As a deal to return the land holding the University of Minnesota’s Cloquet Forestry Center moves forward, the University and the Fond du Lac Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa are working to improve their relationship.

The University announced in August it had reached an agreement in principle to return the forestry center property to the Fond du Lac Band. Former President Joan Gabel first announced the University’s intention to return the land in 2023. 

Because a portion of the land within the Center is state-owned, the transfer back to the Fond du Lac Band must first pass through Minnesota’s legislature. Last year, a bill to return the Center to Fond du Lac passed multiple committees but ultimately failed, due to the legislature being unable to pass an investment bill prior to the legislative session’s end.

According to Associate Professor of Forest Resources Michael Dockry, recent collaboration between the University and the Fond du Lac Band has led to improved relations and strengthened dialogue.

“I think in the more recent past, we’ve had faculty, staff and leadership focus on building good research education partnerships with the Fond du Lac Band,” Dockry said. “These projects, especially around bringing fire back to the Cloquet Forestry Center, really started putting the Band and the Department in good relationships to do that education, research and outreach.”

The Center was acquired by the University in 1909, when 2,000 acres of Fond du Lac land considered unallocated by the United States government were transferred from private logging companies.

Through the allotment system, unallocated land within the reservation was taken from the Fond du Lac and ended up in the control of the University. 

Dockry says that this allotment system was used as a tool of dispossession. 

“It’s their land. It’s within the reservation, and reservations were established to be homelands for tribal peoples after they ceded millions of millions of acres of land that they were told would always be theirs,” Dockry said. “Processes like allotment took that land away from them.”

The Fond du Lac Reservation was established with the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe, the second treaty involving the Lake Superior Chippewa, in which they ceded large tracts of land to the U.S. government. Senior Advisor to the President on Native American Affairs Karen Diver says that this method of acquiring tribal nations’ land was an abuse of power.

“That was treaty reserved homelands,” Diver said. “They could’ve picked somewhere else, but they didn’t. It was because they could, and that Congress has that power.”

The University has profited significantly from lands originally belonging to tribal nations, having acquired them through its status as a land-grant university. The University has generated over $900 million for its endowment fund over the last 175 years through former tribal lands, according to MPR. 

Dockry added that there are royalties still being earned at the University today from lands allocated through the Land Grant system.

Since the initial acquisition of land, the University has expanded its holdings within the borders of the Fond du Lac Reservation, acquiring new land as recently as 2003. The total land area of the Center now sits at 3,400 acres.

Under the terms of the agreement, the University will still operate and maintain the forestry center and will continue research projects in accordance with procedures established by the University and the Fond du Lac Band. 

In an email to the Minnesota Daily, Kyle Gill, the director of operations at the Cloquet Forestry Center, said news of the agreement was well received by faculty and staff, and the center will support existing collaborations with the Band. A pile burn on Nov. 8 marked the center’s latest effort to restore fire to the land, a land-management practice long exercised by the Chippewa. 

According to Dockry, the return of the land to the Fond du Lac is a precursor to the future of forestry education in the U.S.

“This is where forestry is going in the 21st century now,” Dockry said. “How do you build close partnerships with tribes, and how do you work with tribes? How do you understand tribal perspectives and goals for land management? How do you work together? This is everything we’re doing at Cloquet in this land back process.” 

Diver said collaboration with the Fond du Lac will drive the Cloquet Forestry Center’s education beyond conventional practices.

“Fond du Lac has also helped the Forestry in terms of expanding its knowledge surrounding traditional forest management techniques,” Diver said. “It has fundamentally changed how the Cloquet Forestry Center staff actually view their stewardship responsibilities, and kind of expanded their knowledge from just a western focus to something kind of bigger.”

Diver also said that opportunities for collaboration between the University and the Fond du Lac will extend beyond faculty and staff of the Cloquet Forestry Center alone.

“The Band has expressed that it actually has hired foresters who have graduated,” Diver said. “It values forestry education because it aids them in their own stewardship.”

Public response to the deal has been mixed, with some criticising the University at a public comment hearing last year, according to MinnPost. Several people expressed concern at a 2024 listening session that the deal might impact the University’s forestry research.

To Dockry, those fears fail to recognize the changing nature of forest management.

“This is what forestry education looks like moving forward, and UMN is at the forefront of this,” Dockry said. “You might hear people say that giving the land back is some sort of back track, meaning that it’s not important for Minnesota to continue to do forestry research outreach and education, but that is the furthest thing from the truth.”