Transcript
María (host): Welcome to Present Value.
Kimberly Fuqua: Hi Present Value listeners, I’m Kimberly Fuqua from the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina and I’m a second-year SIPA student working on my MPA. I am also co-chair of the Indigenous Graduate Student Association here at Cornell University. I am thrilled to introduce this episode with Professor Jon Parmenter from Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences department of history. The conversation focuses on Professor Parmenter’s research on indigenous dispossession and Cornell University’s legacy as a land-grant institution published in October of last year as a blog post titled “Flipped script, flipping the script.” This ongoing project seeks to explore the degree to which the Morrill Act and, by extension the University, were implicated in a demand for profits taken from expropriated indigenous lands. Confronting this difficult history, which for too long has been hidden in plain sight, is an important first step in establishing a broader process of engagement and redress. I hope you enjoy the conversation and, as always, subscribe, share, leave a review and follow Present Value on Instagram and Twitter @presentvaluepod.
María (host): I’m your host María Castex.
Jon Parmenter is an associate professor at Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences department of history, where he specializes in the history of indigenous peoples in the northeast, particularly that of the Haudenosaunee. In addition to his research and writing, he has served as a legal and historical consultant to several Haudenosaunee communities and was recognized as a historical expert in the history and ethnography of the Iroquois by the Ontario superior court. At Cornell, Professor Parmenter teaches courses such as “Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong: An Introduction To Native American History,” “NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS,” and “THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.” In 2011 he was the recipient of the Stephen and Marjorie Russell Award for distinguished teaching in the College Of Arts and Sciences.
A dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., he received a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Western Ontario and a PhD in history from the University of Michigan.
Professor Parmenter, thank you so m uch for joining us on Present Value.
Parmenter (guest): Thank you María it’s great to be here.
María: So my first question is an easy one: what originally drew you to study history?
Parmenter: Well, I went to college wanting to do medicine but chemistry took care of those dreams. I was fortunate as an undergraduate to have some great professors who did undergraduate teaching and who really love what they did and their example, I think, is what helped me find my way into the academic world.
María: When did you first become interested in Native American history and why did you focus on the northeast?
Parmenter: I grew up outside of London, Ontario in Canada and that’s a community that’s about halfway between Detroit and Toronto. I went to school and played hockey with kids from the nearby Oneida on the Thames reserve and as a young kid i always wondered why their lives seemed so different from ours, even though they really only lived about 10 miles away. Why did their bus come to school covered with mud? Why so few of them at the time finished high school? And I guess my first book was in part an effort to try and answer that question. To explore the origins of how indigenous people in Canada and the United States went from an independent, fully sovereign existence, to one that was substantially constrained by colonial settlers and their policies. So I think that really is the rude answer to that question. I really was always kind of vexed by that difference I witnessed in my own life growing up.
María: Your teaching and academic research spans topics such as the broader history of colonial North America, historical geography, and race and ethnicity and I think you were kind of starting to get at this answer but how do these topics intersect with the histories of Native Nations in the U.S.?
