Breach of Trust

Alina Sierra needs $6,316. In 2022, the 22-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 grandfather used to take her to UArizona’s campus when she was a child, and their excursions could include a stop at the turtle pond, or lunch at the student union. “He’d always tell me: ‘you’re going to be here one day,’ and ever since then I wanted to go.”

Then the financial reality set in. Unable to afford housing either on- or off-campus, she couch-surfed in her first semester. Barely able to pay for meals, she turned to the campus food pantry for hygiene products. “I would get soap one week and then one week get shampoo,” she said. Without reliable access to the internet, health issues, and with 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. 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 she didn’t learn about it until her second semester and 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 was ‘don’t get a loan’, but I kinda 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. It’s not uncommon to think that Morrill Act grants were used only for campuses, but the lands granted to universities were often located thousands of miles away. While most land-grant universities ignore this colonial legacy, UArizona’s Native scholars program appeared to be an effort to exorcize it. 

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

In combination with other land grant laws, UArizona still retains rights to nearly 687 thousand acres of land — an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles — and another 703 thousand subsurface acres. Known as “trust lands,” these expropriated Indigenous territories are held and managed by the state for the school’s continued benefit. 

[WOULD LOVE A UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA DRONE SHOT HERE — OVERVIEW OF CAMPUS IF POSSIBLE. IF NOT POSSIBLE, COULD DO SOME OF THE TRUST LANDS ASSOCIATED WITH THE 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 — categories that have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What no one has 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.

In 2022, the year Sierra enrolled, UArizona’s state trust land revenue exceeded $10.4 million, before it was invested — more than enough to have paid the full cost of attendance for almost every Native undergraduate at the Tucson campus. That’s an unlikely scenario, as the institution works to reign in a budget shortfall of nearly $240 million.

UArizona’s reliance on state trust land for revenue not only contradicts its commitment to recognize past injustices regarding stolen Indigenous lands, but also threatens its climate commitments. The school has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. 

The parcels are managed by the Arizona State Land Department, a separate government agency that has leased portions of them to agriculture, grazing, and commercial activities. But extractive industries make up a major portion of the school’s portfolio. Of the 705,000 subsurface, or mineral acres, that benefit UArizona, almost 692,000 are earmarked for oil and gas production. The lands were taken from at least 10 Indigenous nations, almost all of which were seized by executive order or congressional action in the wake of warfare. 

Over the past year, Grist has examined publicly available data to locate trust lands associated with land-grant universities seeded by the Morrill Act. In the process, we identified their original sources and analyzed their ongoing uses. In all, we located and mapped more than 8.1 million surface and subsurface acres taken from 146 Indigenous nations that currently produce income for 14 land-grant universities.

“Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia and a climate researcher. “It’s not just a historical fact, the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.”

The amount of acreage under management for land-grant universities varies widely, from as little as 15,000 acres above ground in North Dakota to more than 2.1 million below in Texas. Combined, Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.3 million in today’s dollars for these lands, but in many cases, nothing was paid at all. In 2022 alone, these trust lands generated more than $469 million for their schools. Between 2018 and 2022, the lands produced $2.2 billion. 

This work builds upon previous investigations that examined how land grabs capitalized and transformed the U.S. university system. This new data reveals how state trust lands continue to transfer wealth from Indigenous nations to land-grant universities more than a century after the original Morrill Act.

It also provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change in the western United States. Nearly a third of land-grant universities with trust lands benefited from oil and gas exploration while another 11 percent relied on income from mining of minerals like coal and iron-rich taconite. Logging, agriculture, grazing, and recreation make up the remaining land use activities. However, those land use statistics are incomplete due to data retention standards on a state-by-state basis, and many state land agencies we contacted for this story had incomplete public information on how land was used. 

“People generally are not eager to confront their own complicity in colonialism and climate change,” said Stein. “But we also have to recognize, for instance, myself as a white settler, that we are part of that system, that we are benefiting from that system, that we are actively reproducing that system every day.”

While students like Alina Sierra struggle to pay for education at a university built on her peoples’ lands and supported with their natural resources, future generations, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, will have to live with the consequences of trust land choices made to subsidize land-grant universities today. 

In December, Sierra decided the cost to attend UArizona was too high and dropped out. 

UArizona did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

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Acreage now held in trust by states for land-grant universities is part of America’s sweeping history of real estate creation, a history rooted in Indigenous dispossession. 

Trust lands in most states were clipped from the more than 1.8 billion acres once part of the United States’ public domain — territory claimed, conquered, and redistributed in a process that began in the 18th century and continues today.

The making of the public domain is the stuff of textbook lessons on U.S. expansion. From state land claims reaching as far west as the Mississippi River handed over to the national government after the American Revolution through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to the Alaska Purchase of 1867, a series of huge acquisitions assembled federal territory.

