Category: Text

Our Goals and Methods:

How the Cornell University & Indigenous Dispossession Committee Determined which Present-Day Nations and Communities have been Affected by Cornell’s Past and Present Land Manipulations

by Kurt A. Jordan, Dusti C. Bridges, and Troy A. Richardson

October 17, 2023

Introduction

In June 2020, faculty and staff in Cornell University’s American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) formed a committee to assess the responsibilities and obligations Cornell has to Indigenous peoples based on its actions as a Land Grab/Land Grant institution.[1] The Cornell University and Indigenous Dispossession (CU&ID) committee first committed to inform affected Indigenous Nations about the connection between Cornell and their homelands, in the hope of generating a broad-based coalition of Indigenous governments to engage with Cornell President Martha Pollack. Secondly, the CU&ID committee sought to build on the efforts of the authors of the March 2020 High Country News (HCN) “Land-Grab Universities” report to provide each Indigenous Nation with the specifics of how Cornell benefited, and continues to benefit from, their loss of lands and waters. Third, the CU&ID committee developed and presented a set of recommendations to President Pollack regarding internal processes through which the institution can pursue relations of responsibility for the benefits accrued as a result of dispossessed and stolen land.

Beyond this, the CU&ID committee has and continues to assert that it is imperative to act in consultation with the Indigenous Nations and communities affected by Cornell’s actions. While there are policies and practices the Office of the President can and should enact as a show of good intentions, the CU&ID committee hesitates to provide or impose plans on Indigenous Nations without full consultation; imposed plans and policies for Indigenous Nations have a long history of failing miserably that AIISP does not wish to replicate.  AIISP has developed and pursued program-to-Nation diplomatic outreach, working toward a coalitional project seeking restorative justice for Indigenous peoples affected by Cornell’s actions.

A first step in the process of diplomatic outreach was to examine the history of Cornell’s role in dispossession more closely. The CU&ID committee’s stated goal of “advocating for redress” required a complete list of communities affected not only by dispossession associated with the Morrill Act of 1862, but Cornell’s present-day land holdings throughout New York State and elsewhere. To determine which Nations and communities have been affected, the project used the data and GIS resources provided by HCN, along with resources spanning from 19^th century ethnographies to modern social media to compile the list.

It should be noted that AIISP and the CU&ID committee have taken a broad view of what constitutes an affected community in our diplomatic outreach effort. We know that many Indigenous communities have lost federal recognition due to the extreme colonialist impacts that they have suffered over time.  In some senses, communities without recognition have been most affected by colonialist institutions, including Cornell University.  Thus we have reached out equally to federally-recognized, state-recognized, and unrecognized groups that have been impacted by Cornell’s past and present actions.  Similarly, we recognize that some communities whose traditional territories are in what is now considered to be the United States were displaced into what is now considered to be Canada.  We acknowledge that dispossession does not stop at present-day international borders, and have reached out to Indigenous Nations in Canada that were historically entangled with Cornell.

Lastly, we view Cornell’s territorial machinations of all sorts as equivalent– we see no practical or ethical difference between lands directly owned by Cornell and properties on long-term leases; no difference between formal Cornell properties and those of affiliate units like Cornell Cooperative Extension; and no difference between Morrill Act lands directly acquired and managed by Ezra Cornell and his associates and those lands where Mr. Cornell sold scrip to speculators before individual parcels were officially located and “entered” (to use the Morrill Act terminology for claiming a particular parcel of land).  All of these actions dispossessed specific Indigenous Nations and communities to Cornell’s benefit.  Those communities deserve to be notified about this history of entanglement with Cornell, and provided with an opportunity for their voices to be heard about how to move forward.

Compiling a List of Affected Communities

The Land Parcels Database generously provided by the HCN team formed the basis for our efforts to determine which Nations and communities had been, and continue to be, affected by Cornell’s actions.[2]  HCN supplied shapefiles and table data that include the locations and attributes of parcels of land associated with the Morrill Act. For each parcel, this data included three key attributes: the university to which the parcel was attached; how the land was taken from its Indigenous occupants (e.g., through treaty, outright seizure, etc.); and what community the lands were attributed to at the time of dispossession (most often the signatories of associated treaties). This data, coupled with a map of land cessions provided by the USDA Forest Service Geospatial Service and Technology Center, [3]  allowed us to compile a list of nations historically attributed to the land of each parcel.[4]

On the surface, this endeavor might seem to be a straightforward investigation of the connections between the signatories of the treaties and their contemporary descendants. However, several complicating factors soon arose. Treaties between North America’s Indigenous peoples and colonizing entities are not known for their integrity—corruption, coercion, and misrepresentation were common. We found that some of the treaties in question excluded communities whose lands most definitely were affected—where the U.S. opted to treat with only selected nations as representing everyone in the area. This meant that the signatories of treaties themselves were registers of dispossession. In one instance, the official signatories of the unratified 1851 Treaty at Camp Klamath that seized a portion Wiyot territory (which eventually came to include a Cornell parcel) did not appear to include any Wiyot representatives. This was due to a series of massacres and forced relocations that removed the Wiyot communities from the area prior to the treaty—a circumstance that certainly does not negate Cornell’s ties to Wiyot dispossession, as a simple signatories-to-contemporary nation list would imply.[5]

To explore these historical complexities and ensure that our list of affected communities was as complete as possible, we consulted the map of Indigenous territories produced by Native Lands Digital.[6] The Native Lands Digital map compiles Indigenous sources and historical research to display the general outlines of Indigenous traditional territories.[7] As an ongoing project, this map is continually updated with new sources and information, and is not meant to serve as a definitive set of boundaries. In fact, what one might consider an Indigenous community’s territory is more fluid than a linear boundary. The Native Lands Digital map was employed as a guide to flag any instances where dispossessed communities were underrepresented in the treaty process.[8]

One particularly challenging area of work were those parcels within the present-day state of California. The wide cultural and linguistic diversity of the region, coupled with small political units, settler ignorance (willful or otherwise), and widespread genocidal violence against Indigenous peoples in the area during the 19^th century resulted in incomplete and inconsistent records of treated peoples that do not map easily onto present-day communities. The signatories of the California treaties ranged from individuals to community names and broader cultural groups. Furthermore, following these treaties, many communities were forcibly combined and rearranged into settler-defined Rancherias and reservations. The notes of late-19^th century scientist C. Hart Merriam were an unexpected and invaluable resource in untangling these threads. Although Merriam’s focus was the study of animals in the West, he took meticulous notes on the Indigenous peoples of California, recognizing their knowledge of the wildlife and landscape he was studying. Merriam’s notes encompass Indigenous language dictionaries, placenames, maps, and a study that links signatories of the California treaties to their communities and broader cultural groups.[9] These notes, coupled with the Native Lands Digital map, allowed us to connect the historically dispossessed peoples to contemporary Indigenous Californian communities. To further connect these and other treaties to contemporary nations, we used a combination of directories provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribal websites, social media pages, news articles, and history books.

In the end, a combination of GIS, historic and contemporary maps, treaty documents, historic accounts, ethnographies, crowdsourced lists, Tribal websites, social media, and news outlets informed our list of contemporary communities whose ancestral land provided the financial foundation of Cornell University through the Morrill Act of 1862. Further, Cornell’s literal foundation – its present-day land holdings and educational outposts — span the length of New York State and include spaces in both Washington D.C. and Maine. Some of the communities affected by Cornell’s physical footprint are currently embroiled in struggles to maintain land in their homelands.[10] Communities upon whose land Cornell buildings and programs reside in our eyes have equivalent status to those Nations affected by the Morrill Act processes and their traditional territories and histories and were investigated using similar methods.

Our research to date demonstrates the fluid nature of our knowledge—new discoveries, implications, and connections will likely expand this list in the future as we continue to uncover the role of Indigenous dispossession in the university’s history. In particular, our focus moving forward has shifted to locating those land parcels where the university retains mineral rights, as well as any communities impacted by soldiers schooled through the military training requirement for male Cornell students that was mandated in the Morrill Act. These next steps may be particularly difficult as the Cornell central administration has informed the CU&ID committee that it will not supply a list of all of Cornell’s present-day landholdings to the group.

The Diplomatic Outreach Process

To begin contacting the affected nations, we drew upon formal and informal sources to collect physical and email addresses for the leadership of each community. For federally recognized nations, contact information was drawn from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Tribal Leaders Directory and corroborated through individual nation websites.[11] For others, the most up-to-date contact information was gathered from a variety of sources. Some communities maintain websites and social media, while contact information for others had to be drawn from petitions and letters of intent to petition for recognition filed with the federal government. For some smaller communities, especially in California, this information could only be found readily available in Tribal consultation lists developed by local Cultural Resource Management (CRM) firms.

As we determined Nation and community addresses, we gradually sent out paper letters to each.  Since these letters represented program-to-Nation diplomacy, we addressed them to the principal leaders in each Nation.  We elected to use paper letters as they provided an element of formality that is lacking in electronic communication.  In several instances, our first letters were returned as undeliverable by the Post Office.  In those cases, we searched for additional addresses and mailed new letters.  In relatively few cases, we resorted to email communication when letter deliveries to several addresses failed. We recognize that using paper letters alone may not have gained the attention of all addressees, but we hope that publication of the list of affected communities will provide another way of notifying leaders and communities of their entanglement with Cornell.

We recognize the research skills, logistical efforts, and attention to detail of numerous faculty, staff, and students associated with Cornell’s AIISP whose dedicated labor made the diplomatic outreach efforts possible.  In particular, we thank Karishma Bottari, Dusti Bridges, Kurt Jordan, Leslie Logan, Ben Maracle, Ula Piasta-Mansfield, Troy Richardson, and Annabel Young.

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[1] Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land Grab Universities: Expropriated Indigenous Land is the Foundation of the Land Grant University System,” High Country News, March 30, 2020, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities.

[2] Robert Lee, “Morrill Act of 1862 Indigenous Land Parcels Database,” https://github.com/HCN-Digital-Projects/landgrabu-data, High Country News, March 2020.

[3] “Tribal Ceded Lands,” USDA Forest Service Geospatial Service and Technology Center, 2018, http://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/datasets.php.

[4] For any institutions or individuals who wish to engage in these processes themselves, we have provided detailed instructions in the notes. To generate the initial map, Bridges first pulled CSV and shapefile data from the database provided by HCN. To assign the attributes listed in the CSV file (which listed attributes such as the University involved, the Patent date, amount paid, etc.) to the polygons representing each parcel within the shapefile, Bridges performed a table join using a unique object key within both files.

(using QGIS) Processing > toolbox > Join Attributes by Field Value > select the shapefile as input layer 1 and the CSV file as input layer 2 > set the table field for both inputs as OBJECTID_1 > set the join type as one-to-one > click run

To separate out the Cornell parcels from the rest, Bridges selected within the parcels shapefile by attribute, resulting in a new shapefile that only contained Cornell University Parcels.

(using QGIS) right click on layer > open attribute table > select/filter features using form > in the University field, type and Select Cornell university > click select features > close > right click on the layer in the layers panel > export > save selected features as > set the format to ESRI Shapefile > use the button with three dots to locate the file you wish to save to and name the file > make sure the CRS is correct for your project > deselect any unwanted fields > make sure the add saved file to map box is checked > ok

(note: it is also possible to use the Extract by Attribute function in the processing toolbox to complete this task, but these extra steps allow one to check the attribute table before generating a new shapefile from the selection. This can help catch any features that would be excluded due to typing and spelling errors, especially when dealing with a large amount of qualitative data.)

