[This post has been updated. Details at end.]
For more than three decades I have worked for Land-Grant universities. For them what don’t know what that means, a land-grant institution originates in the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, which was a method by which states were granted tracts of federally controlled land they could then sell or manage to raise funds that would then be used for for the creation of endowments for state colleges.
Thus, the “land-grant” colleges were born, a string of state schools across the nation designed to meet the pressing needs of education at the time, primarily in the fields of agriculture, science and engineering, in response the growing industrial revolution. Also military science – as we were in the middle of a bloody civil war.
In my old granite state stomping grounds, New Hampshire’s land grant of 150,000 acres raised enough capital to create the NH College of of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Hanover, which grew and eventually moved to Durham thanks to a generous bequest from Ben Thompson, and thence continued to grow into today’s University of New Hampshire.
The A&M focus was common across the nation, and many schools today still use A&M in their names, in places such as Tallahassee FL, Miami OK, and College Station TX. Chances are, a school that calls themselves “Aggies” started with a land grant.
Once such school is Oregon State University. Its College of Agricultural Sciences bills itself as the oldest, founding college at OSU, which was once, in fact, called Oregon Agricultural College.
All of the land-grant colleges started with a donation of land from the federal government to the states. Younger western states like Oregon in the mid-1860 had a lot of federal land within their new borders, land that was given to settlers in in large chunks thanks to laws like the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Law and later under the 1862 Homestead Act. It’s curious to me, raised in seacoast NH, to walk around here in Corvallis and see plots of land that were doled out under those programs when the town, later city, was first settled by folks who came out the Oregon Trail.
So where did NH’s land-grant land exist? Turns out that NH and other northeast land-grants were made with western federal land – the states were given “scrip” that described their grant.
As it turns out, my career in higher education has Oregon roots – on both coasts, as UNH’s land grant included 22 parcels of land in Coos, Josephine, and Douglas counties totaling 1,816 acres. Oregon State University began with 91,629 acres spread across 601 parcels in Oregon.
I chose to live in a problematic state; my time here has opened my eyes to a history that I never learned much about on the other side of the nation. For example, Oregon’s first constitution prohibited black people from the state. (Maybe “problematic” is an understatement…)
Oregon, like much of the west, was created in the nation’s era of Manifest Destiny – we expanded from the collections of colonies on the Atlantic coast to cover the continent all the way to the west coast in a remarkably short period of time. Some of the expansion was made possible through land grabs, some by land sales. Along the way, it’s worth noting, this new nation and all its new settlers were moving into a place that was not empty.
My old home of Dover, NH, is going to celebrate its quadricentennial next year. But for thousands of years before the past four hundred it was home to many tribes of indigenous peoples. Across the nation, as settlers carved a new nation out of the coastline and western wilderness, white people displaced and decimated native nations. Along the way, many, many treaties were made between the new nation and the older ones, which the new, expanding nation broke with impunity, many times, over and over.
Sidebar: I had long known of the rotten history that is the treatment of native peoples here in the U.S. Perhaps the strangest way I learned of the impact of this history was through satire, in the form of an audio sketch by the Firesign Theatre, Temporarily Humboldt County. Without trying to break down satire, as overthinking it makes it fail, what makes this piece work is the fact it is so horribly rooted in truth. A formula has been posited that explains humor: Comedy=Tragedy+Time. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but it seems to work in this sketch.
More seriously, a greater reawakening of this knowledge and concern in me began back in 2011 when I recorded an interview program with Paul VanDevelder, who had received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Savages and Scoundrels (Yale University Press), telling the history of the violations of treaties made between the United States and the native populations of its lands. Bottom line: the actions against the tribes of this nation by the federal government are, simply, crimes. If treaties are, as our Constitution states, the “supreme Law of the Land,” than our government has a long, sordid history of breaking the law.
In recent years, we white folks have been forced to come to face this horrible truth. A few years ago, our university began the practice of including a land acknowledgement at university events. Here’s a sample of an early version suggested by a resolution from student government:
Let it be acknowledged that Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR is located within the traditional homelands of the Mary’s River or Ampinefu Band of Kalapuya. Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 (Kalapuya etc. Treaty), Kalapuya people were forcibly removed to reservations in Western Oregon. Today, living descendants of these people are a part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon (https://www.grandronde.org) and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians (https://ctsi.nsn.us).
https://asosu.oregonstate.edu/land-rec
One of the things that struck me when I first came to this campus was the presence of numerous cultural centers, and the one I’ve been most interested in over these years is Kaku-Ixt Mana Ina Haws, known as the Longhouse. I’ve attended a number of events over the years, many as part of my job to record or stream events, but many more just out of my own curiosity. In 2020, we began to see signs around campus declaring “This is Kalapuyan Land,” an outgrowth of an exhibition by the same name. As these signs began appearing on a campus mostly deserted due to pandemic, their impact was not as broadly felt for another year, but folks who were on campus saw them, and heard the land acknowledgments in Zoom meetings and online events with a different awareness.
The land acknowledgements began to evolve. A Faculty Senate President introduced a new bit of verbiage in her statement before meetings, explaining that some parts of the suggested one felt a bit like boilerplate (my description). The College of Agricultural Sciences has been discussing with numerous stakeholders the status of native lands near here on which a an experimental farm is operated by the college.
