Data obtained through the Land Grab University investigation conducted by Grist shows that much of what remains of the Normal School Trust land is tribal land taken mostly from the Ojibwe people
During the fall 2023 semester there were fewer than 700 Native Americans enrolled at Universities of Wisconsin schools, about 0.4 percent of the total student population, according to system data. Yet despite that minuscule proportion, Tribes in Wisconsin continue to have a large impact on the UW System.
In the 2023 fiscal year, through a land trust managed by the state’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL), the Universities of Wisconsin received more than $1 million earned by lands that had been taken from the state’s tribes during the 19th century.
The UW System is one of 52 land-grant universities that was supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from indigenous tribes to fund the creation of public universities.
But the Morrill Act was just one piece of the actions, from the federal and then-newly formed state government, that used tribal land to prop up the University of Wisconsin. In the 1780s, the Northwest Ordinance opened the created incentives to encourage the settlement of the Wisconsin territory while creating the system in which lands are held in a trust to fund education, according to Matt Villeneuve, a professor of history and American Indian studies at UW-Madison.
In 1850, just two years after Wisconsin achieved statehood, the federal government passed the Swamp Land Act, which allowed states to claim millions of acres of swamp land with the goal of draining the swamps to create more farmland. Wisconsin received the title to more than 3 million acres of land, without regard for whether or not the swamps included tribal land.
This act led to an explosion in the settlement of central Wisconsin despite opposition from the state’s tribes who, according to Villeneuve, tried multiple times to stop the taking of the swamp land. In 1897, the Stockbridge Munsee lost a lawsuit seeking to have some of this land returned to them.
Later, in 1865, the state government decided it didn’t need all the land and, according to the public lands commission, sold off half of it. The Legislature then passed a law which placed half the proceeds from the sale and half of the lands into a trust for the benefit of normal schools, which at the time were the state’s first teaching colleges.
Today, just 70,000 acres remain in the Normal School Trust Fund, yet the fund’s principal has grown to about $30 million.
Data obtained through the Land Grab University investigation conducted by Grist, an independent nonprofit media organization, shows that much of what remains of the Normal School Trust land is tribal land taken mostly from the Ojibwe people.
The extraction of timber from more than 68,000 acres of land originally held by tribal nations spread across the Upper Midwest — for which the federal government paid just $107,352, adjusted for inflation — now contributes about $1 million per year to the Universities of Wisconsin.
In a multi-state investigation, Grist found 8.2 millions of surface and subsurface acres of land taken from 123 Indigenous nations helping to fund 14 public universities. The combined nations were paid a combined $4.3 million for their land, according to Grist, while in 2022 those lands generated $2.2 billion for their schools.
read more: https://ictnews.org/news/university-of-wisconsin-schools-benefit-financially-from-former-tribal-land