To add treaty boundaries to the map, Bridges pulled the “Tribal Ceded Lands” file from the USDA Forest Service Geospatial Service and Technology Center. To reduce the clutter on the map to treaties involved in Cornell’s parcels, Bridges extracted a shapefile of only the relevant treaties.

(using QGIS) Processing > toolbox > Extract by Location > select the Tribal Ceded Lands file in the “Extract features from” drop-down menu > select intersect under the “Where the features (geometric predicate)” heading > in the drop-down menu under “By comparing to the features from,” select the file containing the parcels you are studying > click run to generate the new file > this will create a temporary layer that you can save once you’ve double-checked the results (alternatively, navigate to the desired folder and name the file prior to running the extraction)

[5] Malloy, Kerri J. “Remembrance and renewal at Tuluwat: Returning to the center of the world.” In Remembrance and Forgiveness, pp. 20-33. Routledge, 2020.

[6] Native Land, Native Land Digital, 2021, native-land.ca.

[7] See https://native-land.ca/resources/ for a brief explanation of their methods.

[8] From the API page of native-lands.ca, (https://native-land.ca/resources/api-docs/), right click on “Territories” under the Files heading, and click save link. Save the link to a local file. The file will save as a .JSON. To add the file to your map in QGIS, navigate to the add vector layer window and add the .JSON file.

(using QGIS) layer > add layer > add vector layer > vector dataset(s) = (the indigenous territories JSON you just saved) > add

The individual territories are added to the map, but are not classified. To mimic the presentation of the Native Lands interface, change the display settings by right clicking on the layer in the layers panel.

(using QGIS) properties > symbology tab > select “categorized” in the drop-down menu at the top > select “name” in the drop-down menu for column > click on the symbol box to open the symbol selector box > set the opacity to 30% > click ok > click the classify button > click ok if a high number of classes warning appears > click ok to save the settings and exit the properties window

Your map should now look similar to the native lands site. Each parcel now intersects with one or more of the traditional territory polygons. One can now perform a spatial join to add these attributes to the parcel data, but we found that to be an unnecessary step when it came to this analysis.

[9] Merriam, C. Hart. C. Hart Merriam papers. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://lccn.loc.gov/mm82032698.

[10] For example, see Wolkin, Kenneth, and Joseph Nevins. “‘No sovereign nation, no reservation’: producing the new colonialism in Cayuga Count(r)y.” Territory, Politics, Governance 6, no. 1 (2018): 42-60.

[11] U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribal Leaders Directory, https://www.bia.gov/tribal-leaders-directory

Originally released October 7, 2023.

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:

Prof. Kurt Jordan, Cornell University & Indigenous Dispossession (CU&ID) Committee Co-chair: kj21@cornell.edu

Leslie Logan, CU&ID Committee Co-chair: ll88@cornell.edu

 

Cornell University’s Land Grab Impacts 251 Tribes 

Diplomatic Outreach Efforts Inform Native Nations of Cornell’s Connection to Extensive Dispossession of Indigenous Lands and Resources

(GAYOGO̱HÓ:NǪˀ HOMELANDS, ITHACA, New York, October 7, 2023) — More than 160 years ago the federal Land Grant College Act of 1862, also known as the Morill Act, paved the way for Cornell University to secure rights to nearly one million acres of land. Cornell’s gain accompanied widespread losses to more than 250 tribes in terms of land and resources as Indigenous peoples were dispossessed and removed from their homelands through federal and state actions backed by force and fraud. In homage to Indigenous Peoples’ Day (October 9, 2023) the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program’s Cornell University & Indigenous Dispossession (CU&ID) Project released a list of 251 Native nations tied to Cornell University’s land grab.

The Gayogo̱hó:nǫ^Ɂ (Cayuga) are among the affected tribes as Cornell University’s sprawling 745-acre campus sits on the ancestral homelands of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ^Ɂ. While Cornell’s local and regional landholding acquisitions used a process separate from the Morrill Act, the legislation enabled the founding of the University and generated funds for local land purchases.

For context of the breadth of impact to Indigenous Nations, there are 574 federally recognized tribes and another 63 state-recognized tribes in the Unites States. The Association on American Indian Affairs estimates there are about 400 other Indigenous communities that have not been acknowledged by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Cornell, one institution of higher education alone, impacted almost one-quarter of these groups across the country—not just tribes known to occupy New York State and the Northeast but also extending to the west coast. The wide swath of Cornell’s dispossession ties stretch from Alberta, Canada with the Siksika Nation to the Akwesasne Mohawk territory in New York and Quebec, to the Arapaho of Wind River in Wyoming. The full list of 251 affected tribes can be found at: https://blogs.cornell.edu/cornelluniversityindigenousdispossession/impacted-communities/

The Cornell University & Indigenous Dispossession Project’s efforts began in June 2020 in response to the High Country News article “Land Grab Universities” by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone. Lee and Ahtone’s article catalyzed further research and the associated website lists the 52 universities that benefitted from the expropriation of more than 11 million acres of Indigenous land and millions of dollars in resources https://www.landgrabu.org/

Out of the 52 land grant universities, Cornell University was the greatest beneficiary of all, having received federal “scrip” (vouchers) for almost one million acres of Indigenous land—the most land allocated to any university. Land in 15 present-day states eventually was claimed using Cornell scrip. Cornell sold all of its Morrill Act lands by 1938, but the revenues from these sales contributed to Cornell’s endowment, built many of the most iconic buildings on campus, and provided most of Cornell’s operating funds for the university’s first 30 years. According to the last available University financial report with information on Morrill Act revenues (2005), the principal fund value was reported as $53.3 million, providing an annual interest payout of $2.58 million in unrestricted funds. In 2023 dollars, the payout amount is approximately $4.0 million per year.

The High Country News study stated that land-grant universities have a moral responsibility to own up to their actions as they have fundamentally profited (and continue to profit) from Indigenous dispossession. To address Cornell’s responsibility, the CU&ID committee committed to diplomatic outreach efforts to inform the leadership of affected Indigenous Nations about the connection between Cornell’s establishment and their homelands. This was a long-term research effort that sought to determine the present-day descendants of the original treaty signees, as well as other groups whose lands had been taken by other means. The CU&ID committee conceived of the list as including both recognized and unrecognized groups, as well as Nations that had been displaced across international borders. The diplomatic outreach process was completed in July 2023. To date, members of the committee have had dialogue with approximately 10% of the dispossessed tribes.

Prof. Kurt Jordan, co-chair of the CU&ID committee said, “One goal of the committee’s outreach effort is to generate and engage a broad-based coalition of Indigenous governments. We hope to speak with many more of the 251 impacted Nations on the list.”

Prof. Troy Richardson, Tuscarora/Saponi, Director of the AIISP and members of the CU&ID committee, originally formulated the diplomatic outreach to each affected Indigenous Nation and the Dispossession blog as actions for accountability. Richardson noted, “The individual letters to the leadership of the respective Indigenous Nations sought to open direct engagements with each Nation. The outreach effort was in part meant to facilitate an unmediated discussion wherein Indigenous Nation leadership could express the interests and concerns of their people to the Cornell Administration and convey in their own terms what the ‘next steps’ might entail.”

AIISP intends to compile the results of these and ongoing discussions with Native communities and present them to the Cornell administration.

Leslie Logan, Seneca, co-chair of the CU&ID committee and associate director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program said, “When you have 251 tribes dispossessed by an elite institution, you have significant impact. We encourage Native Nations and leaders to contact Cornell University about issues they would like to see addressed. The committee is eager to engage with Native peoples and explore how we can best support the interests and concerns of affected Native communities.”

More information on the Indigenous Dispossession Project can be found on the AIISP website https://blogs.cornell.edu/cornelluniversityindigenousdispossession/.

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For a link to PDF and Word Document versions of the press release, please visit here.

Good Intentions are Not Good Relations

Grounding the Terms of Debt and Redress at Land Grab Universities

by Meredith Alberta Palmer (Ska:rù:rę’/Tuscarora)

Published June 21, 2023

Abstract

As part of a violent project US imperial expansion into Indigenous lands, the 1862 Morrill Act endowed and continues to accrue lasting benefits for Land Grant/Grab Universities (LGUs). The last three years have seen a surge in nationwide attention and mobilization for redress and calculations of debts owed to Indigenous Peoples for the land dealings of the 52 original LGUs. This article intervenes in the LGU question in two parts. First, I demonstrate culpability of LGUs by illustrating how the Morrill Act was part of a set of US imperial policies that expanded jurisdiction into Indigenous territories through violent and imperial acts of dispossession which are maintained today. Second, I argue that any terms of debt and redress for this dispossession must be framed within Indigenous and Indigenous feminist analytics of land and territory. Restitution cannot occur on the same terms as dispossession and instead must be built through repairing and maintaining good relations within specific Indigenous protocols. These interventions inform my concluding analysis of university administrations’ responses to growing advocacy around LGUs, with a focus on Cornell University where I am situated as a researcher.

Read the full article here.

Originally published in the Letter to the Editor section of The Chronicle of Higher Education on August 30, 2022. The original publication can be found here on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website.

To the Editor:

In April 2020, you reported on the “land grabs” lodged in the 1862 Morrill Act. That legislation gave birth to the Land Grant system, endowed by the sale of Indian homelands repurposed as ‘public domain.’ Some Land Grant institutions acknowledge this redistributive windfall and seek equitable solutions with their Indian benefactors. The Universities of South Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and California stand out. Others wait on the sidelines.

The Supreme Court has held, according to Harvard Law School professor Joseph Singer, “that treaties with Indian nations must be interpreted as the Indians themselves would have understood them, and that any ambiguities must be interpreted liberally to preserve tribal sovereignty and property rights.” To premise public ownership on broken treaties and then privatize these lands to endow a Land Grant mission is unscrupulous. It is foreign to any moral fiber in that mission.

Nearly three quarters of Morrill Act lands came from Indian Treaty lands. Treaties are the highest law of the land, yet numerous Indian treaties were unilaterally gutted by the Federal government. Washington’s nonchalance over these wrongs invites concern. Property title established through treaty abrogation is repulsive.

Our nation is constitutionally committed to property rights. As home buyers know, titles claimed by a third party are legally defective and unmarketable. Buyers are responsible for examining title defects and notifying sellers. Educational endowments sourced from defective “public domain” — confiscated homelands of unwilling sellers — are horrendous. Both law and conscience view the taking of others’ possessions as theft.

We who have benefited from Land Grant endowments and entitlements must express these truths to our alma maters. Millions of acres of indigenous lands were taken from 240 tribes in 24 states under the Morrill Act; this occurred before Washington terminated its hundred-year-old Indian treaty tradition. According to Professor Singer, “Limiting tribal sovereignty or harming tribal property without tribal consent is an act of conquest.”

How in good conscience can any Land Grant beneficiary wait on the sidelines? Land acknowledgements are a first step. It’s time to walk the talk. Well done is better than well said, a learned elder once observed.