Parmenter: Well one of the first things I asked students in my intro course is to reflect on what they remember from their K to 12 education about Native American history. And that’s always an interesting question because we start talking about when in their education it was covered (if at all), what was emphasized and how much time they spent on it. And the sneaky aspect of this exercise is I already kind of know the answer. Research into history curriculum standards in the U.S. shows that a really kind of glossed over message of Native American history is what prevails. Most of the standards, for example, don’t cover the 20th century at all and send a message the indigenous people are people of the past. Most name no individual native people in their standards at all and those who are mentioned are most commonly figures like Squanto, Sacagawea, Pocahontas, which sends the message that the only indigenous people who counted were the ones who helped the settlers. And a lot of times you’ll sort of see you know in these students’ recollections and what they talk about really is a lot of vague general knowledge without much in the way of specific chronology or terminology. And you just get the sense that indigenous people are sort of not really linked in any kind of concrete way to the master narrative of American history. So you get the sense, as students come in even to a university like Cornell, that they really don’t have much knowledge, that they haven’t really been in a position of learning about this or even being able to question you know the master narrative that sort of suggests that indigenous people in the Americas yielded peacefully to a superior civilization. And I think that’s really the one thing that in my own teaching that I really like to try to challenge people on to think about you know what they’ve been taught and how these messages have been relayed and to sort of think about why the study of Native American history has been relatively ignored for so long. And the subtext to that is that there’s some very significant reasons for that. I mean many of the so-called messages or truths that I just talked about that have currency in mainstream thinking really do sort of exist to sort of uphold current colonial circumstances in North American settler nations: Canada and the United States, trivializing native history as a means of silencing its less savory aspects, claiming comprehensive knowledge as a means of avoiding challenges to the received wisdom, writing native history in terms that assume the inevitability of their conquest and colonization by superior supposedly civilization. So I think it’s really critical that we understand the stakes of these attitudes and that’s really what I try to unpack in my own work and get students thinking about. You know we have a situation where if you take the United States: you have roughly three million native people, about a million of them residing on reservations, and their metrics in terms of social attainment, social pathology and what have you are very bad. The poverty rate is twice the national average, many kind of issues with crime, alcoholism, domestic abuse. We effectively have a third world country within our borders and I think there’s a lot for all of us to think about in that particular situation and it’s raising that awareness and trying to get people thinking about not only how it happened but why it continues is really what I’m trying to do, certainly in that intro course.
María: Thinking about some of the words that you’ve used: unpacking and trying to understand how things happened will resonate a lot with what our conversation will cover throughout the rest of the episode I think. And to introduce that topic, I originally reached out to you about a month ago because I read an article in the Cornell Chronicle that was titled “Faculty Research University’s Ties to Indigenous Dispossession,” which was about the work that you’re currently doing to investigate Cornell’s history as a land-grant institution and its relationship with the dispossession of indigenous peoples. This article referenced a blog post that you published in October titled “Flipped Scrip, Flipping the Script: the Morrill Act of 1862, Cornell University and the Legacy of 19th Century Indigenous Dispossession.” So before we dive deeper into the specifics of this research, which is fascinating, I want to double click on the concept of dispossession and provide some context for our listeners, many of whom like myself might not be entirely familiar with this topic. What is indigenous dispossession and why is it important to understand?
Parmenter: Well indigenous dispossession really at one level is essentially the history of these countries, the history of what has happened from the time Europeans arrived until the present. And for a long time it’s been kind of disconnected from contemporary life, it’s something that happened a long time ago and not something for those of us walking around in 2020 to be concerned about. I think the current scholarship and research on this is really beginning to challenge this and to begin to force us here in the 21st century to begin thinking about the legacies of this, certainly on the settler side of the population. Indigenous people are certainly aware of the consequences of dispossession, they live with it every day. The rest of us are not really always mindful of it or have any real understanding of it and I think that really is starting to change. This is really a quite new area of research and scholarship; the energy that’s come into it is really quite interesting and quite exciting.
María: And as I was trying to become more familiar with this topic, preparing for our conversation today, I read part of one of the books that you recommended called “Theft Is Property” by Robert Nichols from the University of Minnesota. One part that stood out to me was the notion of recursivity, to quote Nichols: “…unlike ordinary cases of theft, dispossession created an object in the very act of appropriating, making and taking were fused.” To what extent do you agree with Nichols’ assessment?
Parmenter: Well, I’m really glad and impressed that you took the time to read Nichols’ book, it’s quite a fascinating and very challenging text. My reading of Nichols’ thesis is that he’s talking about the manner in which dispossession, the taking of indigenous lands by the settler population, simultaneously created (paradoxically) an indigenous right to property, but a right that was truncated. So if we think about property rights they normally involve the right to acquire, to enjoy and use, and to alienate that property. And what Nichols demonstrates so effectively is that for indigenous people in what is now the United States during the first half of the 19th century, their legal right to property came to be defined exclusively as the right to sell. They had the right to sell, settlers had the right to acquire, use and enjoy and also on their own to alienate. But that’s the difference and because federal officials wanted the appearance of a consensual process for the broader project of dispossessing indigenous people, they put in place the treaty system as the primary vehicle to achieve indigenous land surrenders. Written agreements taken for most of the 19th century on par with treaties with foreign nations ratified by the senate, etc. were the means by which this happened and when Nichols talks of recursivity what he’s referring to is sort of the ratchet effect that’s created by early cycles of territorial acquisition, enhancing the conditions for subsequent rounds of dispossession in a self-reinforcing manner. And he extends this to talk about how the dispossessive logic and mechanisms established in the United States during the early years of the 19th century eventually spread to other Anglo-settler colonies all over the globe. So it’s kind of an interesting and quite new and exciting way of looking at things, very stimulating and I’m really quite impressed with that text, I highly recommend people have a look at it.