Backed by the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal principle with religious roots that justified the seizure of lands around the world by Europeans, U.S. claims to Indigenous territories were initially little more than projections of jurisdiction. They asserted an exclusive right to steal from Indigenous nations, divide the territory into new states, and carve it up into private property. Although Pope Francis repudiated the Catholic Church’s association with the doctrine in 2023, it remains a bedrock principle of U.S. law.

Starting in the 1780s, federal authorities began aggressively taking Native land before surveying and selling parcels to new owners. Treaties were the preferred instrument, accompanied by a range of executive orders and congressional acts. Behind their tidy legal language and token payments lay actual or threatened violence, or the use of debts or dire conditions, such as starvation, to coerce signatures from Indigenous peoples and compel relocation. 

By the 1930s, tribal landholdings covered less than 2 percent of the United States in the form of reservations. Most were located in places with few natural resources and more sensitive to climate change than their original homelands. When reservations proved more valuable than expected, due to the discovery of oil, for instance, outcomes could be even worse, as viewers of Killers of the Flower Moon learned last year.   

The public domain once covered three-fourths of what is today the United States. Federal authorities still retain about 30 percent of this reservoir of plundered land, most conspicuously as national parks, but also as military bases, national forests, grazing land, and more. The rest, nearly 1.3 billion acres, has been redistributed to new owners through myriad laws. 

When it came to redistribution, grants of various stripes were more common than land sales. Individuals and corporate grantees — think homesteaders or railroads — were prominent recipients, but in terms of sheer acreage given, they trailed a third group: state governments. 

Federal-to-state grants were immense. Cram them all together and they would comfortably cover all of western Europe. Despite their size and ongoing financial significance, they have never attracted much attention outside of state offices and agencies responsible for managing them.

The Morrill Act is one of the best known examples of federal-to-state grants, and in one key sense was unexceptional: It followed an established path for funding institutions by allocating Indigenous land to state legislatures for administration on behalf of beneficiaries selected by those bodies. 

Many other laws subsidized higher education by issuing grants to state or territorial governments in a similar way. The biggest of those bounties came through so-called “enabling acts” that authorized U.S. territories to graduate to statehood. 

Every new state carved out of the public domain in the contiguous United States received land grants for public institutions through their enabling acts, which functioned like dowries for joining the Union. These grants funded a variety of public works and state services ranging from prisons to fish hatcheries.

IMAGE	TEXT
Land, no political boundaries	For as long as the sun has risen in the east and set in the west, Indigenous peoples have lived with, and cared for, the lands they call home.
Zoom to Washington? Overlay land cessions	But as settlers moved west, U.S. government and military officials forced those communities from their lands, sometimes through the signing of treaties, sometimes through military action.
Overlay territory / state borders	Once ceded, those lands became territories, then, states. With statehood, those lands could become part of America’s real estate system.
Fade up National Grid	Lands inside newly formed states were overlaid with the United States National Grid – a rectangular coordinate system designed by early colonists to map newly acquired Indigenous lands.
Zoom to township	One six-by-six mile square on the grid is known as a township.
Highlight sections	Inside each township are 36 more one-by-one mile squares called sections.
Highlight 16/36	In most states, sections 16 and 36 of every township were set aside to fund education.
Zoom out to western US	In the years since statehood, some of these lands have been sold or swapped, but most Western states have held onto their trust lands.
Emphasize OUR trust lands. Fade up ALL trust lands, freeze to transition to next sentence.	Spread across the western U.S. land grid, trust lands are often unseen, landlocked and anonymous on the landscape.

Their primary function, however, was subsidizing education. Primary and secondary schools, or K-12, were the greatest beneficiaries by far, followed by institutions of higher education. What remains of them today are referred to as trust lands. “A perpetual, multi-generational land trust for the support of the Beneficiaries and future generations,” as the Arizona State Land Department describes them.

Higher education grants were earmarked for universities, teachers colleges, mining schools, scientific schools, and agricultural colleges, the latter being the means through which states that joined the Union after 1862 got their Morrill Act shares. States could separate or consolidate their benefits as they saw fit, which resulted in many grants becoming attached to Morrill Act colleges.  

Originally, the land was intended to be sold to raise capital for trust funds. By the late 19th century, however, stricter requirements on sales and a more conscientious pursuit of long-term gains reduced sales in favor of short-term leasing. 

The change in management strategy paid off. Many state land trusts have been operating for more than a century. In that time, they have generated rents from agriculture, grazing, and recreation. As soon as they were able, managers moved into natural resource extraction, permitting oil wells, logging, mining, and fracking. Land use decisions are typically made by state land agencies or lawmakers. Of the six land-grant institutions that responded to requests for comment on this investigation, those that referenced their trust lands made clear that they had no control over permitted activities, deferring to state agencies.