Charles Geisler
Professor Emeritus
Cornell University

Jarrid J. Whitney (Six Nations Cayuga; Wolf Clan)
Former Chair of the Cornell Native American Alumni Association

Frederic Wien
Dalhousie University

Meredith Alberta Palmer (Tuscarora, Six Nations)
Postdoc, University at Buffalo

Lousie Fortmann
University of California at Berkeley

Andrew Curley (Navajo Nation)
University of Arizona

Christopher Dunn
Executive Director, Cornell Botanic Gardens

by Professor Jon Parmenter

Cornell University, chartered in 1865 as New York State’s designated recipient of federal land-grant university status, received approximately ten percent of the acreage allocated nationally by the Morrill Act of 1862.  By 1900, nearly one-third of the total Morrill Act land-grant revenues generated by all the states had accrued to Cornell University.  In March 2020, the High Country News published “Land-Grab Universities” (hereafter “LGU report”), an award-winning investigative report coauthored by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone that detailed for the first time how the Morrill Act funded land-grant universities with expropriated Indigenous land.  Increased public awareness of the linkages between Indigenous dispossession and the monies that built land-grant universities prompted many of these institutions to begin reckoning with their origins in new and interesting ways. Given Cornell University’s exceptional status within the broader history of the Morrill Act, this essay assesses the University’s response to date in the context of its peer land-grant institutions as well as that of the emerging national conversation concerning the imperative of redress for all manner of inequities associated with the historical financing of American higher education.

General Responses

Within a month of the original publication of “Land-Grab Universities, Professor Stephen M. Gavazzi of Ohio State University published an op-ed in Forbes, entitled: “The Original Sin of Our Nation’s First Public Universities.”  Noting the analogy between the findings of the LGU report and the national dialogue regarding atonement for slavery, Gavazzi argued that the evidence uncovered by Lee and Ahtone obligated land-grant universities to undertake both contrition – expressions of remorse and offers of apology – and reparations.  Drawing a distinction between the case of slavery (and/or the slave trade), in which identification of the recipients of an apology (or reparations) may not always be obvious, Gavazzi pointed out that the documentation provided by the LGU report made clear not only the amounts and location of former Indigenous land allocated by the Morrill Act, but also the identity of the tribal nations from whom the land was taken – often by what he describes as “lopsided” treaties, the threat of violence, or “brute force.”  Gavazzi, one of the first to respond publicly to the LGU report, has been, as we will see, one of the most active and consistent advocates for meaningful reconciliation undertaken by land-grant universities whose endowments rested on profits taken from the ancestral homelands of some 250 Indigenous nations.

The next broadly-focused response to the LGU report appeared in a scholarly forum entitled “Reflections on the Land-Grab Universities Project,” published in the Spring 2021 issue of Native American and Indigenous Studies.[1]  The case of Cornell University loomed large in this forum, with eight of the fourteen essays addressing aspects of the institution’s outsized role in this history as “the beneficiary of the greatest endowment of wealth by far from Indigenous lands and/or scrip distributed by the Morrill Act.”[2]  Among the more significant themes evoked by this forum were:

• the challenges posed by the “Land Grab Universities” findings in the context of historically persistent narratives of progress surrounding land-grant universities[3]
• the power of the mapping techniques employed by Lee and Ahtone for representing the extent and nature of benefits accruing to particular institutions from particular acts of state-sponsored dispossession[4]
• discussion of the long-term, intergenerational impacts of deprivation on Indigenous nations in juxtaposition to the spectacular financial growth of land-grant university endowments over time[5]
• the arresting and disturbing claim that land-grant universities “consistently perform worse than non-Morrill universities” in regard to both enrollment and graduation rates of Indigenous students[6]
• calls for long-term-oriented acts of atonement and accountability on the part of land-grant universities that align with the ongoing nature of benefits flowing from the Morrill Act to their respective endowments.[7]

In the Fall of 2021, the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University convened “Campuses and Colonialism,” a symposium intended to promote the kind of serious intellectual and institutional accounting for complicity with settler colonialism[8] that has been witnessed in recent years with regard to slavery and the slave trade.  Citing the example of Northwestern University’s response to the role of John Evans, one of its founders, in the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado Territory as an exception, the organizers of “Campuses and Colonialism” highlighted the ongoing disparity between the impressive and heavily capitalized projects undertaken with reference to slavery at institutions such as Georgetown University, Yale University, and Harvard University and those relating to past acts of violence toward and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.  Though not concerned with the Morrill Act per se, this symposium marked a significant turning point in raising awareness of long-overlooked linkages between settler colonialism and the development of higher education in the United States.

Stephen Gavazzi’s research team at Ohio State University commenced publication of the preliminary results of their activities in November 2021.  Crediting the LGU report for having blown “the doors off the central narrative surrounding the foundation of America’s original Land Grant [sic] universities,” the authors discussed steps undertaken at Ohio State for opening a dialogue on reparative actions to be undertaken in response to the dispossession and sale of tribal lands issued by the Morrill Act to fund the establishment of the University.  Gavazzi and John Low elaborated further on the reckoning underway at Ohio State in a Spring 2022 online essay published by the American Association of University Professors, in which they discussed: the significance of land acknowledgments focused not only on lands currently occupied by land-grant universities but also on the lands taken from tribal nations and sold to fund institutional endowments, examples of programs to provide financial assistance to Native students in various states, partnerships between 1862 Morrill Act institutions and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) granted land-grant status by the 1994 Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act, and the need to commit to the “long haul of decolonization” – commencing with a call for all land-grant universities to provide free tuition for Native American students without regard for residency.  Finally, in April 2022, the Ohio State research team discussed their preliminary findings derived from interviews with representatives of tribal nations impacted by the particular federal treaty surrenders of land provided by Congress to the State of Ohio to underwrite the establishment of Ohio State University.  The data obtained yielded an extensive catalogue of ongoing harms experienced by tribal nations as a result of earlier losses of land, indicating the “devastating and unceasing impact” of prior dispossession “on virtually all aspects of life” in affected Indigenous communities.  Gavazzi’s team underscored once more in this article the imperative of land-grant institutions making enduring commitments to restitution rather than converting the circumstances into a “feel-good” exercise for the university or offering merely a “one and done” experience.

Responses from Other Land-Grant Institutions

Prior to considering Cornell University’s response to the information first brought to light by the LGU report, we will survey representative examples of responses from the national cohort of fifty-two “1862” Morrill Act land-grant universities.  Notably, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, which serves as an overarching organization for institutions chartered under federal land-grant legislation in 1862, 1890, and 1994, has issued a statement of land acknowledgment that addresses the role of Indigenous dispossession in the history of the Morrill Act.  Yet at present the mandate of its Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is framed in general terms, containing no specific mention of the Morrill Act in its discussions of advancing racial justice and equity.[9]

South Dakota State University – The Wokini Initiative

In January 2017, over three years before the publication of the LGU report, South Dakota State University President Barry H. Dunn published an institutional white paper outlining the university’s commitment to better serve the Lakota and Dakota residents of South Dakota in light of the annual income accruing to the University from treaty-guaranteed lands taken from those nations under the auspices of the Morrill Act and the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887.  Employing the Lakota term for “a new life,” or “a new beginning,” the Wokini Initiative is based on a simple premise: to devote the approximately $600,000 annual income from 160,000 acres of land given to the University by the Morrill Act to reparations (described by Dunn as “strategic re-investment” in the form of scholarships and programs aimed to support tribal members as students) and financing for a new American Indian Student Center.  The Wokini Initiative maintains an extensive online presence and publishes a newsletter. Its mission statement emphasizes three principal goals: 1) to enhance cultural programming and support for American Indian students, 2) to offer Wokini scholarships for students who are tribally enrolled or have descent through a federally recognized tribe in the United States including Alaskan Natives, and 3) to enhance research and outreach partnerships with tribes, tribal colleges and other tribal organizations.

University of Wisconsin-Madison – Our Shared Future

From its origins in a sign erected on campus in June 2019 recognizing the University’s land as the ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk Nation, this endeavor at the University of Wisconsin has grown into a multifaceted institutional commitment to respect the inherent sovereignty of the Ho-Chunk and other First Nations residing in what is now the State of Wisconsin and to promote deep consideration of the shared past and present of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Teejop (a.k.a. Madison).  Significantly, Our Shared Future is described as:

“a process, not a land acknowledgment or something to recite.  It is a collective act of moving from ignorance to awareness; an educational framework for posing questions; and an opportunity to celebrate the Ho-Chunk people, as well as learn about the hard truths of our histories with them.  It is a challenge to educate ourselves and each other, and create a better future together.”

Our Shared Future has hosted symposia in 2019 and 2021 on the anniversary of the September 15, 1832 Treaty in which the Ho-Chunk Nation ceded lands (including the present-day City of Madison) to the United States with the goal of fostering improved understanding of these nation-to-nation agreements and how they continue to structure relations between the Ho-Chunk and the United States to the present day.  The University began to fly the Ho-Chunk flag on its campus in November 2021 and the website maintains an active blog linking media coverage, events calendar, and learning resources.

Ohio State University – Stepping Out, Stepping Up

Formed in December 2020 with extensive support from both internal and external grants, this initiative – led by Gavazzi but engaging a large number of scholars across the OSU system – is based on a call for Ohio State University, as an 1862 Morrill land-grant institution, to “Step Out” of comfort zones and “Step Up” to the responsibilities that come with the massive transfer of wealth from tribal nations to the University and to address challenging questions with regard to Ohio State’s relationship to contemporary Indigenous communities.  Resources posted in the online blog include links to published scholarship, videos, interviews, public events, and a speaker series.  Organized around the question of “Why Land-Grant Truth?” the Ohio State research team describes its purpose as two-fold: 1) joining with the descendants of tribal nations affected by the various land surrenders that contributed to the founding of Ohio State, and 2) advocating alongside these nations to repair the harm caused by these past acts of dispossession through means including “social and economic restitution.”

University of Minnesota – Toward Recognition and University-Tribal Healing (TRUTH) Project

This project originated from a series of resolutions written by the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council calling on the University of Minnesota to improve itself as a neighbor to the eleven tribal nations who share geography with state residents.  Adopting the unique approach of grant-supported, community-led participatory research, the TRUTH project enables tribal community members to tell, in their own words, the history of relations between their nations and the University of Minnesota.  The project website hosts a detailed Project History, linking the questions posed to the data provided by the LGU report.  The TRUTH project organizers emphasize that their initial goal – the revealing of truth concerning the nature and extent of the impact of Morrill Act-related dispossession in Minnesota – represents only the beginning of subsequent conversations to be held about how to “right the decades of atrocities that have been inflicted on Native Americans and their respective Tribal Nations at the hands of the State of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota.”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

On April 19, 2022, President L. Rafael Reif of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published an open letter to the University community entitled “The Indigenous History and Future of MIT.”  President Reif discussed what he had learned from visits to a class on the “Indigenous History of MIT” over the prior two semesters and announced an extensive series of institutional steps undertaken to “advance Indigenous scholarship and support our Indigenous community.”  These included: creation of a tenure-track faculty line in Native American Studies, expanded support for a visiting professors and scholars program, a research project aimed at documenting the role of former MIT President Francis Amasa Walker in advancing the reservation system during his prior tenure as federal Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1871-72, and enhancing scholarship support for MIT’s Indigenous Languages Initiative, which aims to train students from Native communities confront by endangerment of their Native languages.  In keeping with the precedent set by the Wokini Initiative, President Reif also noted that an amount of money equivalent to the annual disbursements made from the State of Massachusetts to MIT (as interest payments on the endowment principal created by the sale of former Indigenous land under the auspices the Morrill Act) would be made available to support Indigenous community efforts on the MIT campus.  A campus media report indicated the influence of the “Indigenous History of MIT” course in promoting the wide-ranging institutional expression of obligation to Indigenous students and communities as a result of the benefits yielded by the Morrill Act.  MIT Fellow David S. Lowry was quoted in the campus news article pointing out that the truth-telling associated with discussions of past injustices is often read as antagonism but is actually better understood as a means of developing a more cohesive sense of community through improved understanding of different groups’ historical experiences.