María: I really enjoyed it. I think 90 percent of it was a little bit over my head but I thought it really helped me kind of think about some of these issues in a bit more theoretical way, which I think was helpful to kind of approach it from an abstract point of view.
Parmenter: Year, I mean that’s really the key point. I mean he puts it right out there, I mean he calls property the product of theft and he forces people to kind of grapple with the implications of that. Now, not everybody’s going to agree with, that but I also think that it certainly is a provocative way to look at it and when you start looking in the way that the land base of both Canada and the United States came to be in the 19th and 20th century in particular it’s a very instructive piece of writing.
María: So you cite that from 1776 to the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. purchased, appropriated and conquered approximately two million square miles of indigenous land. In light of the pace of expansion, which was astronomical – about two square miles per hour within that period of time, you quote an observation made by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis Walker, in 1872. And I’ll read that quote now: “Every year’s advance of our frontier takes in a territory as large as some kingdoms of Europe. We are richer by hundreds of millions, the Indian is poorer by a larger part of the little he has… Surely there is an obligation found in considerations like these requiring us in some way to make good to the original owners of the soil the loss by which we so greatly gain. My question is, were these kinds of concerns about the pace and nature of expansion common, particularly among those who, like Walker, were in positions of power?
Parmenter: No, they were not particularly common. Walker’s did however make it into his published annual report and that’s what makes it unique and interesting and unusual and worth talking about. He surely was not the only federal official to have reached that understanding but his decision to articulate it struck me as quite important. He’s an interesting guy, he was a Civil War union general, a statistically-inclined person. He only served a brief term as Commissioner of Indian Affairs but he was in office during one of the most fervent periods of federal territorial acquisition in the post-Civil War era when the winning of the west was seen as an essential process to heal the nation’s sectional wounds. Everybody turned from the Civil War and devoted a mass amount of attention and energy to the process of conquering the plains Indian nations, building the transcontinental railroad, etc. So Walker would have been the kind of person, as the Commissioner, who had read all the reports from his field agents that were discussing you know in nitty gritty detail the wrenching process of indigenous people’s transition in many cases from a fully independent lifestyle to one of confinement on reservations. At this point in time this is happening within an individual indigenous people’s lifetimes, born as an independent member of a tribal nation and becoming an adult and then in middle or old age being forced onto a reservation. And I think the sense that Walker came up with is just the collective weight of evidence that was coming in from all sorts of quarters of the country, particularly the trans-Mississippi west. It was just so great that he could come to no other conclusion: the United States and its citizens were becoming wealthy and prospering as a direct result of the process he saw happening before his eyes, indigenous dispossession. Indigenous people, for their part as we know, suffered greatly and continue to suffer as a result of that process. It’s a massive transfer of wealth from one group of people to another and kind of thinking back to what we were talking about just a few minutes ago around some of the general lack of understanding, or let’s call it what it is ignorance, around some of these histories in the U.S.
María: I think it’s fair to assume that many of our listeners are probably somewhat familiar with the history of Native land disputes in the U.S., thinking most recently in in the news the struggle surrounding the Dakota access and Keystone pipelines, and the Tongass national forest in Alaska. Yet many of the effects of dispossession receive less coverage and as a result remain, to steal a quote from your article, “hidden in plain sight.” One such example is the legacy of the Morrill Act, an issue you explore at length in the post that we’ve been referring to published in October. The Morrill Act was passed at the end of the of the 19th century, can you talk a bit more about what it aimed to achieve?
