Original Sins by Eve L. Ewing

Author:Eve L. Ewing [Ewing, Eve L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2025-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Dispossession by Degrees: Universities and the Legacy of Theft

The nation’s public universities are often viewed as an embodiment of the American ideal, a mechanism through which young people from any background can seek a better future through higher education. Some of those public universities have a special designation—they are known as “land grant institutions.” In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Land Grant College Act, offering up parcels of land to states that they could sell for the purposes of creating and funding universities. From the University of Maine to the University of California system, from Louisiana State University to North Dakota State University, fifty-two new institutions mushroomed into existence across the country.[42] These new universities were meant to churn out a new generation of “educated bureaucrats” to usher the country into an era of modernity, overseeing railroad expansion, agricultural innovation, manufacturing, and trade.[43] Economic analysis has suggested that the Morrill Act was transformative for the nation, creating a massive surge in human capital, leading to increases in university enrollment and GDP per capita, and allowing the United States to rise into the position of global superpower.[44]

But the land parceled out for the sake of U.S. economic ascendancy was Indigenous land. Almost eleven million acres of land from nearly 250 Native tribes and communities enabled the universities to garner over $22 million—equivalent to almost $500 million in our time.[45] And those universities have used that money to become bastions of economic opportunity for generation after generation of college students—the vast majority of them White. Despite the fact that these land grant institutions came into being only through the theft of Indigenous land, Native students make up less than half a percentage point of the enrollment at the Morrill Act universities; these schools also have lower graduation rates among Native students than non-Morrill universities.[46]

The University of Minnesota emerged from one of the most violent and most profitable of these land cessions.[47] The land transfer occurred just months after a group of Dakota warriors, led by Taoyateduta (Little Crow), mounted a war effort against the European settlers whose numbers had increased from 6,000 to 180,000 over the course of a decade and who had driven the Dakota to starvation after failing to deliver food and supplies promised in exchange for land.[48] When they were defeated, Governor Alexander Ramsey called for the genocide of the Dakota, saying that they should be “exterminated” and that if any should “escape extinction, the wretched remnant must be driven beyond our borders.”[49] It was amid this fervor that thirty-eight Dakota men were publicly hanged on the day after Christmas in 1862, in what remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States.[50] Thirty-two days later, the state legislature approved the transfer of 120,000 acres of land to the university.[51] No university without land theft; no land theft without violence.

Of the many 1862 land grant institutions, Cornell University was able to leverage the sale of the stolen land for the highest return. By 1935, sales of Indigenous land had netted the institution a total of $5.

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