University of California-Berkeley – Native American Opportunity Program

On April 18, 2022 the University of California announced that in-state system-wide tuition and student service fees for California students from federally recognized Native American tribes would be fully covered under grants or scholarships.  The UC Native American Opportunity Plan represented the latest development from the University of California, another Morrill Act institution that made an early response to the findings of the LGU report by hosting a two-part symposium in September and October 2020, publishing a 73-page report summarizing the findings of the symposium, and maintaining an online presence detailing how the expropriation of 150,000 acres of Indigenous land that funded the University of California is tied directly to the state’s uniquely troubled history of dispossession and acts of genocide against its Indigenous population during and after the California Gold Rush.  The published report includes a five-page list of recommended actions, organized under a general rubric that calls upon the University of California leadership to work directly in a transparent, collective manner with affected tribal communities to: 1)identify and pursue actions that meet the prioritized needs of these communities, and 2) to dedicate the necessary financial resources to deliver on these actions. In June 2022, an article by Hayden Royster in California (published by the University of California Alumni Association) asked the question of what Berkeley should do with the information that its origins are linked to land stolen from Indigenous communities.  In an interview response to Royster, historian Robert Lee (an alumnus of the University of California and an author the original LGU report) responded by noting that what the University of California (and, by implication, other 1862 land-grant universities) must not do is treat the Morrill Act as part of a distant history.  Lee pointed out that the Morrill Act, as a living piece of legislation, continues to generate endowment returns on the original investments derived from former Indigenous lands.  Those returns, intended “for perpetuity” by the original Morrill Act also generate, as Lee indicated, “multiplier effects” that need to be considered in any discussion of redress for affected Indigenous communities.

Cornell University – “Commitment to Indigenous Communities and Nations in North America”

Launched in March 2022, Cornell University’s “Commitment to Indigenous Communities and Nations in North America” webpage is accessed via a click-through link on the University’s Land Grant Affairs website.[10]  The visual content of the page as it appears on-screen is oriented toward the present, depicting current faculty, alumni, and research and extension projects.  Scrolling down, one finds the text of the University’s official Land Acknowledgment (adopted in May 2021), which refers exclusively to the University’s location on the ancestral homelands of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ (Cayuga) Nation.  A separate button for “History” then appears, which must be clicked to view a brief (approximately 800-word) narrative produced by University staff.  This section includes the following statement:

In addition to our relationship with the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ homeland, as a result of the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, Cornell was among 52 land-grant universities that were beneficiaries of land scrip from the U.S. federal government. The government awarded land scrip to states relative to a state’s population, and thus New York received the largest amount. We recognize that lands distributed to states to support the founding of universities were previously taken by the federal government from Indigenous Nations by force and fraud that included treaty violations, treaties signed under duress, or direct appropriation without compensation – and that the subsequent sales of these lands seeded endowments, including Cornell’s. Historians, including Prof. Jon Parmenter at Cornell, have explained that, from its very founding, the federal government was engaged in a practice of extinguishing Native title, thereby dispossessing Native people of their lands and natural resources for the benefit of American settler institutions and individuals.

As the largest recipient of proceeds from appropriated Indigenous lands from the 1862 Morrill Act and as the institution that accrued the greatest financial benefit from that land, we acknowledge Cornell’s central place in this history. Indeed, the history of the Morrill Act is more complex than commonly known. As more information continues to emerge, we will continue to honor and present this history as part of our land grant origins. Faculty in AIISP are conducting ongoing research into this important aspect of the university’s history.

The historical narrative then moves to a discussion of Cornell’s involvement with Agricultural Extension Education for New York-based tribal communities in the 1920s, the origins of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program in 1983, and concludes with a description of two Native American-themed residence halls at the University. The online viewer is then encouraged to “collapse” this historical narrative with the click of another button and scroll further down to brief subsections discussing Education, Research, and Engagement.

What is striking about Cornell’s “Commitment” page is its overt focus on the past and present and contrasting silence about the future.  Considered in light of the other land-grant institutional responses to the LGU report discussed above, Cornell’s falls short in terms of offering any discernible, tangible institutional commitment to any kind of redress for the benefits it received under the Morrill Act of 1862 beyond a pledge to “continue to honor and present this history as part of our land grant origins.”  To be sure, the text of the “History” section of the “Commitment” page (and the text on the Land Grant Affairs homepage) contains accurate language acknowledging Cornell’s place in the history of Morrill Act dispossession, but we are left to wonder about the nature and/or extent of any future commitments undertaken by the institution to address issues related to that history.

I will conclude with a few observations and suggestions for consideration.

1. We have known for almost 120 years[11] that Cornell University is the largest beneficiary of any of the nation’s land-grant colleges from lands distributed by the Morrill Act of 1862. Over fifty years ago, an Indigenous Cornellian (Roger Dube ’74) pointed out at an April 1972 public conference on the Cornell campus the institution’s historical profiting from timber harvested on former Indigenous lands in Wisconsin. What more information does the University need to “emerge” in order to move from mere acknowledgment of that fact to effective institutional action on the question of providing redress for the Indigenous nations affected by the land cessions that fueled Ezra Cornell’s renowned speculative venture? Also of note here are the trenchant questions raised by Cornell University postdoctoral scholar Dr. Meredith Alberta Palmer in a September 2021 lecture concerning the form(s) such redress should take.
2. Cornell University’s current official land acknowledgment statement, while commendable in addressing the University’s relationship to the ancestral Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ land on which it is built, fails to acknowledge the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Dakota, Ho-Chunk,[12] Kansa (Kaw), and Osage nations with which the University directly grew its endowment from 1868 to 1935 (to say nothing of the ongoing impact of those funds on the growth of the endowment since 1935). As such, it is an inadequate representation of institutional history and should be revised.

   

3. Recent scholarship has indicated the role of public higher-education funding initiated by the 1862 Morrill Act in the United States’s replacement of the United Kingdom as the world’s primary economic power over the latter three decades of the nineteenth century. Cornell University and fifty-one other land-grant universities converted the resource of former Indigenous land allocated by the federal government into human capital that became a powerful driver of persistent, self-sustaining financial growth.[13]  We now also know more about the relationship between past land loss and the intergenerational trauma experienced by many contemporary Native American populations, and more particularly how its effects are compounded over time.[14]  As Randall Akee reminds us, “[d]eprivation accumulates over generations.”[15]  In light of these facts, it is imperative that Cornell University move beyond its current response to recent revelations concerning the role of Indigenous dispossession in the unmatched revenues the institution obtained as a result of the Morrill Act of 1862.  Simply promulgating an incomplete land acknowledgment and a non-committal expression of “commitment” is insufficient,[16] particularly in light of the responses already underway at peer land-grant institutions – none of which, it must be emphasized, benefited to as great a degree as did Cornell University from the Morrill Act.
4. A review of the “Activity Timeline” on the introductory page of the Cornell University and Indigenous Dispossession Committee website indicates that since the publication of the LGU report in March 2020, the general thrust of the response at Cornell has come from faculty, staff, and students, with administrators manifesting a comparative “lack of substantive action toward redress” if not outright refusals of requests for information and support from the Committee. It is time for this dynamic to change.  As the examples from Cornell’s peer institutions demonstrate, meaningful responses from land-grant universities to the question of the Morrill Act’s grounding on Indigenous dispossession require substantial investment (both monetary and intellectual) from leadership. Cornell University cannot continue to permit its institutional response to the LGU report to be limited to what Tristen Ahtone described in June 2022 as the efforts of “small groups of people [at various land-grant institutions] who are trying to do what they think is the right thing.”[17]
5. If there is a silver lining to being late, one advantage that the Cornell University administration now possesses is an emerging body of “best practices” that can be gleaned from the institutional responses of other land-grant institutions to date. As the exceptional beneficiary of federal largesse taken from Indigenous nations and distributed by the Morrill Act of 1862, Cornell University has become, 160 years later, a wealthy, powerful institution.  With that power comes responsibility.  It is time for Cornell to do better.

 

Jon Parmenter is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University.  During the 2022-23 academic year he will be a faculty fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, focusing on the theme of Repair.  In Fall 2022, he will teach SHUM/AMST/HIST 4674/6674, “Dispossession, Truth, and Reconciliation.”

[1] Edited by K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Kelly McDonough, Jean M. O’Brien, and Robert Warrior, Volume 8, no.1, pp.89-182.

[2] See ibid, pp.90 (quote), 95, 108, 114, 123, 138n2, 145-50, 181.

[3] David Roediger, “Morrill Issues and Academic Liberalism,” ibid, 96; Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy and Amanda R. Tachine, “Myths, Erasure, and Violence: The Immoral Triad of the Morrill Act,” ibid, 139-42.

[4] Mark Palmer, “Drawing a Line from their Institution: One Origin Story of Indigenous GIS Design,” ibid, 109; Marcel Brousseau, “Unrefutable Responsibility: Mapping the Seeds of Settler Futurity and Seeding the Maps of Indigenous Futurity,” ibid, 112-13.

[5] Randall Akee, “Stolen Lands and Stolen Opportunities,” ibid, 124.

[6] Donna Feir and Maggie E.C. Jones, “Repaying a Debt? The Performance of Morrill Act University Beneficiaries as Measured by Native Enrollment and Graduation Rates,” ibid, 131.

[7] Theresa Stewart-Ambo, “The Future is in the Past: How Land-Grab Universities Can Shape the Future of Higher Education,” ibid, 166-67; Meredith McCoy, Roopike Risam, and Jennifer Guiliano, “The Future of Land-Grab Universities,” ibid, 169-70.

[8] See also Alyssa Mt. Pleasant and Stephen Kantrowicz, “Campuses, Colonialism, and Land Grabs before Morrill,” ibid, 151-56.

[9] 2021 APLU Annual Report, 11-14.  Available online https://www.aplu.org/library/2021-aplu-annual-report/File. Accessed August 8, 2022.

[10] It can also be accessed via the “About Cornell” link on the University’s homepage: https://www.cornell.edu/about/ (accessed August 9, 2022).

[11] Samuel D. Halliday, A History of the Federal Land Grant of July 2, 1862 For the Establishment of Colleges of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, with a Full Account of the Land Scrip Allotted to the State of New York and Afterward Given to Cornell University [(1905); 2^nd ed., Ithaca: Cornell University, 1923], 46-47.

[12] Since publication of my initial summary of the tribal nations whose lands were directly managed by Cornell University to grow the endowment, I have learned that the University also located parcels within the lands ceded by the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) Nation in the treaty of November 1, 1837. See https://treaties.okstate.edu/treaties/treaty-with-the-winnebago-1837.-(0498) (accessed August 8, 2022).

[13] Isaac Ehrlich, Adam Cook, and Yong Yin, “What Accounts for the US Ascendancy to Economic Superpower by the Early Twentieth Century? The Morrill Act – Human Capital Hypothesis,” Journal of Human Capital 12.2 (2018): 233-81.

[14] William E. Hartmann et al, “American Indian Historical Trauma: Anticolonial Prescriptions for Healing, Resilience, and Survivance,” American Psychologist 74.1 (2019): 6-19.

