The University of Minnesota’s land grab history has sparked debate and calls for accountability as revelations of displacement and acquisition surfaced in recent years. Now, the University is being called upon to address its history of wrongdoing.
When Minnesota was only known as a territory, Congress granted to it two tracts of land for the endowment of a university. Today the University of Minnesota spans over 2,700 acres and has over 50,000 students, widely considered to be one of the most successful schools in the country. What is not often considered is the destructive history of the University as a land grab institution, complicit in the removal and erasure of Indigenous people. The TRUTH report and its historical implications are set to be presented by former interim president Jeff Ettinger to the Board of Regents this June, according to an email from Ettinger.
Ettinger wrote in an email to The Minnesota Daily the University plans to take initial steps toward some of the TRUTH Report’s recommendations.
Archivist Eric Moore wrote in an email to the Daily the TRUTH report is the best source to understand how the University benefited and profited from the ethnocide and genocidal policies, actions, and beliefs of political leaders and University regents.
American Indian studies Professor Nick Estes said there is a lot of wealth, capital and infrastructure invested into the University, and it was only possible to reach this level of prosperity by taking away the land livelihoods of the people who lived here.
“Crow Creek – I’ve got family from there – it’s one of the poorest places in the United States and they don’t have the kind of infrastructure that this university has,” Estes said. “They are categorically excluded from even the auspices of the truth report, because they’re not in State Tribes and were removed by federal law.”
Estes added there is a lack of education on the impact of settler colonialism in the US Dakota War, the removal policies, the policies starvation and genocide. He said the exile of the Dakota and Ho-Chunk people from Minnesota territories is ill understood and inadequately addressed.
Estes also said it is impossible to extricate oneself from the history of the state, and people who are beneficiaries of the land are not removed from the process. He said the land collects interest and annuities over time, and was meant to kind of pay people in perpetuity.
“The original wealth was from the land grant, amongst other things, but a good portion of it was from the land grant,” Estes said. The wealth of the university and the wealth of the state today can be tied back to that original time period and there needs to be an acknowledgement of that.”
Archeologist Ray Reser said land acknowledgements are a Get Out of Jail Free card for most universities or public or private entities. He said he had been asked to write or draft a lot of land acknowledgments or help draft them.
“The problem with them is, it really is an easy way to say we recognize this land was taken or stolen and, you know, we feel kind of bad about it,” Reser said. “But we have no intent of giving any of it back, we have no intent of actually making this right.”
Reser said while working with Wisconsin tribes he observed they are also sick of the land acknowledgements in part because there’s no recognition of the opportunity and wealth that’s been lost in the native community.
“For the Native community here in Wisconsin, many of them say, look, there has never been a formal recognition or apology from the feds or the state,” Reser said. “The state was absolutely complicit in taking native lands, and they’ve never even admitted it.”
What is the TRUTH report?
The Towards Recognition and University-Tribal Healing (TRUTH) report is a 215 page research document detailing the historical injustice against native people. The project draws on academic literature, financial, legislative and archival records as well as indigenous oral history to make policy recommendations to improve University-Tribal relations, the project reads.
The TRUTH report details the University of Minnesota’s founding as a “land grant/grab institution” in 1851 extracted vast amounts of wealth from Tribal Nations. It also cohesively describes the scale of institutional harm perpetrated including forced removal and execution, economic oppression, unethical research on Native children and other forms of cultural erasure.
“The institution must account for perpetual harms and enact policies that prioritize and maximize the benefits to Indigenous peoples,” the TRUTH research team wrote in a press release statement.
What is the Morrill Act?
Librarian Ryan Mattke said upon the University’s founding in 1851, it was made almost immediately insolvent and closed during the Civil War until the Morrill Act gave Universities across the country a source of income.
“The Morrill Act kind of saved the university – a lot of universities,” Mattke said. “It just gave a bunch of land to them that they could then sell and build up their endowments.”
The 1862 Morrill Act, signed by President Lincoln, allowed states to establish public colleges through the sale and development of Federal land grants. According to the National Archives, 10 million acres of these lands were seized from Native Americans through forced treaties, agreements and seizure.
The act redistributed 80,000 parcels of land across 24 states, taken from almost 250 tribes and over 160 land cessions. The University of Minnesota received almost 95,000 acres through the Morrill Act, most of which was ceded by the Dakota in an 1851 treaty, according to the Urban and Regional Affairs Center.
Estes said the Morrill Act was a method of seizing native land to build starting capital for public institutions at the expense of Native people. The land sold was essentially a bank or lending agency, and the University continued to build profit by land sales and interest on stolen land.
