indigenous

Alina Sierra needs $6,405. In 2022, the 19-year-old Tohono O’odham student was accepted to the University of Arizona, her dream school, and excited to become the first in her family to go to college.

Her godfather used to take her to the university’s campus when she was a child, and their excursions could include a stop at the turtle pond or lunch at the student union. Her grandfather also encouraged her, saying: “You’re going to be here one day.”

“Ever since then,” said Sierra. “I wanted to go.”

Then the financial reality set in. Unable to afford housing either on or off campus, she couch-surfed her first semester. Barely able to pay for meals, she turned to the campus food pantry for hygiene products. “One week I would get soap; another week, get shampoo,” she said. Without reliable access to the internet, and with health issues and a long bus commute, her grades began to slip. She was soon on academic probation.

“I always knew it would be expensive,” said Sierra. “I just didn’t know it would be this expensive.”

She was also confused. The university, known colloquially as UArizona, expressed a lot of support for Indigenous students. It wasn’t just that the Tohono O’odham flag hung in the bookstore or that the university had a land acknowledgment reminding the community that the Tucson campus was on O’odham and Yaqui homelands. The same year she was accepted, UArizona launched a program to cover tuition and mandatory fees for undergraduates from all 22 Indigenous nations in the state. President Robert C. Robbins described the new Arizona Native Scholars Grant as a step toward fulfilling the school’s land-grant mission.

Sierra was eligible for the grant, but it didn’t cover everything. After all the application forms and paperwork, she was still left with a balance of thousands of dollars. She had no choice but to take out a loan, which she kept a secret from her family, especially her mom. “That’s the number one thing she told me: ‘Don’t get a loan,’ but I kind of had to.”

Established in 1885, almost 30 years before Arizona was a state, UArizona was one of 52 land-grant universities supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from Indigenous nations to fund a network of colleges across the fledgling United States.

By the early 20th century, grants issued under the Morrill Act had produced the modern equivalent of a half a billion dollars for land-grant institutions from the redistribution of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous lands. While most land-grant universities ignore this colonial legacy, UArizona’s Native scholars program appeared to be an effort to exorcise it.

But the Morrill Act is only one piece of legislation that connects land expropriated from Indigenous communities to these universities.

In combination with other land-grant laws, UArizona still retains rights to nearly 687,000 acres of land — an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles. The university also has rights to another 703,000 subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other resources underground. Known as trust lands, these expropriated Indigenous territories are held and managed by the state for the school’s continued benefit.

State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.

The parcels themselves are scattered and rural, typically uninhabited and seldom marked. Most appear undeveloped and blend in seamlessly with surrounding landscapes. That is, when they don’t have something like logging underway or a frack pad in sight.

read more: https://www.hcn.org/articles/stolen-indigenous-land-is-the-foundation-of-the-land-grant-university-system-climate-change-is-its-legacy/