[15] “Stolen Lands and Stolen Opportunities,” 124.

[16] Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang, “Beyond Land Acknowledgment in Settler Institutions,” Social Text 39.1 (March 2021): 21-46.

[17] Quoted in Royster, “This Land is Their Land.”

This article has been republished with permission by TheNaturalFarmer.org.  This article was published as a part of TheNaturalFarmer.org’s spring 2022 issue.  You can read the whole issue here.

 

by Dr. Charles Geisler

I live on land in upstate New York awarded to Revolutionary War veteran, Izaac Doty, for his military service. I also live on traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hónǫ’ (the Cayuga Nation), a member of the Iroquois Confederacy that predated the Revolution. I purchased my land with income from Cornell University, a Land Grant institution. I tend to think I own this parcel free and clear, yet it is laden with equity issues and moral contingencies that require further truth-telling.

Not infrequently, our land belongs to us because our ancestors claimed territories belonging to its Indigenous inhabitants. In pursuit of profit, power, and dominion, Europeans annexed what they found. In dispossessing others they thought uncivilized, most of our settler forebearers believed that they were doing the right thing. But were they?

In this piece, I’ll comb through the deeply vexing side of land ownership as we practice it. Not many generations ago, Indigenous people partook in a robust spiritual tenure with all quarters of this continent and strong possessory ties of their own making. A lifequake occurred when European culture met theirs. We gradually took their territories and used law, religion, military brawn, and sustained conceit to turn justice into a juggernaut. I will summarize, all too briefly, the settler occupation that unfolded piecemeal across the United States. This will include recent reporting about Cornell University and its sister Land Grant Universities, accused of complicity in a government land grab extending to almost eleven million acres of Indigenous homelands.

Pulverizing Indigenous Lands

The original British colonies sought and gained independence from the motherland in 1783. Thereafter, they mimicked in many ways what had been Royal Charters, land grants, treaties, Eurocentric notions of property and ‘discovery’ as justifications for usurping ‘vacant’ land incidentally occupied by Indigenous people. Despite occasional dissenters like Roger Williams, who founded the colony of Providence in what became Rhode Island and acknowledged full Native entitlement, such land was endlessly coveted by new waves of immigrants. According to Cornell historian Jon Parmenter, in the process of civilizing and pacifying new dominions between 1776 to 1900, the United States purchased, appropriated, or conquered approximately two million square miles of Indigenous land, or two square miles per hour throughout this period.

Land hunger and land speculation were constant artifacts of settler expansion. Speculators included presidents, generals, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and Quakers. When Indians were strong in numbers and powerful early in the 19th Century, treaties minimized warfare. Between 1778 and 1871, Congress authored 360 treaties, often on its terms. Treaties were, as stated in the Constitution, “the Supreme Law of the Land.” But as Indians were weakened and displaced by betrayals and forced removals, treaties were disregarded, illegally altered, or, so glaringly in the case of California, never ratified by Congress despite the good-faith compliance by Indians. As the tables turned numerically in favor of the settler society, treaties were renegotiated under terms unfavorable to Native peoples and, even then, breached time and again. Meanwhile, Supreme Court decisions hollowed out the meaning of Indian sovereignty and further diluted Indian negotiating status.

Well before the Homestead Act of 1862 transferred so-called public land from Indian to non-Indian denizens, the Continental Congress and its sequel used endless bounty warrants to recruit settler-soldiers to its military causes with the lure of ‘free land.’ Some military warrants, like that on my parcel, were allocated on traditional Indian lands in the east. Others were designated in the then ‘Northwest Territory,’ Kansas, Louisiana, and beyond. Veterans from the Revolution and the War of 1812 were granted 8,000,000 acres in the Northwest Territory alone, often billed falsely as fertile farmland.

These military land grants, in tandem with the Land Acts of 1785 and 1787, spelled doom for Native inhabitants. The 1785 law established the Federal Land Survey so that land could be sectioned and divided, while the latter established rules for future statehood. Its Article 3 humbly stated: “The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.” Indian distrust over land encroachments spawned a decade of warfare led by Little Turtle. Ultimately, General Anthony Wayne met and defeated Little Turtle in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, resulting in the Treaty of Greenville, Indian pacification, treaty-making, and land cessions.

The Civil War period, famous for its north-south strife, included tragic east-west bloodshed for Indians. The Homestead Act of 1862 transferred 270 million acres of Native homeland to non-native settlers and speculators, though it hardly ended land speculation. Large acquisitions occurred after its passage. William Chapman alone bought over 1 million acres in California and Nevada; Henry Sage and John McGraw, benefactors of Cornell University, entered 352,000 acres of timberland in the Midwest and the South; Francis Palms and Frederick E. Driggs bought nearly half a million acres of Wisconsin and Michigan timberland; and, as Cornell historian Paul Gates meticulously documented, an era of speculator feeding frenzy overcame Wisconsin.

After the Civil War, Manifest Destiny grew more militant and anti-Indian sentiment mushroomed. Former Union troops strung forts across the west and marched Indians to reservations. By 1871, treaty-making unilaterally ended along with treaty pretexts. Henceforward, no tribe would be recognized as an independent nation, obviating the need for new treaties (existing treaties were left in place, along with their loopholes and abuses). Lands granted to Indians were now subject to Congressional whim and that of lobbyists committed to remaking western lands.

Alas, Indian land loss was far from over. In the
1880s, reservation lands were subjected to aggressive privatization (allotment) under the Dawes Act. Private allotments were carved from reservation holdings in the name of farming and assimilation, “unallotted” lands being purchased by the government and placed in trust. Rip-tide losses of reservation lands followed. Within several decades, the Indian estate plummeted from 130,000,000 to 48,000,000 acres. The proceeds from unallotted land sales, according to plaintiffs in the landmark Cobell v. Babbitt litigation a century later, were grossly
mismanaged and withheld from individual Indian trust funds by the Department of Interior, perhaps in the amount of $150 billion. In 2010, President Obama signed legislation authorizing a $3.4 billion government settlement for individual Indian trust fund holders and a Native Scholarship fund.

This brief account omits countless transgressions that pilfered Indian lands, often by design. The Trail of Tears, associated with the violent dislodging of the Five Civilized Tribes from the southeastern United States to Kansas and Oklahoma Territories, would be reenacted many times for Indian inhabitants and render them, in United Nation’s terminology of today, internally displaced people. But, when Indians became U.S. citizens in 1924, was their land not immune to unlawful government seizure under
protections of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution?

The answer, according to Indian legal scholars, is yes and no. It is true that until the mid-twentieth century, courts recognized that Indian and Alaska Native property rights were within the Constitution’s guaranteed protection of private property. But in its Tee-Hit-Ton v. United States decision of 1955, the Supreme Court created a new legal rule, concluding that the Constitution does not protect lands held in aboriginal title (title by actual, continuous, and exclusive use and occupancy for long durations). Those Indian and Alaska Native lands recognized in treaties, statutes, or executive orders are constitutionally protected from governmental taking. In other words, Native lands do not enjoy the blanket of protection accorded to your back yard and mine, which, as I hope has become clear, have shape-shifted from Indian hands to ours thanks to the continuing bombardment of hostile government policies.

Land Grabs of Another Kind

According to the Morrill Act, passed in the same year as the Homestead Act, states holding federal lands could claim and then sell this land to underwrite new Land Grant colleges. New York lacked such lands and, following a federal formula, received certificates (“land scrip”) sold to parties who could acquire ‘uninhabited’ public land further west. The bearer of the scrip would invest the proceeds of land sales and generate revenues for new institutions offering instruction in agriculture, the mechanic arts, and military training. In 1863 the New York legislature, of which Ezra Cornell was now a part, moved to sell scrip totaling 989,920 acres to establish its Land Grant institution. Cornell hastened this action by donating $500,000 to buy scrip for his namesake university along with his Ithaca farm as a potential campus site.

Income from the 1862 Morrill Act gave Cornell University a commanding endowment, one that surpassed those of any sister land grant university. Using his business acumen, Ezra Cornell acquired vast acreages of land deemed “public” by Washington in what would be 15 future states. By 1914 Cornell University enjoyed an estimated $5.7 million in revenues from its land grants or approximately $148 million today. Through Morrill legislation, Indian lands taken by the government were monetized and repurposed for redistribution to state-based post-secondary education. Cornell’s considerable endowment earnings were fulsome, bearing fruit for the Cornell community across generations and for generations yet to come.

Was this a land grab or a gift of free land from the government enabling agricultural education on a continental scale? Is a land grab limited to outright land seizure or does it include wealth wrung from such land and transferred to a third party? As the High Country News authors who thoroughly investigated the matter put it, “The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher education.” High-minded though their mission may have been, the Land Grant recipients of this largesse were complicit in accepting what were spoils of war, of abrogated treaties, and of fraud. Indirectly but undeniably, Indian homeland loss helped to capitalize our 1862 Land Grant institutions.

In the latter half of the 19th century, nearly 11 million acres of former Indian homeland would transfer from government hands to those of land agents and speculators anticipated by the Morrill Act. The territories were taken from 240 tribes in 24 eventual states. In 1890, more Land Grant institutions were added, these being colleges for Black Americans denied admission to the Morrill Act schools in Southern states. A century later, in 1994, another 34 Tribal colleges obtained Land Grant status. These 1890 and 1994 colleges received diminished endowments because the great American commons held by its aboriginal inhabitants was long gone.

In founding Cornell, according to Paul Gates, Ezra Cornell relied on western associates for clues to available “public lands.” Much of the Wisconsin land he purchased was former Ojibwa land, ceded under duress through treaties prior to Wisconsin statehood. These treaties were ambiguous, ignored conditions posed by the Ojibwa, offered minimal annuities, and threatened military eviction if breached. The 1837 Treaty alone yielded over a million acres of available land—cessions that went to Cornell and other budding Land Grant universities. Cornell’s land acquisitions in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and 12 other states eventually translated into nearly one-third of the total Morrill Act Land Grant revenues.

Over time, Cornell teaching, research, and extension have fueled agriculture among the descendants of immigrants and unintentionally fallowed it for Native Americans. No pardons have been extended nor investigations made, until recently, into the magnitude of this imposition. Much the same can be said of Cornell’s failure, until 2020, to acknowledge former Indian tenure of the 17,000 acres it owns within New York State. Most of these in-state lands were not acquired outright with Morrill Act scrip. Yet they could not have been acquired in the absence of the endowment and good fortune bestowed by the Morrill Act.

Obligations and Opportunities

Cornell’s land-grant mission states that a land-grant university should be “expansive, endlessly adaptable, and always relevant.” In 2020 and again in 2021 a group of one hundred faculty and alumni wrote letters to the Cornell Administration about its Morrill Act land history, urging reconciliation with affected American Indian tribes. Hundreds of Cornell students signed a petition with their own demands, and the university’s American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) embarked on a faculty-led “Cornell University and Indigenous Dispossession Project.” In its initial response, the administration publicly acknowledged that its Ithaca campus is historically part of the Cayuga Nation’s homeland and averred that Cornell’s Morrill Act land grant was “accompanied by a painful history of prior dispossession of Indigenous nations’ lands by the federal government.” In terms of action, senior administrators have been cautious. Proposals for new academic programs pertaining to Indigenous studies have been devolved to individual college
deans for consideration and there are nods towards
better recruitment and retention of Native students.