Parmenter: Yeah the moral act is passed in 1862. Tt’s best understood, I think, as one of three pieces of related legislation by which the Civil War-truncated Congress secured the west for their vision of what the national future would be. So in a space of I believe it’s six to eight weeks in 1862 we see the Homestead Act passed, the Morrill Act and then the National Railway Act. All of these are designed to sort of structure how the United States is going to evolve as a nation and interestingly it’s done during the Civil War, when part of the nation had left. But what the Morrill Act tries to do is take a resource that the United States at the time had in abundance, the so-called public land or often called the national domain obtained from indigenous nations, and direct it toward a quite commendable objective: improved access to practical education for the nation’s citizens. So the land-grant colleges that were created by the Morrill Act aimed to provide instruction in agriculture, the mechanical arts (which is what they called engineering back then) and military science. They were intended to be a new kind of university, more accessible to the nation’s farming and working classes, and they prided themselves at the time and they still do, on solving real-world problems with scientific and technical research. So the genius of the Morrill Act was to provide federal funding for these colleges from the pool of public land that the federal government held and the amounts were allocated by congressional representation so each state added up the number of representatives and senators that they had and 30,000 acres of land were allocated to the sum total of their congressional representation. Well it was no surprise to anyone that, because New York was the most populous state in the union at that time, that New York and subsequently Cornell, the land-grant college that New York state established, would have an outsized role in the Morrill Act’s history. The idea behind it was for states to take the grant of land and manage it as a resource: they could sell the acreage and then use the proceeds as base investment capital to provide an endowment from the interest on the sale proceeds for one or more land-grant colleges within the state. The interesting thing is that eastern states like New York had no public land in 1862. New York had all been settled by that point in time, so instead of receiving public land within its own borders, eastern states like New York received paper certificates referred to at the time as agricultural college scrip that entitled the bearer to select a quarter section (160 acres of unappropriated public land) open to private entry anywhere in the United States. So it’s a little bit complicated but I think we need to understand that land open to private entry at the time was public land that had been put up for auction but had not met the minimum price for sale set by the federal government. So this typically was not prime settlement land either because of its distance from transportation or its particular terrain. The idea behind the Morrill Act was really that the land would be held for a time until its value increased and greater returns could be realized. The problem was not very many people in the east had experience with that kind of investment and fewer still wanted the hassle of dealing with the management of a speculative land venture beyond their state’s boundaries, so what most eastern states did was simply dump their script on the market selling it often at a steep discount from its face value of 1.25 per acre, rather than going to the trouble of treating it as investment capital. And that’s where Ezra Cornell steps into Morrill Act history. He had the benefit of long experience in the business world and close friends he could rely on for advice and he made the decision to do something quite different: he purchased nearly all of New York state’s scrip for himself and set out to select and locate public lands with an eye toward holding them long-term for the eventual benefit of the university that bears his name today. And that’s what makes Cornell’s history different. Nobody else did that, nobody else did it on the scale that Cornell did and it’s really, I think, the thing that was the most eye-opening part of the research that I’ve been doing and to dig deeper into Cornell’s role.
María: I want to point to one of the points you make in your article referring to the call made by Sharon Stein, who’s a professor of educational studies from the University of British Columbia, to “work backward from a particular land-grant institution in order to ask about the histories and peoples of the lands on which it sits, as well as the lands that it selected and sold to fund itself per the provisions of the Morrill Act.” So you were just talking about sort of Cornell’s role in all of this, can you walk us through how, based on your findings thus far, Cornell in specific benefited from the Morrill Act.
Parmenter: I can do that and before commenting that, I just do want to make sure your listeners are aware of the groundbreaking study that was published in March of 2020 by Robert Lee and Tristan Atone. It’s called “Land-grab universities.” It appeared in High Country News and in my view it was probably one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism related to Native American history in the past decade. They’re maintaining a blog themselves at landgrabu.org and I’d really recommend it to anyone as an overview of the entire phenomenon.
