrill Act promised states between 90,000 and 990,000 acres, depending on the size of their congressional delegations.
Eastern states that had no public land, as well as Southern and some Midwestern states, received vouchers — known at the time as scrip — for the selection of parcels anywhere on the surveyed public domain.
Western states chose land parcels inside their borders, as did territories when they achieved statehood.
Like so many other U.S. land laws, the text of the Morrill Act left out something important: the fact that these grants depended on dispossession.
This map connects Indigenous land (in blue) redistributed to universities (in red) via the Morrill Act, or acts in lieu thereof. Use the drop-down menu below to filter universities by state; click the [•] button to zoom to your present location; or search for a location in the box on the lower right.
Universities
“Every thing the pursuit of knowledge requires and money can buy”
—1884 Cornell University report to alumni
Land-grant universities were built not just on Indigenous land, but with Indigenous land. It’s a common misconception that the Morrill Act grants were used only for campuses. In fact, the grants were as big or bigger than major cities, and were often located hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their beneficiaries.
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. HCN 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.
By the early 20th century, the grants had raised $17.7 million for university endowments, with unsold lands valued at an additional $5.1 million. Altogether, the grants, when adjusted for inflation, were worth about half a billion dollars.
If those sums sound paltry today, bear in mind that places like the University of Nebraska-Lincoln matriculated just 20 students to its first class in 1869. Contemporaries not only welcomed the grants as “a very munificent endowment,” they competed to acquire them to found new colleges or stabilize existing institutions.
The table below contains a sortable, searchable list of universities that benefited from Indigenous land. Use the drop-down menu below to show universities by state. Click on a university name for more details.
| University | State | Acres | U.S. Paid | Univ. Raised | Return | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cornell University | NY | 977,909 | $41,166 | $5,739,657 | 139x |
Tribal Nations
Tribal Nations
“It’s called genocide”
—Gov. Gavin Newsom's public apology to California Indians in 2019
Profit from dispossession permeates the Morrill Act grants. Colorado, for instance, located nearly half of Colorado State University’s grant on land taken from the Arapaho and Cheyenne less than a year after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in which U.S. forces brutally murdered more than 200 members of those tribes.
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 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 California, bounties for Indigenous heads and scalps, paid by the state and reimbursed by the federal government, encouraged the carving up of traditional territories without any compensation. Eighteen treaties made to secure land cessions in the Golden State were rejected by the Senate and kept secret for a half-century by Congress.
To extinguish Indigenous title to land siphoned through the Morrill Act, the United States paid less than $400,000 to tribal nations. In truth, however, it often paid nothing at all.
Our data challenges universities to re-evaluate the foundations of their success by identifying nearly every acre obtained and sold, every land seizure or treaty made with the land’s Indigenous caretakers, and every dollar endowed with profits from dispossession.
The table below contains a sortable and searchable list of tribal nations whose lands supplied Morrill Act grants. Click on a row to view details on an individual tribe, and to see where the lands were located.
| Tribal Nation | Cessions | Acres | U.S. Paid | Univ. Raised | Return | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chippewa | 7 | 2,236,182 | $157,427 | $5,833,359 | 37x |
| 2 | Sioux (Wahpeton and Sisseton Bands) | 5 | 1,101,248 | $21,761 | $2,028,476 | 93x |
| 3 | Sioux (Medewakanton and Wahpekuta) | 2 | 832,683 | $20,871 | $1,589,334 | 76x |
| 4 | Ya-wil-chine | 3 | 574,387 | $0 | $1,366,970 | Incalc. |
| 5 | Wo-la-si | 3 | 574,387 | $0 | $1,366,970 | Incalc. |
| 6 | Wack-sa-che | 3 | 574,387 | $0 | $1,366,970 | Incalc. |
| 7 | Po-ken-well | 3 | 574,387 | $0 | $1,366,970 | Incalc. |
| 8 | Pal-wis-ha | 3 | 574,387 | $0 | $1,366,970 | Incalc. |
| 9 | New-chow-we | 3 | 574,387 | $0 | $1,366,970 | Incalc. |
| 10 | Ko-ya-te | 3 | 574,387 | $0 | $1,366,970 | Incalc. |
NOTE: Our data shows land cessions that are associated with multiple tribal nations. These totals add up to more than 100% of total acreage, amount paid, and amount raised. The names above appear as they did at time of cession. Many are not in use today, and some are considered offensive. For more information, see our methodology.
Lands
PARCEL ID: MN051240N0340W0SN090ASEMN
Photograph: Kalen Goodluck/High Country News
Lands
“Unquestionably, the history of land-grant universities intersects with that of Native Americans and the taking of their lands.”
—The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities in a written statement.
Hundreds of violence-backed treaties and seizures extinguished Indigenous title to over 2 billion acres of the United States. Nearly 11 million of those acres jump-started 52 land-grant institutions.
Today, these acres form the landscape of the United States. On Morrill Act lands there now stand churches, schools, bars, baseball diamonds, parking lots, hiking trails, billboards, restaurants, vineyards, cabarets, hayfields, gas stations, airports and residential neighborhoods.
HCN tracked down and mapped all of the Morrill Act lands and overlaid them on Indigenous cession areas in a geographic information system. The results reveal the violence of dispossession on land-grant university ledgers.
The table below can be sorted or searched by county or state. Use the drop-down menu to filter lands given to universities in a specific state. Click on a row to view a map and details for a specific parcel.
| County | Grant State | Tribal Nations | Acres | U.S. Paid | Univ. Raised | Return | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mariposa, CA | NY | 6 | 213 | $0.00 | $1,249.46 | Incalc. |
| 2 | Merced, CA | NY | 6 | 201 | $0.00 | $1,180.14 | Incalc. |
| 3 | Merced, CA | NY | 6 | 200 | $0.00 | $1,174.39 | Incalc. |
| 4 | Merced, CA | NY | 6 | 197 | $0.00 | $1,158.90 | Incalc. |
| 5 | Merced, CA | NY | 6 | 193 | $0.00 | $1,133.66 | Incalc. |
| 6 | Buffalo, WI | NY | 1 | 192 | $38.66 | $1,128.08 | 29x |
| 7 | Merced, CA | NY | 6 | 190 | $0.00 | $1,117.28 | Incalc. |
| 8 | Merced, CA | NY | 6 | 189 | $0.00 | $1,109.77 | Incalc. |
| 9 | Stanislaus, CA | NY | 6 | 189 | $0.00 | $1,106.37 | Incalc. |
| 10 | Stanislaus, CA | NY | 6 | 188 | $0.00 | $1,106.13 | Incalc. |