An additional graduate student research assistantship within AIISP has been created, and there is unfinished talk with AIISP about the necessity of contacting Native communities beyond Cornell for insights into new relations and remedial actions. What might Land Grant universities do in response to the collateral damage experienced by Indigenous peoples who unwillingly forfeited ancestral homelands for Land Grant benefit? Government land grabs in the 19th century were problematic in the extreme and recycling these lands for non-Indian higher education is cold comfort to Indigenous people. Land Grant leaders must choose between dissimulation and dedicated engagement. In my view, an enlightened pivot is possible, and Cornell can, by owning its full history, become a platform for signature change. Beyond land acknowledgements within New York and beyond, what would this look like? Among many conceivable initiatives, I offer three that, subject to vetting by Indian stakeholders, seem well within reach of Cornell’s leadership.

Alumni/ae Engagements: When justifying to the New York Legislature the Land Grant institution he was building, Ezra Cornell intoned the words “to do the greatest good.” Those words have become the motto of Cornell’s 2022 capital campaign and are now before a quarter of a million people. Beyond gift-giving, the motto could as well summon new forms of alumni/ae engagement, agency, and accomplishment.

Cornell alums are not wheel-spinners. Many are skilled at tackling great challenges. They are diverse and include a Cornell Native American Alumni Association (CNAAA) with hundreds of members of its own. Native Alumni/ae are a vault of wisdom, sensitivity, and expertise when it comes to relations with their communities. More generally, alumni/ae are Cornell’s working conscience. The majority of people signing the 2020/2021 letters to the administration were alumni/ae and are the tip of a community iceberg committed to “doing the greatest good” on and off-campus.

Cornell alumni/ae sharing this commitment and wishing to uphold their alma mater’s reputation for academic excellence could be a muscle of change on this front. Recent research by Donna Feir and Maggie Jones on Native enrollment and graduation rates in Land Grant versus other institutions found that Land Grants have benefited Native students less than non-Land Grant institutions on both measures. In their words, “Many notions of justice imply that universities whose endowments were seeded by the Morrill Act lands have a greater obligation to current generations of Indigenous students whose ancestors were effectively deprived of their ability to provide opportunities for their children through the taking of their lands without fair compensation.” Alums can pose needed questions of where Cornell falls on measures of Native enrollment, graduation, financial support, and racial equality.

A new avenue for such change is in view. In 2021, Cornell launched the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, dedicated to opening “new pathways for Cornellians to embrace the university’s Land Grant mission to improve lives.” This is a significant outreach development. The Center aspires to involve Cornell faculty, staff, students, alumni and community partners in efforts at racial justice. Under the heading of “Our team’s commitment to antiracism,” appear the words “We stand with those demanding the end of white supremacy and those pursuing racial justice — at Cornell, in
Tompkins County and across the country. We believe that community-engaged learning can address ongoing violence against and systematic oppression of Black, Indigenous and People of Color.”

Tribal College Engagements: Cornell students and faculty would benefit from cooperation with Tribal colleges in states where Cornell exchanged scrip for former Indian land. These 1994 Land Grant institutions improve career opportunities for Native youth through research, education, and extension programs, often focusing on food, environment, and natural resource challenges. They are tribally controlled and serve populations in underserved communities. In the spirit of Einhorn Center community engagement, Cornell could reach out and explore memoranda of understanding and exchange with Tribal Colleges in states whose public lands profited Cornell’s endowment.

There are precedents. The first Morrill Land Grant University, the University of Kansas, has an M.O.U. with Haskell Indian College in the fields of science/technology/engineering/mathematics (STEM), and provides STEM training opportunities for Haskell faculty. Michigan State University has National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) funding to do collaborative extension work with Bay Mills Community College, a Tribal College. In 2020, UW–Madison, in partnership with Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe College and the College of Menominee Nation, received NIFA funds to foster Native paths from secondary to postsecondary education and incorporate Indigenous knowledge into STEM curricula. In late 2021 NIFA invested $7 million in an array of 1994 Land-grant colleges to enhance student recruitment and retention and do joint research on climate-smart agriculture and forestry on Tribal lands. “Other projects aim to ensure food and nutrition security and support healthy Tribal populations through improving bison herd productivity, uncovering the ways traditional plants can impact diabetes, or controlling invasive species.”

The convergence of Cornell’s interests and those 1994 Tribal Colleges is obvious and could take many forms. Faculty and student exchanges would be mutually beneficial. Imagine Cornell students returning from a “semester abroad” in Indian Country and enriching their classes, clubs, and fraternities with their discoveries. Imagine the growth in racial understanding across the Cornell community if Einhorn Center engagements opened revolving doors at Tribal colleges. Consider the contribution of Cornell’s 80 Alumni Clubs “doing the greatest good” by teaming up with 1994 College alumni/ae on projects of mutual interest. Cornell encourages continued learning via internet classes among its alumni/ae; the same infrastructure could serve this population at both Land Grant institutions in authoring, among other things, a dedicated land curriculum—how land is colonized, distributed, owned, shared, preserved, and sustainably used.

Law School Engagement: The legal concerns of Native Americans, given their encounter with profound discrimination, land theft, and near genocide, are interminable. Top law schools must hire, teach, and train outstanding legal minds equipped with legal tools to resolve the unfinished business of Indian justice. Cornell’s Law School should not minimize its related responsibility as a Land Grant entity nor underestimate the opportunities at hand. In 1976 the first Native students enrolled in the Law School, and a chapter of the National Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) is well established. Its Native graduates enjoy growing prominence. Among the many is Kansas Congress–woman Sharice Davids (who attended Haskell and the University of Kansas before earning her Cornell law degree).

As well, and in tandem with Yale Law School, Cornell’s Law School offers a multi-year Federal Indian Law Practicum. Participating law students represent Tribes and Tribal members in cases across the country. Their source materials include treaties, congressional statutes, tribal codes, executive orders, regulations, federal case law, court decisions, and the Constitution itself. Encouraging as this is, unjust laws still prevent Indian people from recovering their homelands and related livelihoods; how can the whittling away of Indian lands, still occurring, be stopped?

Cornell Law School must deepen its engagement with Indian law and people. It must help the larger university and its Trustees come to terms with the legalities of Land Grant origins and broadened fiduciary thinking.

And there are salient questions needing attention in a truly engaged legal curriculum. Can public land titles be defective where impropriety, disproportionate force, annexation, and deceit are clearly evident? Are land titles of Land Grant institutions, which would not exist but for the forced removal of prior inhabitants, encumbered by the terms of good-faith treaties and trust obligations? As fragile as international law is, what applications has the United States stood behind (e.g., crimes against humanity, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid) that warrant fuller consideration with respect to domestic aboriginal populations? Similarly, how might jus bellum (Latin for just war) doctrines be made legally relevant on Native American soil taken militarily to expedite nationhood? Equally important, what about jus post bellum (“justice after war”) and winner responsibility to rebuild when hostilities end? The “windfalls for wipeouts” paradigm from planning law (land value capture to compensate land value lost) comes to mind as we come to terms with relevant Land Grant windfalls and Indigenous wipeouts.

Such engagements by Cornell may or may not conform to what Native people want. Their wishes are paramount. Private landowners such as myself, along with diverse public owners and non-profit groups devoted to land conservation, would do well to revisit their land titles, the entitlements they afford, and the origin stories in the shadows of both. Should vast territories be returned to Native Americans to steward, as the distinguished painter/explorer George Catlin proposed long ago? How might non-Natives become more reliable co-trustees of the land with Native Americans? How can we best inhabit the cultural intertidal zone of those who, on so many historic occasions, showed hospitality even as we encroached on their living spaces? My back yard and perhaps yours need amending with generous applications of what Native Americans call “good mind.”

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Resources and Links:

High Country News Article, www.landgrabu.org/

Cornell Land Dispossession Page, blogs.cornell.
edu/cornelluniversityindigenousdispossession/
Paul W. Gates, The Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell
University, 1943. Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
NY.

In September, 2020, Profs. Geisler and Wien prepared a letter addressed to the Cornell President raising the issue of Cornell’s failure publicly to recognize and address the fact that the university has benefitted enormously from the lands made available through Indigenous dispossession. That letter, which was signed by more than 100 alumni — principally from Rural/Development Sociology — is included in this Dispossession blog.

In response, Dr. Pollack committed to undertaking several actions to address the issues that were raised in the original letter. Writing a year later, in September 2021, Geisler and Wien ask to what extent each of those commitments has been realized, and make recommendations for the future.

September 8, 2021

Dear Dr. Pollack:

You will recall that we wrote you about a year ago, raising questions about Cornell’s Morrill Act lands. We were concerned about the University’s lack of public recognition about this fundamental aspect of its history as well as the absence of a strategy to address the issues raised, including coming to a reconciliation with the affected American Indian tribes.

In your response, dated September 1, 2020, you undertook to act on four dimensions. We in turn promised to be “… attentive observers as this new relationship takes root” (September 9, 2020). Our intention now is to review what has been accomplished in the past year and to urge additional effort if meaningful progress in addressing the issues raised by the Morrill Act Lands is to be achieved.

We base our conclusions and recommendations on correspondence with informed observers located both within and outside Cornell, including representatives from the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP). We will limit our observations to “big picture” items of the kind that fall within the purview of your office. We organize our thoughts around each of the four commitments you made:

(1) Working with AIISP to develop “a public institutional statement acknowledging our land grant history”.

While we are aware of a paragraph acknowledging that Cornell’s Morrill Act land grant was “accompanied by a painful history of prior dispossession of Indigenous nations’ lands by the federal government”, this appears to be the only such acknowledgement (apart from AIISP’s blog) and it is not located in a prominent place (https://landgrant.cornell.edu/). Wording is also inadequate, failing to describe the situation as rooted in violence, theft, and genocide.

(2) Work with AIISP toward the “… engagement with the indigenous peoples impacted by our land-grant and by Cornell’s New York campuses”.

We appreciate that a land acknowledgement has been adopted for the Ithaca campus and is being used at some public events such as at graduation. We understand that the wording was developed jointly with AIISP and approved by the Gayogohó:no’ traditional leadership, following appropriate protocol in this instance. Where this constructive step falls down is in its implementation, allowing individual units to use the acknowledgement as they see fit. Not surprisingly some, such as Human Ecology and AIISP, are diligent in displaying the acknowledgement while others have done little or nothing with it. The announcement in the Cornell Chronicle was buried in a location less likely to be seen.

As for reaching out to the Indigenous nations affected by the Morrill Land Act, we understand that this has been discussed with Vice Provost Avery August last November. A draft letter was submitted to the administration in February by the Indigenous Dispossession Committee at AIISP, but their proposal jointly to reach out to the affected Nations was rejected. AIISP declined to co-sign the administration’s outreach letter, offering a detailed critique of its content. More recently, AIISP has begun to mail diplomatic outreach letters to the Nations affected by Cornell’s past and current landholdings.

(3) Work with AIISP toward “… a more overt and robust inclusion of the perspectives of Native American peoples in our ongoing efforts to confront systemic racism”.

Speaking to the issue of confronting systemic racism at Cornell, we understand that there are some initiatives being considered, such as the establishment of an anti-racism centre, a required course for students, and training for faculty and staff. These and the items in #1 and #2 above are worthy first steps. They and others to come must include Indigenous perspectives. Cornell’s unique history with respect to the Morrill Act lands will necessarily be a major and inescapable dimension of any serious consideration of systemic racism at the university.