But getting back to Professor Stein. I mean, I really think that that was the inspiration for me to begin looking more closely into the Cornell story, because the fascinating thing in this particular case is we do have a very good paper trail and it can be done, it’s quite involved but I’ll get to that in a second. So what ends up happening is that Cornell, Ezra Cornell, on the advice I believe quite strongly of Henry Sage and John Mcgraw, two early very prominent figures in Cornell’s history who were timberman who made a lot of money in what are now midwestern states timber production, advised Mr. Cornell on the selection of public lands in in three states: Wisconsin, Minnesota and Kansas. And we can actually, with the work that’s been done by Lee and Atone, we can actually identify parcels of land that were granted by the Morrill Act and associate them with prior treaty surrenders. So essentially, the land that Cornell eventually got as a result of the Morrill Act was the product, I found, of nine treaty surrenders with five distinct tribal nations that happened between 1825 and 1851. My essay online talks about seven of those surrenders, since posting it I’ve actually found two more that yielded lands selected by Cornell in Wisconsin and Minnesota. There will be an update to that at some point over the January break, but it’s important to appreciate that we actually can pinpoint precisely where and when these lands were brought into the national domain and then subsequently selected by Cornell and bequeathed to the University. For all intents and purposes the surrenders are all ratified treaty surrenders, they’re fully legal in that sense, but what was really interesting to me as I started looking into them more closely is that there are some real issues with every single one of them. Just to cite a few examples, the 1825 Osage and Kansas surrenders that provided some of the land Cornell eventually got in Kansas extended fraudulent surrender the federal government first obtained in 1808. There are three Ojibwe treaties signed between 1837 and 1847 that were initially limited to natural resource extraction but the federal commitments in those treaties were unfulfilled and the deforestation of hardwoods that Cornell involved itself in subsequent to receiving the land is actually arguably a violation of the terms of those treaties itself. Dakota suit negotiators signed a treaty in Washington DC that involved a land surrender because they were denied passage home until they signed the treaty. Another treaty in 1837 with the Ho-chunk or Winnebago people was also signed, the terms of the surrender were protested subsequent to the signing of the treaty by the community and ended up resulting in a forced removal of part of the tribe to Nebraska and a scattering of others who stayed behind in Wisconsin. It’s a very complicated story, I’m still wrapping my head around that one. There are finally two Dakota treaties in 1851 where the surrenders were obtained with threats of military force and the withholding of food from negotiators assembled at the treaty conference, in other words you don’t eat until you sign. So it’s clear that the terms under which the Morrill Act lands that Cornell selected in these three states did not enter the public domain in a manner that could be considered wholly ethical or on the up and up. Now did Ezra Cornell or the men subsequently involved in managing the University’s western land committee know this, it doesn’t seem to be the case. And that’s precisely the point of what I’m trying to argue, for too long the public lands allocated by the Morrill Act were treated as a giant grab bag of free stuff when in fact they came with a great deal of baggage, the indigenous nations who surrendered those lands did so under varying degrees of duress and suffered subsequently as a result of signing those treaties. Even worse, the federal government in most instances failed to live up to the quite minimal commitments made to those nations in the treaties themselves. So most of the land selected by Cornell had been in the public domain for a considerable period of time by 1866 when Cornell, the man, began selecting and entering. After his death in 1874, Cornell’s western land committee, which I’m still trying to identify the precise membership but it involved at any given time the President and Treasurer of the University and certain members of the Board of Trustees. Henry Sage and John Mcgraw were early on. I would also say that one of the fascinating things I found in my research is Ezra Cornell was literally working on this until almost the day he passed. He passed away in December of 1874 and he is involved in decisions and correspondence almost up to the day he died, so he really took this seriously. And I think he imparted on people who took over in the western land committee the idea of maintaining these lands as a speculative hold until the early 1880s when they start to negotiate massive timber deals, I should say, and eventually by about 1900 sales of the cleared land to settlers. The Wisconsin case is best known and that’s where most of Cornell’s profits were taken, but this was unambiguously a settler colonial enterprise dedicated to bringing as much revenue as possible from the resource granted by the Morrill Act over decades of time and, again, that’s also what makes it unique. No other institution, certainly no other scrip-receiving eastern institution, managed the Morrill Act resources with the intensity, energy, undeniably the intelligence of what Mr. Cornell started and the western land committee effectively finished.
