[Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 4: Land Theft and University Wealth

[Reid L]

Land Theft and University Wealth

Private property is so thoroughly integrated into the ways many of us live
on and relate to land that we hardly take a moment to consider it. Land is
owned, passed from one property owner to the next; links in a never-ending
chain of possession. But this chain of possession began with dispossession:
the massive theft of Native lands across the North American continent.
Through coercion, manipulation, and violence, the wealth of the United
States was built on stolen land.



One of our primary goals for this reading group is to consider the
relationship between the Yale Forest School and the nearly 11,000 acres of
forestland it owns and operates for research, education, and profit. In
Week 1, we used Native Land Digital’s Native Land Map
<https://native-land.ca/> to learn more about the Native peoples and
Nations who have long held deep relationships with the land that the Yale
Forests rest upon. This week, we’ll situate Yale’s land ownership in the
context of the Morrill Act, a defining piece of legislation for the
country’s institutions of higher learning.



Signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the Morrill Act made millions
of acres of Native land, claimed by the federal government through
treaties, seizure, or cession, available to states across the country.
States then allocated the land to universities to conserve and invest the
principal and to provide education in “agricultural science and mechanical
arts.” In High Country News in March of this year, Robert Lee and Tristan
Ahtone published two years of extensive research into the Morrill Act. The
article is an exhaustive piece of journalism, detailing the transfer of
nearly 11 million acres of land from “nearly 250 tribes, bands and
communities through over 160 violence-backed land cessions.” To the
universities who received these lands, they were collectively worth half a
billion dollars, raising capital for endowments that still keep these
universities operating today. For this violent taking of their land, Native
tribes collectively received less than $400,000 from the U.S. Government.
Many received nothing at all.



“Land-grab universities: Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of
the land-grant university system” by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone,
published by High Country News

https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities

Published March 30, 2020



If you’d also like to explore this topic by listening, we recommend this
episode of The Red Nation Podcast, an interview with the authors of the
above High Country News piece:


“How universities benefit from stolen land w/ Tristan Ahtone & Bobby Lee”
from The Red Nation Podcast

https://soundcloud.com/therednationpod/how-universities-benefit-from



It might surprise you to know that Yale University was one of the nation’s
original land-grant colleges. Throughout the second half of the 19th
century, Yale had a thriving agricultural program, housed in the Sheffield
Scientific School. As a result of this curriculum, the university was
eligible for state land grants, and became a recipient of Morrill Act Land.
High Country News reports:

“Yale was assigned the benefit of 180,000 acres of Morrill Act scrip,
eventually redeemed from the former homelands of 53 tribal nations. That
land was transferred to the United States through 33 ratified and
unratified treaties made between 1808 and 1858. Connecticut sold the entire
lot in a block in 1863 for $135,000, raised primarily at the expense of the
Ojibwe and Odawa, whose lopsided land cessions contained more than 70% of
what became the state’s grant.

Interest from the fund provided scholarships for in-state students until
Connecticut reassigned the endowment to the University of Connecticut (then
known as Storrs Agricultural College) in 1893. Yale went to court and later
received a settlement for the full $135,000 plus interest, worth about $4.8
million in today’s dollars.”

“When Yale Was A Farming School” by Judith Ann Schiff, published by Yale
Alumni Magazine

https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/2405-when-yale-was-a-farming-school

Published March/April, 2009



For us Forest Fellows, the legacy of the Morrill Act at Yale is especially
direct. According to Judith Schiff writing for the Yale Alumni Magazine,
Yale lost its status as the state’s land grant institution when the State
Grange complained that high admissions standards were depriving the state’s
farmers of the full benefits of the Morrill Act. Professors in the
Sheffield Scientific School went on to organize Yale’s Forestry School.



How do we reconcile the origins of Yale’s wealth and the dispossession it
entailed? With an endowment built on the violent appropriation of Native
land, what responsibilities do we have to correct that history, to right
wrongs? Furthermore, how does the history of Morrill legislation change the
way we think about university-owned property and endowments?

The nearly 11,000 acres of forestland owned by Yale’s Forest School didn’t
come directly from Morrill Act land grants, but it is still the result of
violence-backed Native land theft. We shouldn’t have to speak in monetary
terms to understand why this theft is wrong. But now that the theft has
been quantified, how can we reconcile? According to High Country News:



“…there are some hints. The American Indian and Indigenous Studies
Department at Michigan State University, for instance, has incorporated
language on the Morrill Act’s relationship to expropriation and genocide in
its extended land acknowledgment <http://aisp.msu.edu/about/land/>. But
perhaps most strikingly, the Wokini Initiative
<https://www.sdstate.edu/wokini> at South Dakota State University has
recently redirected income from its remaining Morrill acres into
programming and support for Native students hoping to attend SDSU.”

We, of course, don’t have the answers here. We join the chorus of voices
urging institutions to truly commit to interrogating their histories and
moving forward more justly. By learning from these resources, we hope to
facilitate a greater understanding of the varied mechanisms the United
States government has used over the years to claim and seize Native lands.
We’ll continue to examine these themes of theft and dispossession over the
next few weeks, and hope to continue to engage thoughtfully and critically
with this material as we move forward.

Here are some questions we’re considering this week, which we encourage you
to consider as well:

   - What is your personal relationship to lands transferred by the Morrill
   Act?
   - How has your university - or a university near you - benefited from
   Native land theft? How have you personally benefited from your
   relationships to these institutions?
   - How is the knowledge that these universities create -- and the power
   and privilege they confer -- dependent upon Native land theft?
   - How can we acknowledge and address land theft? To whom does the
   responsibility of this acknowledgement fall? How successful have we/they
   been?

--

Thanks so much for following along this week! Have thoughts, comments, or
reflections you’d like to share? Are there resources you feel we should
have included? We hope you’ll send an email our way:
yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram:
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We would like to express our deep gratitude for those leading the
interrogation of the history and continued impacts of Native land theft.
Particularly, we would like to thank the creators whose knowledge and work
we shared here, with special thanks to Robert Lee and Triston Ahtone (
https://tristanahtone.net/). Thank you for assisting us in our journey to
learn about and confront atrocities both past and present, in our attempt
to create a better, more just future -- personally, institutionally,
nationally, and globally.
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