Teaching initiatives that introduce Indigenous perspectives may be underway in individual departments and should be encouraged, indeed incentivized. Two new Indigenous faculty have been hired – in Mathematics and in Literatures in English – a step in the right direction. Insofar as 2 percent of the present US population is Native American, a proportional match for Cornell’s 1695 faculty would be 34 Native American faculty. This can’t occur overnight but is a worthy goal in Cornell’s diversity discussions.

The same might be said for Indigenous students. Cornell should give special recognition to Indigenous students from affected American Indian nations, making special efforts in recruitment, and going beyond its current needs-based financial support policy so that the financial burden on the students and their parents is reduced or eliminated. Additional attention must also be paid to retention once Indigenous students enter Cornell. Such steps are important considerations because one of the powerful remedies that Land Grant Universities have available to them to achieve redress is to make significant investments in Indigenous faculty, students, and courses of study. When interacting with the affected American Indian tribes, this is evidence that Cornell is serious about reconciliation. There are other steps that Cornell could and should take, such as concerted extension outreach by the College of Agriculture or targeted initiatives from Law, Engineering, Medicine, or the Veterinary School, among others. What research could be developed in conjunction with Indian nations, Cornell being a flagship research institution?

(4) Strongly endorsing AIISP leadership with the goal of “understanding and addressing the full extent of our land-grant history”.

In any future discussions with affected American Indian tribes, it would be a likely prescription for failure if the Cornell administration went into such consultations without the enthusiastic support of its own American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. Tribal representatives will be looking for evidence that the Cornell administration is listening to, and benefitting from, the unit within the University that brings together Indigenous voices.

Yet, the record of the past year demonstrates that not all is well. Recommendations about language to be incorporated into a university statement about the land grant history, for example, have been rebuffed. Requests for transparency about Cornell’s land and mineral holdings have been denied. Offers jointly to reach out to affected American Indian communities have not been accepted. AIISP’s 15- point plan for advancing Indigenous Studies at Cornell has not, after 2.5 months, received a response.

The only concrete measure we know of with respect to AIISP has been the funding of a graduate research assistant to work on the Indigenous Dispossession project. This is welcome, of course, but far more is required to approach proportionality in offsetting the land grant/grab in question.

(5) Overview

We hope we have been fair in recognizing what Cornell has and has not achieved. Much more remains to be done. We come back to the fact that Cornell’s land grant origins are a foundational issue for the university to address. It is not just a detail about its history, but rather a cornerstone of its creation and endowment. As the AIISP blog dealing with Cornell’s Morrill Act legacy says, referring to the 2020 High Country News research:

This report tied the history of those educational institutions founded through the Land Grant College Act of 1862 (also known as the Morrill Act) to the forceful dispossession of Indigenous peoples, in some cases immediately prior to those lands’ disposition to universities. Essentially, the original funding for these land-grant universities is derived from land taken through a systematic and genocidal campaign of violence, fraud, forced treaties (some never ratified), dislocation and death. Cornell received the most land through the Morrill Act procedures, almost 1 million acres in total. With the exception of some retained mineral rights, the University sold all of its Morrill Act parcels by 1935. Cornell made substantially more money from the manipulation and sales of these lands than any other land-grant institution, and revenue from these lands formed the lion’s share of the University’s operating budget for the first thirty years of its existence.

We believe the University’s response needs to be commensurate to the magnitude of these realities. In preparation for discussions with the affected American Indian tribes, the University will need to be able to demonstrate the following:

• That its leadership understands the enormity of what was done to the affected tribes and how Cornell has benefitted from their sacrifice
• That it is committed to taking action to achieve reconciliation
• That it has a record of concrete achievements since the issue achieved national attention
• That it is willing to work with the affected tribes on the development of a plan for the future, beyond the initial steps taken, and
• That it is prepared to accept and act on leadership from the AIISP, which will be the main interlocutor between the University and the affected tribes.

(6) Further Recommendations

In our letter sent to you a year ago, we recommended that AIISP play the leading role in shaping Cornell’s response to our Morrill Act history, and we were gratified that you subsequently met with their faculty and endorsed their role. We offer the following recommendations, which we have discussed with AIISP:

• Any significant change in a university community requires the understanding and support of its members. To prepare the ground, we recommend that the University undertake a systematic program of public education for all concerned about Cornell’s history with respect to the Morrill Act lands and why positive action is required at the present time.
• After a year, the University has still not developed an adequate public statement about its history with respect to the Morrill Act lands and the erasure of Indigenous peoples from whose homelands the grants were taken. It is imperative that it do more, and to do it in conjunction with the AIISP.
• This statement and the land acknowledgement pertaining to the Cornell campuses and research stations should be prominently displayed on the university web site and those of all its affiliated units and read on major public occasions
• The University should develop and implement a robust plan for the recruitment and support of Indigenous faculty and students, and for the enhancement of programs dealing with Indigenous Affairs. This will require financial commitments and policy changes. Financial support for Indigenous students, for example, needs to be offered in such a way that it reduces or eliminates the financial burden faced by Indigenous students and their parents.
• Following AIISP’s lead, Cornell should develop a strategy for engaging with affected American Indian tribes and advancing plans for reconciliation.
• Several senior members of the Cornell administration have been tasked with producing an agenda related to Morrill Act lands and Indigenous dispossession as it benefitted Cornell. Beyond this, we recommend that the University establish a high-level permanent position with responsibility for Indigenous Affairs in the President’s or Provost’s office, as some other post-secondary institutions have done. This will provide a focal point for action and accountability that seems to be currently lacking.

Dr. Fred Wien, Professor Emeritus, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. MS’69 PhD’71  (frederic.wien@dal.ca)

Dr. Charles Geisler, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York  (ccg2@cornell.edu)

by Dr. Meredith Alberta Palmer

After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on September 18^th, 2020, Cornell University committed to naming one of five new dorm buildings located in the North Campus Residential Expansion (NCRE) currently under construction, after her. Naming a building after Justice Ginsburg is an unsettling choice for anyone familiar with her harmful record regarding Indigenous nations and their legal treaties with the United States.

The new dorm buildings are the ones marked in red, at Site 1 and 2 in the map below. Just to the west of Site 1 sits the Native American residence hall Akwe:kon, on the map delineated with a purple circle. In Kanienkehaka, the language of the Mohawk people, Akwe:kon means “all of us.” Akwe:kon is the first university residence hall in the country dedicated to Native American students, communities, and scholarship, and is open to all students. It opened in 1991, and continues to house 35 undergraduate students, and to host Indigenous community and academic events. Since the announcement that a dorm building may be named after Justice Ginsburg, many in the community of Indigenous scholars and Native American studies academics at Cornell have been reckoning with this proposal, and working to assure that at the very least this Ginsburg Dorm will not be the one that now towers above Akwe:kon.

What might it mean for a new dorm building to be named after Justice Ginsburg? A building named for an individual who is so widely recognized transforms it into a space of memory. The university campus is a social and institutional landscape, and those who work and live within it draw identity and a sense of belonging—or conversely a sense of being out of place—from those memorializations. Whose memories count and are chosen to live within the design of campus landscapes is a question of power and notice. Regarding the proposed Ginsburg dedication and the one for Toni Morrison, Cornell President Martha Pollack stated that the university wants to “create a memorial that would be seen by, and have its doors open to, ‘any person’ at Cornell.” Any Indigenous student,  staff, or faculty member—currently underrepresented at Cornell—who is from one of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s six nations (Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Mohawk, Seneca, and Tuscarora), or who is Navajo, Chickasaw, Paiute, Shoshone, Potawatomi, Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, or Kiowa, will likely know Ginsburg as a direct adversary to their Indigenous nations and their people. She instantiated this negative legacy in the harsh, anti-Indigenous language used in her court opinions dealing with Indian law cases affecting all the specific tribes here listed directly, and more in the precedent set by these deleterious court cases.

One of the most devastating and vexing decisions she wrote occurred merely 15 years ago regarding Oneida lands in New York State, just 1.5 hours northeast of Cornell’s campus. This 2005 Supreme Court case, City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, denied the right of the Oneida Nation of New York (ONNY) to reinstate their sovereign rights on parcels of land claimed to be part of the City of Sherrill, NY. In 1985 it had been determined by the US Supreme Court that over 6 million acres of Haudenosaunee land had been appropriated by New York illegally around the turn of the 18^th century, including these specific parcels which had been illegally appropriated in 1805 and 1807. The Oneida Nation of New York then purchased these parcels back in the late 1990s. In this seemingly benign case, the ONNY did not ask for jurisdiction over anyone, nor did they try to tax anyone. They merely purchased back their stolen lands and claimed rights to them: the right to not pay taxes to a foreign government. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion for the Sherill case denying this claim, arguing that the Oneida could not “rekindle the embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” The language she deploys reveals structures of erasure of Indigenous peoples and governance within the United States. Likening Indigenous sovereignty to an ebbing flame, Ginsburg naturalizes the imagery of a “vanishing race;” a disappearance of Oneida governance in these lands, assumed to be extinguished merely because it is unrecognizable to her. Like so many American novels, Western movies, US history textbooks, and continental philosophers, Ginsburg perpetuates this violent cliché of the “slowly fading Indian race,” within the commanding context of the US Supreme Court. She imagines that the Oneida—who were finally able to bring this case to court after over a century of denial—have emerged almost out of nowhere, and without a history of knowing who they are and continue to be.

Ginsburg’s opinion in this case also rests on the Doctrine of Discovery. That a US court can still today base decisions on a decree given by a Spanish Pope in 1493 that names non-Christians barbarians (or heathens) and thus justifiably subject to death and dispossession is almost too irrational and overtly racist to take seriously. But in the Supreme Court, such seemingly absurd propositions become an overt form of legal violence to the Indigenous peoples whose lives and livelihoods are in the jurist’s hands. Justice Ginsburg’s opinion in this case reads as follows:“…it was not until lately that the Oneidas sought to regain ancient sovereignty over land converted from wilderness to become part of cities like Sherrill” (emphasis mine). Ginsburg invokes here an anti-Indigenous hierarchy of lifeways, rendering Indian land a so-called “wilderness” that had been tamed, “civilized” by Euroamericans. Also referencing the doctrine of laches, Ginsburg argues the ONNY had “slumbered on their rights”—or waited too long to reclaim sovereignty over these lands—an insidious argument considering that state and federal governments had staunchly prevented New York tribes from bringing any land claims to court until 1974. The precedent that Sherrill set slammed the door on any unresolved Indian land claims in the United States, the majority of which take place in the Second Circuit states of New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.  Just three months after Sherrill was decided, a Second Circuit Court decision in Cayuga Indian Nation of New York v. Pataki denied the Cayuga Nation of New York restitution for over 65 thousand acres also deemed illegally taken by New York State. This Second Circuit Court case involving the Cayuga (Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ) peoples, whose land Cornell University’s original campus occupies, primarily applied the Sherrill ruling to deny their claims to Indigenous sovereignty and restitution. The harms of the Sherrill case, so clearly embedded in anti-Indigenous racism, have thus trampled through other Indigenous nations and, it seems, will continue to do so long after Ginsburg’s passing.