María: We talked earlier about Francis Walker’s concerns and I’m wondering if you found any evidence of administrators on the Cornell campus reacting to this process or the acquisitions during this period that were similarly concerned about the dispossession of the indigenous populations that those lands belong
Parmenter: I can’t really say that so far and I’ve probably, I haven’t certainly looked at all of it, but my sense so far is that this was not something that registered prominently in their minds. The idea was that the land had been alienated, it was in the national domain, it was there for the taking and that was that there wasn’t any kind of questioning of the process that I’ve come across. There was very little consciousness of the fact that indigenous people were still around and again this is also a time people have to remember that in American history, that native people are really actually suffering demographically. There were a lot of intelligent people in the late 19th century who were concerned that Native Americans were going to go extinct, that’s how low their population levels had sunk, so it wasn’t something that people at the time and certainly not the folks involved in this particular enterprise were paying a great deal of attention to. I’ve not seen much evidence at all that would suggest that there was any kind of consciousness or even you know really awareness that there were Native people around in these three states where Cornell was managing a quite effective speculative enterprise.
María: We’re talking about evidence and I want to try to paint a picture, most of our audience or like myself are business school students who don’t spend a significant amount of time doing historical research, of what your process is like. I think that’s really kind of interesting, your work involves hours of painstakingly sorting through boxes of archival materials that include letters and ledgers and receipts and I imagine this data is not only vast but incredibly messy to process. What are some of the most interesting or surprising things that you have found?
Parmenter: I’m not the first person to have gone through this stuff. The first person to have substantially analyzed these records was a predecessor of mine in the history department named Paul Wallace Gates who published a book called the “Wisconsin Pinelands of Cornell University” in 1943 and when Gates did his research interestingly enough the records were actually still in the Treasurer’s office which was then in Morrill Hall at Cornell. Since that time, I’m not exactly sure when, the records have been kind of archived – meaning they’ve been placed into boxes and taken out of the like almost scrapbooks that they were in and so they’re now loose papers in folders and boxes and there are 66 boxes, 33 ledger volumes and that’s just in this collection alone. There’s a number of other collections in early institutional records that sort of this touches on and I think the thing, the first thing I would say is that what really is struck me and I’d read Gates’ book before I started doing this but until you sort of get into this you really don’t appreciate the scale and scope of the operation. This is truly a quite jaw-dropping enterprise when you look at the original records. You can just sort of see how much time this involved, how much energy was devoted to it and attention and institutional time and resources. I’m pretty convinced this was the main job the Treasurer of the University had; the first two Treasurers of the University, I believe, are a father and son and this was basically their job. We’re talking some days 10 or 12 letters a day being written, 10 or 12 coming in, managing these enterprises and activities at a distance, using the postal system, sometimes telegraph and as we get later into it you see sort of the transition into modern office equipment like a typewriter and telephoning and these kinds of things. But I’ve really kind of identified I think three phases here that we can talk about: the acquisition period, which Ezra Cornell was personally very actively involved in from about 1866 to ’68, during which time nearly half a million acres of land in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Kansas came into his, and later the University’s possession. That’s followed by a period that I would sort of refer to as holding for capital gains that span most of the 1870’s, Ezra Cornell, as I mentioned, was very actively involved in this until he passed but this was sort of the process of maintaining the resource, which meant paying taxes on the land in various counties, making occasional small sales for you know revenue, and upkeep like protecting the land from trespass. Very intense bureaucratic work and, as I said, I think this took up a lot of the University Treasurer’s time. And then finally, a period of active selling that went from the early 1880’s till just after the turn of the 20th century. And here’s where you see the University beginning to finally reap the benefits of the long-term hold that had been taking place, okay, they actually benefited greatly from what appears to have been a deliberate undercount of white pine in the federal census of 1880 that caused the value of their timberland holdings in Wisconsin, in particular, to skyrocket overnight. And this is where you begin to see these massive sales of very large tracks of land to big timber companies like Weyerhaeuser, some of these are still around today, and I think what stands out for me as I’ve gone through this, you know I’ve really only been looking at the correspondence I haven’t really had the chance to look yet at the ledger books and the purely financial content, but you really sense the exhilaration manifested in the records by those involved, it was really a quite incredible natural resource extraction enterprise. I mean it was an exciting, dramatic process: negotiating deals, arguing with state and local governments about taxes, hiring and firing agents, working with lawyers, lawsuits left and right. It’s really a quite phenomenal to sort of sit there and try to take it all in. It was certainly an exciting dynamic, dramatic process for the University officials who saw the massive rewards come in on Mr. Cornell’s speculative gamble. And we’re talking the equivalent here of multiple billions of dollars in 2020 equivalencies, we’re seeing you know there’s several sales in the 1880’s alone that amount to the equivalent of two and three billion dollars today. So this is this is a lot of money, in fact the money was coming into Cornell almost faster than it could be counted. The disparity between the subsequent experiences of the University and the indigenous nations whose lands effectively took Cornell from zero to 60 in the space of 20 years (between about 1870 and 1890) could not be more stark and I’m convinced, as a result of the research I’ve been able to do, that we’re all here because of Cornell’s uniquely energetic and determined effort to leverage Morrill Act resources to build the University.