We also saw other campuses around the west and the rest of the nation begin to grapple with their own relationships with native people and lands, from similar land acknowledgement statements to curated exhibits, campus place names and markings, and more. I was intrigued to see UNH, too, was making gestures towards…what, exactly? When we began saying the words, I wondered: is this a beginning to restorative justice, or will it just be a restorative interpretation?
In making presentations, I have at times been one chosen to read the words. At one point during the COVID interregnum, my producer’s brain got me to thinking about making a short video version with words and images, to make it easier for people across campus to include a uniform acknowledgement in campus presentations…but it didn’t take me long to connect the dots and realize that it wasn’t about making the statement easy to do. Having read the words out loud, I understood, somewhat, why the form has evolved, depending on who is reading it, since we introduced it as a necessarily element in public events.
Still, it felt like…well, just words.
Then something exciting happened last spring: the University of California system announced their Native American Opportunity Plan. In short, California students who are also enrolled in federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes get free tuition.
WOW! That’s a lot more than words, for damn sure. When I heard that news, I was kind of sad – someone else did it before us, but I was eager to see what OSU would do. Finally, in August, we learned what OSU would do: any person enrolled in a federally-recognized tribe would be eligible for in-state tuition. So if you’re, say, an Abenaki from the east, you can go to OSU and not pay out-of-state tuition. And if you’re enrolled in one of the Nine Tribes of Oregon:
students who are enrolled members of the Nine Tribes of Oregon may be eligible to enroll in the state of Oregon’s newly announced Oregon Tribal Student Grant Program, which provides assistance up to the cost of attendance at Oregon public and private non-profit colleges and universities.
https://leadership.oregonstate.edu/speeches-and-statements/osu-allow-state-tuition-enrolled-members-all-federally-recognized-tribal
Emphasis added. Worth noting: this particular grant program is only funded for the 2022-23 academic year, but, if eligible, it means that a tribal member here in Oregon can attend tuition-free.
Some work is begin done in Oregon, and in recent weeks the rivalry school south of OSU stepped up with a similar announcement that the University of Oregon (not a Land-Grant, but located on stolen land, too) will cover full tuition and fee costs for American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) residents. UO is doing this in a manner similar to OSU’s plan:
…incorporating wrap-around services that support student retention and graduation through complementary financial assistance, improved counseling and academic services, and professional development. Once state and federal options have been exhausted, the UO will waive remaining tuition and fees for Oregon residents who are enrolled citizens of the 574 federally recognized tribes.
https://homeflight.uoregon.edu/
These are good steps, but are they enough?
Meanwhile, I hadn’t realized how much our land acknowledgment statement had evolved at OSU, until I heard a college dean reading one in a public meeting. The new one has come quite a long way since the students crafted one one in 2019. It reads:
Oregon State University recognizes the impact that its land grant history had on Indigenous communities in Oregon. Through the Morrill Act of 1862, which established land grant universities in the United States, the federal government seized nearly 11 million acres of land from 250 sovereign tribal nations, with little or no compensation.
In 1868, the state legislature designated Corvallis College as Oregon’s land grant institution. Soon after, Oregon received 90,000 acres of federal lands — taken from the Klamath, Coos, Lower Umpqua, Siuslaw and Coquille people — to be sold to create an endowment supporting the growth of the new college, which would become Oregon State University.
Oregon State University in Corvallis is located within the traditional homelands of the Marys River or Ampinefu Band of Kalapuya. Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855, Kalapuya people were forcibly removed to reservations in Western Oregon. Today, living descendants of these people are part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. Indigenous people are valued, contributing members of the Oregon State community and represent multiple sovereign tribes among students, faculty, staff and alumni.
Oregon State University accepts its responsibility for understanding the continuing impact of that history on these communities. Oregon State is committed — in the spirit of self-reflection, learning, reconciliation and partnership — to ensure that this institution of higher learning will be of enduring benefit, not only to the state of Oregon, but also to the people on whose ancestral lands it is now located.
https://oregonstate.edu/land-acknowledgement
Words.
Isn’t it past time to go beyond talking about concepts such as restorative justice, and time to start acting it out? Yes, OSU, the problematic State of Oregon’s flagship research university, its Land-Grant institution, is trying to do something, but I would argue it is not enough.
Why does any Land-Grant university charge a fee for indigenous people to attend? Seriously – why can’t the descendants of the native people who were robbed to create these lucrative endowment start getting something back? An opportunity for direct restorative justice is sitting right there: simply don’t charge anyone enrolled in a federally recognized tribe any tuition.
It’s way past time to start making up for the original theft.
[Updated 24 October. In my original post, I did not get the details of OSU’s plan quite right, so I fixed that, and while in there I rewrote the end a bit. Tangentially, I had a nice chat with the interim Chief Diversity Officer at OSU today, and he mentioned a few other interesting things I had not noticed before, such as the impact some research involving indigenous knowledge can have from an intellectual property perspective. I need to wrap my head further around that notion. The bottom line to me is that the legacy of the land-grants is something rather awful, and making land acknowledgments is far too little to get us back into any semblance of karmic balance. That non land-grant schools like UO are grappling with the history of the land upon which they sit is useful to see, too. But we all still have a lot of work to do, and a long way to go…]
