This project expands on previous research on land-grab universities, as published at High Country News.
Signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the Morrill Act used land taken from Native communities to fund public colleges across the US. For this project, a team of Grist reporters examined publicly available data to locate and map these trust lands. They also identify 14 land-grant universities that continue to benefit from colonization and the natural resources on stolen Indigenous land, including the University of Arizona, New Mexico State University, Texas A&M, and Washington State University.
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.
In 2022, the year Sierra enrolled, UArizona’s state trust lands provided the institution $7.7 million — enough to have paid the full cost of attendance for more than half of every Native undergraduate at the Tucson campus that same year. But providing free attendance to anyone is an unlikely scenario, as the school works to rein in a budget shortfall of nearly $240 million.
Students like Alina Sierra struggle to pay for education at a university built on her peoples’ lands and supported with their natural resources. . . .
In December 2023, Sierra decided the cost to attend UArizona was too high and dropped out.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/7m1edky
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/NgkAe7K