María: You mentioned the undercounting of the white pine. I’m curious, you know there’s clearly a lot of upside right, a lot of money to be made. Have you found any evidence that this was in some way deliberate or intentional?
Parmenter: Well, it’s interesting because one of the… the person who did the count for the census, the federal census, was actually one of Cornell’s former agents. He was an expert in the area, his sort of unfortunate legacy to history is a terrible handwriting, his letters take a long time to decipher. But there were people at the time, particularly in the timber industry, who immediately criticized these counts that were published in the federal census as way off and it does seem that there was a lot of questioning in the early 1880’s as to whether these could be right or not. But many people decided they weren’t going to take the chance and started buying this stuff up at vastly increased prices. I mean, let’s be clear here, Cornell acquired the land for 60 cents an acre, it was sold on average for almost 10 dollars an acre with some sales that were close to 80 dollars an acre. So the amount of money that turns as a result of that 1880 census count is certainly not insignificant and there, again like I said, were people at the time who were very skeptical of it but they were kind of drowned out in the noise of everybody rushing to make sure they didn’t miss out.
María: Another piece that’s really interesting to me, in terms of your process, is you know you talked about bad handwriting and in our pre-interview you shared a frustrating anecdote in which a rodent consumed what would have been an important bit of research. Can you talk a little bit about what happened there?
Parmenter: Yeah, that that was something that was kind of a function of the arc of the records being stored outside of an archival environment for a long time. It really wasn’t until the 50’s or 60’s that someone effectively rescued them from an office which at the time could have been in Morrill Hall and what I think happened was the documents were stored in binders; they would literally come in as letters and they would put a piece of like adhesive paper on them and basically fold them into a scrapbook and I think some of the scrapbooks on the lower shelf, there was a run of letters that had the bottom right corner of the page chewed away by mice or rats and because of the way people wrote their letters at the time, it typically had a significant sort of space at the top and then the bottom part you know writing on the bottom half of the page this meant that a significant chunk of many letters’ content is gone. And in one case this was sort of frustrating because there was a discussion of the University retaining mineral rights on lands even after they were sold and I, you know, that that document certainly is not complete so it’s a little hard. You just have to basically try to piece the story together as best you can from the fragments that remain. The good thing is there’s not that much of this damage but that one in particular was disappointing and I did sort of bring it to the attention of the staff at the library but they were they’re like yeah this happened a long time ago. So it’s not happening now.
María: So for the next few minutes, I want to shift our focus and kind of zoom out and think about this conversation and its implications in a broader sense right and the conclusion of your article is titled “Flipping the Script: Prospects of Moving Forward.” You begin this section with an anecdote about a conversation with a friend about this research and I would like to pose that same question that she asked you: “what’s the point of dredging all this up?”
Parmenter: Well, at one level, that’s basically the historian’s job. I mean, we dredge stuff up all the time. But in this case, for me, it was just the realization that the story of Cornell University’s origins had never been connected to indigenous dispossession was really a sobering one. I had always heard something about these Wisconsin lands, I’d kind of wondered about it, but it really wasn’t until I read the Lee and Atone piece and sort of began to kind of understand the scale of this that. I realized I had to find out more about it because I think when you make that connection it raises a lot of questions about the nature of past events and whether, when their dynamics are brought fully to light, they warrant not only reflection in the present but maybe also atonement. And I want to be clear and say that I’m not interested in judging 19th century historical actors by 21st century standards of ethics, those are for us, we’re the ones with the full awareness of what was done, how it was done, who benefited and who didn’t. We’re the ones that ought to be judged by how we respond to that knowledge.