“The land grant sales became the starting capital not only for the University but also for the state of Minnesota,” Estes said. “That money was bonded out to local municipalities and counties to build roads, bridges, and infrastructure of the state itself at the expense of native people”
The Morrill Act says the money made from land sales must be used in perpetuity, meaning those funds are still on university ledgers in the present. A 2014 study shows that these lands continue to generate value for universities, even calling such lands “the gift that keeps on giving.”
Reser said that according to the TRUTH report, there was land taken under the Morrill Act which has never been sold, developed or used. Universities hold a lot of land which could go back to the tribes.
“As High Country News went over it, a bunch of that money is still sitting in university coffers and they’re making interest on it,” Reser said.
How settlers stole Land
Geography Professor Roderick Squires said after the revolutionary war, the Land Survey system was used to divide and sell plots of land to various people. The survey was a way to identify boundaries and location of a parcel of land that then could be transferred from the U.S. government to private interests, he added.
Squires said the land division system could only occur when American Indians ceded their land.
“The survey was a way to colonize empty land, called empty land, ie, no white people,” Squires said. “The federal government owned all the land right after they extinguished the Indian title.”
American Indians had an ‘aboriginal title’ based upon use and occupancy, as opposed to the European American concept of land ownership with documents or written records, Squires said. The deliberate federal removal policy, post 1832, was a result of the recognition that the indigenous populations had a right to occupy and use the land, he added.
“It was a recognized form of ownership, not based on records, but based on occupancy and use, which had to be extinguished,” Squires said. “And that’s certainly been the Anglo European way of doing things.”
The TRUTH report reads that Minnesota was an area made of primarily Dakota, Ojibwe and Metis people before the 1850s, and area colonists were fur traders and government agents. The report reads the federal government acquired millions of acres of land from the Indigenous people through various treaties between 1805-1889.
Archivist Erik Moore said in an Email to the Minnesota Daily the location of the University today originates from an 1854 land title purchase by then Board of Regents president Franklin Steele. The University’s first location was near the Falls between First and Central Avenues, and business ventures and associates of members of the original Board of Regents were decisive factors in deciding the original location.
“The Regents used their position and influence to locate lands they believed to be particularly profitable,” Moore said.
Estes said the first Board of Regents included political leaders and military leaders such as second governor of Minnesota Alexander Ramsey and Congressman Henry Hastings Sibley.
Ramsey called for the killing and removal of the Dakota during the 1862 Dakota war and stole from Dakota annuities while pressuring them to sell their land. Sibley had a role in the formation of the treaties which divided up Dakota land and illicit ‘trader clauses’ that placed the Dakota people further into debt, Estes said.
Estes said it was settlers who first introduced the concept of private debt to the Dakota people, and there was no word for ‘debt’ in the Dakota language until the fur trade and the introduction of treaties. People did not fully understand what they were doing, he added.
“When we think of any treaty in the world that’s ever been made, both parties or all parties have equal interpretation to that treaty,” Estes said. “But so far, we’ve only really seen a kind of a US interpretation that trumps an indigenous or a Dakota interpretation of those treaties.”
Moving Forward
Former Morris Student Body President Dylan Young said the report gives a very detailed overview of the university’s exploitative relationship with the tribes, and there’s an argument to be made that the university should be doing more to improve tribal relationships and reach a cultural and historical moment of truth, healing and reconciliation.
“Personally, as a Native American student at the University of Minnesota, I think that the recommendations give a pretty strong overview of what we as Native students would want from the university,” Young said.
Young said the Native American experience is very positive at University of Minnesota Morris. He said he also wants to see more indigenous representation, Native American and BIPOC housing security and especially University efforts to address a history of wrongs.
Reser said the University of Minnesota was one of the most egregious offenders, although every state is also complicit. He said now the information is out we can begin to realize the extent of what happened and is continuing to happen.
“I can tell you after, you know, putting in 40 or 50 years on this stuff, the native communities are exactly right, in what happened here,” Reser said. “I think we as a country need to face what we did, and figure out how to repatriate some of that land, or, you know, try and make it whole.”
Reser said right here in Minnesota we have a template to do things right. In the largest land back agreement in Minnesota, the Bois Forte band of Chippewa restored over 28,000 acres of land back to Tribal ownership within its reservation, Native News Online reported.
Reser said to move forward you need to do justice to what actually happened rather than shy away from painful conversations. People are sad and pissed off and frustrated, he added, but giving land back or addressing harms would be incredibly impactful for the tribes.
“Let’s give these guys a seat at the table,” Reser said. “Let’s look at what we can do differently, you know, what could we give back?”
This story will be continued in Part 2
