Land-Grab Universities: How expropriated Indigenous land became the foundation of the land-grant university system

2021 Winner

Land-Grab Universities: How expropriated Indigenous land became the foundation of the land-grant university system

Country/area: United States

Organisation: High Country News in collaboration with grants from The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and The Fund for Investigative Journalism

Organisation size: Small

Publication date: 30 Mar 2020

Credit: Robert Lee, Tristan Ahtone, Margaret Pearce, Kalen Goodluck, Geoff McGhee, Cody Leff, Katherine Lanpher, Taryn Salinas

Jury’s comments:

High Country News opened a dark chapter in America’s history books with an exhaustive two-year investigation that revealed how 52 of the nation’s best-known public and private universities were funded by 10.7 million acres of land seized from nearly 250 indigenous tribes. Reporters Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone traced and mapped all the land grants, worth half a billion dollars after accounting for inflation, and tied them back to the universities that have benefited. Their work has prompted students and faculty of many universities to demand acknowledgement of this injustice, and High Country News also has made their database available for download for further research by others.

Project description:

Nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous land, over 160 violence-backed treaties and land seizures, approximately 250 tribes, bands and communities, and fifty-two universities: Our investigation reveals how expropriated Indigenous land financed the land-grant university system, and how many institutions continue to profit.

Impact reached:

Within months of publication several major initiatives took shape in response to our reporting. At Cornell, the largest Morrill Act beneficiary, faculty launched a project to document the university’s financial windfall. Similar internal reviews are ramping up at MIT and the University of Connecticut, which is developing an exhibition based on the data as part of a push for a new Cultural Center for Native & Indigenous Students. At Ohio State researchers have partnered with the First Nations Development Institute to draft a reconciliation plan that will benefit the tribal communities whose land seeded the school’s founding. Washington State University has taken the lead in actually rewriting its land acknowledgment to incorporate the report’s findings, and pledged to commission a team to determine reconciliation plans. Working groups at Colorado State, Arizona State, the University of Minnesota, and others are likewise laying the groundwork for reforms tying their land-grant legacies to the needs of their Indigenous students.

This year, thousands of undergraduate and graduate students at scores of universities are reading the report in journalism, education, and liberal arts courses. The University of Missouri even made it required reading university-wide through its freshman composition program. At the University of Florida, Yale University, and Cornell University, student governments and advocacy groups demanded investigations, protested for racial justice, and petitioned for increased recruitment and funding for students from tribal nations disadvantaged by the Morrill Act. The response is reminiscent of the reaction to Brown University’s Report on Slavery and Justice (2006), which sparked a reckoning with higher education’s connections to the slave trade. Only it appears to be moving at a more accelerated pace.

Techniques/technologies used:

This investigation relied on a unique combination of large-scale spatial analysis and historical research. To tell the story, we had to uncover ties between contemporary universities and Indigenous land redistributed by the federal government more than a century ago. To accomplish this, we built a geodatabase of nearly 80,000 land parcels. This database recreates the complete footprint of a major US land law for the first time.

To populate our geodatabase, we constructed parcels in ArcGIS using data digitally extracted and hand-transcribed from fifty different sources. We linked these parcels to Indigenous land cessions from nine publicly available spatial datasets and maps, several of which required original georeferencing. We incorporated data on past payments for Indigenous land, acreage distributed, and principal raised for universities from 28 other sources, primarily court cases for broken treaties and government reports. Our sources ranged from crumbling archival manuscripts from the 1860s to state disclosures posted online in the past few years. To visualize and analyze this data, we processed it with a dozen different software programs. The database enabled our photographer to visit parcels and our cartographer to produce maps and graphics. It generated statistics that punctuate the story. And it revealed long hidden connections between prosperous universities and dispossessed tribal nations that structured our narrative. Because we developed the methodology for this story from scratch, we also published an essay detailing our process and sources. These materials both document our findings and illustrate an approach future investigators can adapt to examine other sites of state and institutional wealth building through the expropriation of Indigenous resources.

What was the hardest part of this project?

There were many missing records in any single place, which meant material had to be gathered from multiple sources, cross-referenced, and duplicates eliminated to reconstruct the full record for a given state/school. Some of these records were crumbly and illegible (or almost illegible), literally falling apart. The polygons had to be constructed to match the plss notation. Hundreds had to be drawn by hand. There was no guide to tell us exactly how much material we were looking for. We had to construct that from research, too. It was like putting together a massive puzzle for each state, except the pieces aren’t contiguous, you don’t know how many there are, they’re stored in different boxes, there are duplicates, and there’s no cover image to tell you what you’re looking for.

What can others learn from this project?

Because we developed the methodology for this story from scratch, we also published an essay detailing our process and sources. These materials both document our findings and illustrate an approach future investigators can adapt to examine other sites of state and institutional wealth building through the expropriation of Indigenous resources.