María: The more I read about this topic the more I was left wondering: what does redress look like? In the last decade institutions in the U.S. and Canada have embraced the land acknowledgement. Where does this approach fall into the spectrum of possible responses?
Parmenter: Land acknowledgements can be an important first step in a process of reconciliation. We actually were just engaged in a discussion over the past couple weeks about how Cornell ought to address that and senior administration officials demonstrated an interest in getting that done properly. So we did make some headway there. There’s new language on Cornell’s land grant affairs website that can be found at landgrant.cornell.edu. We’re hopeful that this can be a first step toward raising awareness on campus, in the wider community of land-grant colleges and universities more generally, and of course with the… in fact with the affected indigenous communities. This is, of course, a first step. It’s words on a web page, okay, there has to be some things that kind of go beyond that. But I was encouraged by the way in which people responded to some of the commentary that that we offered, and I think that the right thing was done in that regard.
María: In terms of going beyond that, can you think of any examples of more authentic or maybe effective gestures of apology, redemption and you spoke of atonement?
Parmenter: Yeah, these are these are difficult, I mean, because we don’t have a lot of great examples of this. The one that people refer to a lot in Canada, I don’t remember exactly what year it was, it was probably about 10 years ago, the prime minister of Canada broke into tears during his apology to indigenous people. Not many people know that the Obama administration did apologize to Native people, the apology is buried in a defense appropriations bill, but I think in our particular case the real silver lining for us at Cornell is that the proceeds of dispossession went to an institution founded on principles that are dedicated to making a lasting positive difference in the world. Land-grant colleges and universities pride themselves on being the social conscience of American higher education and this is a tremendous advantage to eventually achieving an effective reconciliation of this particular historical issue. We have the rationale, we have the means, we have the capacity, we just have to find a way to bring all these things together and, in my view, what this is really going to mean at some point is sitting down with representatives from affected indigenous communities and having a grown-up conversation about the intersections between their needs and the resources available here to help address them. That’s really, in my mind, the only way to do it in a meaningful respectful way.
María: When we spoke last you mentioned that your work is very much ongoing. So I’m curious, what comes next for you?
Parmenter: Well, it’s going to take me the better part of next year to finish research in Cornell’s collections alone and I think that’ll help me determine where I need to go to round out the story; that being the post-dispossession histories of the indigenous nations that I’ve identified as affected here that’ll probably be several archives in trips out to Wisconsin, Minnesota and Kansas. And I have already begun the process myself of reaching out to members of these affected descendant communities for their perspective. I mean, that’s very much in the early in planning stages of things, given the limitations we have currently on travel and whatnot, but certainly that is something that’s going to be important for my work as well. So, I am planning a book on this, I’m hoping it will be ready within, I’ll be optimistic and say 2023, hoping that you know I can get going on some of the research that’s out of town. But I have certainly a lot to do here ,which is great, and it’s really been quite wonderful, even under these very difficult circumstances to have had the access that I’ve had this fall. It’s enabled me to get a real good start on certain aspects of the main collection and also to identify the affiliated collections that I’m going to need to look at as well.
María: To wrap up, many of our listeners are current MBA’s, like myself, or graduates who are now operating in the business world and want to use our privilege to address systemic injustices. What’s your advice for someone who might be learning about this history for the first time?
Parmenter: My advice would be to look more closely at the history that’s often hiding in plain sight and to think about why that’s the case and to ask questions. So a better understanding of an institution’s origins or the origins of a particular business can be very helpful for orienting its present values and its future plans. That’s sort of the message I try to leave my students with and I think it would apply to you folks as well.
María: Well, Professor Parmenter, it’s been such a pleasure speaking with you about this very important work. Thank you so much for being on Present Value.
Parmenter: Oh, thank you for having me.
María: The Present Value podcast is an independent editorial project created by students at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. This episode was produced by Greg Wool, Minwei ACao, Gleb Margolin and me. I’m your host, María Castex. Music by Poddington Bear logo by Kalechi Pomongo. Until next time, thanks for listening to Present Value.