During Justice Ginsburg’s first 15 years on the court, 38 Indian law cases were argued. The rights of Indigenous nations prevailed in only seven of those cases. Indigenous nations lost in eight of nine Indian law cases for which she wrote the court’s decision, including the Sherrill case. Some legal scholars have suggested that her overwhelmingly anti-Indigenous stance on the court was due to lack of training and familiarity with Indian Law. Indian law is a complex and discrete set of treaties, statutes, and agreements that govern the long relationships existing between the three relevant sovereigns of the United States: tribal governments, the federal government, and individual states. In the United States, few law schools offer adequate training in Indian law, if they offer any at all, evidenced also by Ginsburg’s 1993 confirmation hearing. During this hearing, one Senator from South Dakota asked about her familiarity with Indian law. She replied, “I cannot pretend to any special knowledge in this area of the law,” and stated that she had never studied it or taught it. Despite the fact that she had indeed taken part in six cases as federal appellate judge that touched on Indian law, and participated in the development of an ACLU amicus brief on a Supreme Court case directly speaking to it, she still renounced any claim to competence in Indian law. In most Indian law cases in which she decided, Ginsburg drew on her knowledge of civil rights – a framework based on upholding individual rights in law.[1] Yet the framework of individual rights that civil rights law is based on ignores the question of group rights – importantly, of the over 370 treaties that tribal and Indigenous nations have made with the US federal government. Indian law cases are no small matter. They take up 5% of the Supreme Court’s docket, and court hears one or two court cases regarding Indian Law each session. Despite the prevalence of Indian law cases, training in Indian law remains paltry.

Ignorance of the law, especially by those in power, is exceedingly devastating, and as the adage suggests, ignorance of the law excuses no one. Here at Cornell Law School this injustice is being addressed. The Cornell chapter of the Native American Law Student Association (NALSA) submits that, “while Cornell Law has not always had a strong Indian law program, it is clear that the administration is working very hard to make changes. We are continuously excited about the direction CLS [Cornell Law School] is headed.” NALSA offers the following thoughtful comment on this essay:

Experts in Federal Indian Law recognize that Justice Ginsberg was a complex individual who made decisions that were wonderful for civil rights in general, and other decisions that were harmful to Native America. While our Nations will be recovering from the harm she has done to our Indigenous Communities for a long time, we recognize the good that she has done for individual Americans.

It has been rumored that Ginsburg regretted her decision on the Sherrill case more than any other decision she made. In the last few years of her life she had learned more about Indian Law and applied her knowledge to cases such as the 2020 case McGirt v. Oklahoma, in which she stood in the 5-4 majority that confirmed that much of eastern Oklahoma is “Indian territory” of the Creek Nation. Yet for the Oneida, the Cayuga, and other Indigenous peoples against whom the Sherrill decision has been used as precedent, her regret does not return the land, nor does it repair the present and future damage.

Ginsburg’s legal career is often held as a testament to her demand for justice for women – she is an esteemed icon of feminism in the US. But her destructive legacy on issues of racial justice, prisoner’s rights, and Indigenous/tribal sovereignty often goes unappraised. Her decisions regarding Indigenous peoples in the United States in particular are conscripted into a legal system that from its start has intended to erase Indigenous self-determination, and to rid all Indigenous claims to traditional home territories in the US. Time and again, so-called liberal and conservative Justices have acted to extinguish Indigenous rights and status, and the legal record is troublingly bipartisan. To the great detriment of so many Indigenous peoples, Ginsburg never troubled herself to learn about Indian law and rights until the end of her career. In August 2019, Princeton Professor of African American Studies, Eddie Glaude stated, “there are communities that have had to bear the brunt of…white Americans confronting the danger of their innocence. And it happens in every generation.” This “innocence,” Glaude says, is sometimes thinly veiled by a willful ignorance. Native experiences and Native American politics falls squarely within the blind spot of a liberal/conservative binary. In a time of stark, rising authoritarianism and white ethno-nationalism in the United States, it is more difficult than ever to sit with nuance and un-block our ears to histories, lives, and political realities that are less amplified and thus less familiar to many readers.

With her reported regret about the Sherill case in mind, would that today we could ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg her opinion about her name on this building in Haudenosaunee lands. She worked indefatigably to reform some of the harms woven through the fabric of US governance from its founding. Yet her attempts at reform have not, and many argue cannot, reach Native American people and tribal and Indigenous governments. As worthy as such advocates are of celebration, this moment requires that a campus community take stock of how our institutions and honorings are complicit in continued injustice and oppression. Racism, seen here as anti-Indigeneity, is a historical and empirical reality in US universities by way of exclusions and adverse inclusions, in many campus traditions, and certainly in course content and omissions. Again this year, departments and students at Cornell have rallied their collective voices to call out this racism and demand change on reconfigured terms. The Cornell University and Indigenous Possession Blog highlights a pathway for Cornell University to begin repairing its relations with Indigenous peoples upon whose lands and lives the institution is established. At the very least, it has been assured that the Ginsburg dorm will not be placed adjacent to Akwe:kon, which would be a serious misstep off this path. Indigenous students at Cornell, who already confront daily on-campus Indigenous erasure, do not deserve to have another reminder of entrenched ignorance of their peoples’ lives and histories tower over their community space. Currently, there is discussion with Cornell University’s Vice President for Student and Campus Life, Ryan Lombardi, and with the traditional leaders of the Cayuga peoples upon whose lands Cornell occupies, about how their people also may be honored and recognized with an NCRE dorm name. I am hopeful that these discussions continue, and materialize.

Ginsburg’s memorialization may be a beacon for many young undergraduates at Cornell who may be encouraged, like Ginsburg, to work for expansive visions of justice. That tradition can take these students beyond what Justice Ginsburg was able to accomplish during her remarkable life. To make this possible, her memorialization ought not to begin with an affront to the many Indigenous peoples who, as she perhaps realized at the end of her career, she had not done justice.

 

[1] Supreme Court Justices unfamiliar with Indian law may tend to “seek parallels with areas of law and modes of analysis with which they are most familiar” (Goldberg 2009, 1004)

 

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References:

Borgman, Amy. “Stamping out the embers of tribal sovereignty: City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation and Its Aftermath.” Great Plains Nat. Resources J. 10 (2006): 59.

Brasher, Jordan P., Derek H. Alderman, and Joshua FJ Inwood. “Applying critical race and memory studies to university place naming controversies: Toward a responsible landscape policy.” Papers in Applied Geography 3, no. 3-4 (2017): 292-307.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wants Trump to Appoint a Native American Woman to the Supreme Court.” The Buffalo Chronicle, September 19, 2020. https://buffalochronicle.com/2020/05/05/ruth-bader-ginsburg-wants-trump-to-appoint-a-native-american-woman-to-the-supreme-court/.

City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, (03-855) 544 U.S. 197 (2005)

Cornell University. “What Is the North Campus Residential Expansion?: Cornell North Campus Residential Expansion.” What is the North Campus Residential Expansion?” 2020. https://ncre.cornell.edu/what-north-campus-residential-expansion.

Duthu, N. Bruce. American Indians and the law. Penguin, 2008.

George-Kanentiio, Douglas M. Iroquois on fire: A voice from the Mohawk nation. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006.

Germino, Katherine E. “This land is your land, this land is my land: Cayuga Indian Nation of New York v. Pataki.” Vill. L. Rev. 52 (2007): 607.

Goldberg, Carole. “Finding the Way to Indian Country: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Decisions in Indian Law Cases.” Ohio St. LJ 70 (2009): 1003.

Marshall Project Staff. “RBG’s Mixed Record on Race and Criminal Justice.” Marshall Project, September 23, 2020. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/09/23/rbg-s-mixed-record-on-race-and-criminal-justice.

Matthews, Michael. “City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation: Balancing the Correction of Historical Wrongs with the Convenience of Ignoring Them.” Okla. City UL Rev. 32 (2007): 169.

Rifkin, Mark. Manifesting America: The imperial construction of US national space. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Singer, Joseph William. “Double Bind: Indian Nations v. The Supreme Court.” Harv. L. Rev. F. 119 (2005): 1.

Williams Jr, Robert A. The American Indian in western legal thought: the discourses of conquest. Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 313-328.

Cornell University’s administration revised its statement about the University’s land-grant mission by adding a new paragraph that acknowledges Cornell’s relationship to Indigenous dispossession both locally and continentally.  This revision was based on the March 2020 High Country News article and the work of AIISP’s Cornell University and Indigenous Dispossession Project.  The new paragraph was written in conjunction with AIISP project members.

The new text reads:

As a land-grant institution, we acknowledge that the commendable ideals associated with the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 were accompanied by a painful history of prior dispossession of Indigenous nations’ lands by the federal government. As the largest recipient of appropriated Indigenous land from the Morrill Act and the institution that accrued the greatest financial benefit from that land, we also acknowledge Cornell University’s distinct place in this history. In addition, Cornell’s Ithaca campus sits within the indigenous homelands of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ (the Cayuga Nation), members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign Nations with a historic and contemporary presence in this area. This history compels our university to ensure that the values it upholds to make a positive impact on the world align with efforts to engage with and benefit members of all communities.

by Professor Jon Parmenter

On October 7, 2020, Ithaca’s Common Council voted to remove from DeWitt Park an historical monument erected in 1933 by the (now-defunct) local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.  This marker commemorated the “First White Settlers” in Ithaca: two Revolutionary War veterans alleged to have erected cabins near what is now DeWitt Park.  Beginning in 2017, the monument came under justified local criticism for its exclusion of both the Cayuga Nation, the Indigenous owners of the land, and long-time Black residents of Ithaca.

In its attempt to correct this historical injustice, however, the Common Council’s revised resolution actually made matters worse.  Their resolution states:  “Whereas the land here was once home to the Cayuga Indians, one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and one of the Cayuga’s refugee [guests], the Tutelos and Suponis [sic]. The Cayugas fought and then fled before General Sullivan’s invading American army in September of 1779. By 1789, the land was largely unoccupied and American settlers had begun to arrive, albeit before legal land claims could be made.”

Beyond a forgivable spelling error (the proper ethnonym is “Saponis”), the resolution constitutes a more explicit erasure of Cayuga ownership and occupancy than the comparative silence of the 1933 DAR marker.  It is true that after making a stand at the Battle of Newtown (near present-day Elmira) on August 29, 1779, Cayugas and other Haudenosaunee opted to take flight beyond the reach of the invading American army.  This was a strategic withdrawal that saved lives at the price of temporarily sacrificing their settlements and much of their property.

But according to the Common Council’s resolution, the Cayugas abandoned the area permanently as a result of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign.  That is not true – Cayugas and other Haudenosaunee returned to their ancestral homelands in the Finger Lakes region shortly after the 1779 American invasion.  Had Cayuga territory been “largely unoccupied” after the Revolutionary War, the sustained, often extralegal efforts of both the national government and New York State to dispossess the Cayugas of their land base during the last two decades of the eighteenth century would have been unnecessary.

By erroneously reducing the Cayugas to victims who abandoned their ancestral homelands, the Common Council’s resolution perpetuates a misleading impression of Indigenous erasure.  Replacing an outdated monument to white settlement with an inaccurate resolution that posits a terminal narrative of the Cayuga Nation’s history does yet more violence to our ability to understand and learn from the past.  As the lone Haudenosaunee nation to be completely dispossessed of their land base in New York State after the Revolutionary War, the Cayugas deserve a more thoughtful representation of their history in the City of Ithaca than that offered by the Common Council.  Ideally, the Common Council would consider consulting with living members of the Cayuga Nation residing locally, who can best relate the true consequences of their dispossession for the rest of us.