At least 11 Native American tribes are calling for reparations from the University of Minnesota

Eleven Native American tribes, including the Red Lake Nation and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, are calling for reparations from the University of Minnesota, the Washington Post has reported. The university’s endowment was funded by “public” land that actually came through the dispossession of Indigenous Nations from their traditional territories, thanks to a law passed a century and a half ago.

The Morrill Act, signed by then-president Abraham Lincoln in 1862, enabled the creation of several land-grant universities. One of them, the University of Minnesota (UMN) received 94,631 acres of land. Most of it was ceded by the Sioux (Dakota) in the Treaty of 1851, while the remainder came from the Treaty of 1847, signed by the Chippewa (Ojibwe) of the Mississippi and Lake Superior.

Today, the 11 tribes contend that UMN is, in fact, a “land-grab” university, because it obtained land taken by the government at a huge discount. For instance, the Dakota tribe was paid $2,309 in the Treaty of 1851—a paltry $0.02 per acre. UMN sold those lands for 251 times that amount. “Not even the world’s most sophisticated Ponzi scheme could promise a 25,000 percent return on investment,” the website for UMN’s Truth Project, which has been researching the impact of the land grab on tribal communities, notes. The Truth Project is trying to quantify claims for redressal, posing questions such as: “What does the University of Minnesota’s land grab equate to in today’s dollars for the Dakota and the Ojibwe tribes? Can a dollar amount be determined for each tribal nation?” But answers are hard to come by. Even activists are unable to arrive at an exact monetary payout as compensation.

The call for restitution from UMN originated in a March 2020 article in High Country News, which highlighted how a seemingly harmless Civil War-era law stole property from Indigenous peoples to invest it for university endowments.

A month later, the research, conducted by a University of Cambridge historian named Robert Lee and High Country News journalists, was published on a free interactive website. It brought attention to the fact that scores of US land-grant schools, including Yale, Cornell, MIT, Pennsylvania State, Texas A&M, and the University of California, benefited from the spoils of land grabs.

By the early 20th century, these grants had raised $17.7 million for university endowments, with unsold lands valued at an additional $5.1 million. Adjusted for inflation, the grants were worth $596 million in 2020 dollars.