Spring 2025
Introduction
In 1862, the Morrill Act was passed, paving the way for the establishment of America’s land-grant universities. We will explore the background of what the Morrill Act is and how it continued the narrative of settler colonialism in the United States during the 19th century. We will also identify the impact the Morrill Act had on the taking of Indigenous lands and how taken lands can be identified today.
The Passing of the Morrill Act
The Morrill Act was a bill proposed by Senator of Vermont, Justin Morrill, in which every state would gain 30,000 acres of federal ‘public land’ per senator and house representative to support the establishment of public universities (Stein 2017, 216). The federal ‘public land’ cited in the Morrill Act was land that the United States government acquired through a combination of violence against and treaties with tribal nations. For example, 30 years before the Morrill Act, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act which facilitated the further dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Calloway 2023, Ch.5). Legislation such as this resulted in the Cherokee Trail of Tears and opened up more land for settler-colonial use.
The goal of the establishment of land-grant universities was to create colleges where students could learn skills such as agriculture and other subjects that would allow for the expansion of an industrial workforce. The following quote from the Morrill Act describes the original criteria for how the public lands had to be used:
… the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts (Stein 2017, 216).
In this way the establishment of land-grant universities can be seen as a perpetuation of settler-colonial ideas of land use such as the western understanding of land as a resource to be exploited rather than a prevalent Indigenous understanding of land to be protected and treated with care.
Implementation of the Morrill Act
The establishment of universities was funded either through the use of land within an institution’s home state or through the selling of land elsewhere in the United States to help support college endowments. States out west had a larger abundance of acquired and unexploited Indigenous land to build colleges on and often used lands directly in the state, while states back east heavily utilized what are called scrips. Scrips were pieces of land throughout the United States that could be given by the federal government and sold by states to support the endowment of colleges. One of the largest users of the selling of scrip land was Cornell University. The following quote from historian Judy Kertész and sociologist Angela A. Gonzales’ article, “‘We Grow the Ivy’: Cornell’s Claim to Indigenous Dispossession,” in the Native American and Indigenous Studies journal describes the amount Cornell relied on the use of scrip.
In fact, of all land-grant institutions, Cornell amassed the lion’s share of an endowment generated through the sales of Indigenous lands. By 1914, Cornell’s endowment $5,739,657 far exceeded the $4.5 million procured by Montana State University, the next largest land-grant beneficiary of Indigenous dispossession (Kertész and Gonzales 2021, 145 – 150).
This exposes the painful history that one of the United States’ most prominent and esteemed universities was built off the stealing and exploitation of Indigenous lands. While Cornell was the highest benefactor of the land-grant system, universities across the United States under the label of land-grant benefitted.
Impact
The clear impact of the Morrill Act is the continuation of the exploitation of Indigenous lands. According to High Country News, land from 245 tribal nations amounting to 10,675,061 acres were used to support the establishment of land-grant universities (Lee 2020). This means that universities either directly used that land or sold the land to build up endowments. Another impact which is not as apparent as the stealing of land is the myth surrounding the establishment of America’s institutions of higher education. The promise of accessible education available to the general public often blurs the other side of the story of the Morrill Act, the one of Indigenous land theft. This continues to perpetuate the narrative that the United States’ expansion throughout the modern day continental U.S. and beyond was for the greater good.
Conclusion
While the Morrill Act is not the reason why the United States originally stole Indigenous lands, it is important to remember the role that the Morrill Act played in perpetuating the U.S.’s role as a settler state. This challenges us to reconcile the fact that land-grant universities both provided a platform for the accessibility and development of education within the United States while also continuing aspects of settler colonialism and injustices against Indigenous peoples.
Continued Reading
The data used in this blog was found from the High Country News’ website on their research into what Indigenous land each land-grant university benefited from. High Country News is a non-profit media source which reports on news in the western United States with a specific focus on environmental issues (High Country News 2025). The methodology used by High Country News to research the transactions of land was centered in the use of publicly available databases, such as the United States government’s Bureau of Land Management (Lee 2020). To learn more about this topic please check out the project by High Country News on the establishment of land-grant universities. A link to this project is provided here: https://www.landgrabu.org/universities/.
Bibliography
Brayboy, Bryan McKinley Jones, and Amanda R. Tachine. “Myths, Erasure, and Violence: The Immoral Triad of the Morrill Act.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 139–44. doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.8.1.0139. Accessed 3 June 2025.
Calloway, Colin G. 2023. “First Peoples.” Chapter 5. Macmillan Higher Education. Available from: Yuzu, (7th Edition). Accessed 3 June 2025.
High Country News. “About High Country News – High Country News.” 2025. High Country News. HCN. January 30, 2025. www.hcn.org/about/. Accessed 3 June 2025.
Kertész, Judy, and Angela A. Gonzales. “‘We Grow the Ivy’: Cornell’s Claim to Indigenous Dispossession.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 145–50. doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.8.1.0145. Accessed 3 June 2025.
Lee, Robert. 2020. “How We Investigated the Land-Grant University System.” High Country News. March 30, 2020. www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-education-how-we-investigated-the-land-grant-university-system/. Accessed 3 June 2025.
Lee, Robert, et al. 2020. “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News. www.landgrabu.org/tribes/. Accessed 3 June 2025.
Stein, Sharon. 2017. “A Colonial History of the Higher Education Present: Rethinking Land-Grant Institutions through Processes of Accumulation and Relations of Conquest.” Critical Studies in Education 61 (2): 212–28. doi:10.1080/17508487.2017.1409646. Accessed 3 June 2025.
Senate.gov. 2023. “U.S. Senate: Justin S. Morrill.” September 8, 2023. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Justin_S_Morrill.htm. Accessed 3 June 2025.