[parker/clay/maria – LAND USE INTERACTIVE GOES HERE]

State agencies likewise receive and distribute the income. As money comes in, it is either delivered directly to beneficiaries or, more commonly, diverted to permanent state trust funds, which invest the proceeds and make scheduled payouts to support services like higher education.

These trusts have a fiduciary obligation to generate profit for institutions, not minimize environmental damage. Although some of the permitted activities are renewable and low-impact, others are quietly stripping the land. All of them fill public coffers with proceeds derived from ill-gotten resources. 

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For a $10 fee last December, anyone in New Mexico could chop down a Christmas tree in a pine stand on a patch of state trust land just off Highway 120 near Black Lake, southeast of Taos. The rules: pay your fee, bring your permit, choose a tree, and leave nothing behind but a stump less than 6 inches high.

“The holidays are a time we should be enjoying our loved ones, not worrying about the cost of providing a memorable experience for our kids,” said the Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, adding that “the nominal fee it costs for a permit will directly benefit New Mexico public schools, so it supports a good cause too.” The offer has been popular enough to keep the program running for several years.

The New Mexico State Land Office, sometimes described by state legislators as “the most powerful office you’ve never heard of,” has been a successful operation for a very long time. Since it started reporting revenue in 1900, it’s generated well over $42 billion in current dollars.

All that money isn’t from Christmas trees.

For generations, oil and gas royalties have fueled the state’s trust land revenue, with a portion of the funds earmarked for New Mexico State University, a land-grant school founded in 1888 when New Mexico was still a territory.

The oil comes from drilling in the northwestern fringe of the Permian Basin, one of the oldest targets of large-scale oil production in the United States. Standard Oil, the infamous monopoly controlled by John D. Rockefeller, was operating in the Permian as early as the 1920s. Despite being a consistent source of shale oil, prospects for ongoing exploitation dimmed by the late 20th Century, before surging again in the 21st.

In recent decades, more sophisticated exploration techniques have revealed more “recoverable” fossil fuel in the Permian than previously believed. A 2018 report by the United States Geological Survey pegged the volume at 46.3 billion barrels of oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which made the Permian the largest oil and gas deposit in the nation. Analysts, shocked at the sheer volume, and the money to be made, have taken to crowning the Permian the “King of Shale Oil.” Critics concerned with the climate impact of the expanding operations call it a “carbon bomb.”

As oil and gas extraction spiked, so did New Mexico’s trust land receipts. In the last 20 years, oil and gas has generated between 91 and 97 percent of annual trust land revenue. It broke annual all-time-highs in half of those years, topping $1 billion for the first time in 2019 and reaching $2.75 billion last year. Adjusted for inflation, more than 20 percent of New Mexico’s trust’s land income since 1900 has arrived in just the last five years.

“Every dollar earned by the Land Office,” Commissioner Richard said when revenues broke the billion-dollar barrier, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.” 

Trust land as a cost-free source of subsidies for citizens is a common framing. In 2023, Richard declared that her office had saved every New Mexico taxpayer $1500 that year. The press release did not mention oil or gas, or Apache bands in the state.

Virtually all the trust land in New Mexico, including 186,000 surface acres and 253,000 subsurface acres now benefiting NMSU, was seized from various Apache bands during the so-called Apache Wars. 

In 2019, newly-elected New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham began aligning state policy with “scientific consensus around climate change”. According to the state’s climate action website, New Mexico is working to tackle climate change by transitioning to clean electricity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, supporting economic transition from coal to clean energy, and shoring up natural resource resilience. 

“New Mexico is serious about climate change – and we have to be. We are already seeing drier weather and rising temperatures,” the governor wrote on the state’s website. “This administration is committed not only to preventing global warming, but also preparing for its effects today and into the future.”

In 2021, the state’s climate task force announced that it had doubled the number of renewable energy leases on state lands, and noted that there was sustained demand for land among the renewable energy industry — a move that would increase green energy sources on the state’s electric grid while also meeting the needs of those lands to generate revenue. 

No mention was made of increasingly profitable oil and gas extraction on trust lands or their production in the Permian. In 2023, just one 240-acre parcel of land benefiting NMSU was leased for $6 million in partial fulfillment of the mission of the Land Office’s Oil, Gas, and Mineral Division: “Optimize Revenues While Protecting Our Heritage and Our Future.” 

NMSU did not respond to a request for comment on this story. 

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Scan the land-grant university trust map and more than 2.1 million acres benefiting Texas A&M jump out — nearly half of the acreage uncovered in our investigation. They fill an area almost three times the size of Rhode Island above and below ground and are located in 20 concentrated clusters in oil-rich west Texas.  

Take the long drive west along I-10 between San Antonio and El Paso, in the southwest region of the Permian Basin, and you’ll pass straight through five of those densely-packed parcels without ever knowing it — they’re hidden in plain sight on the arid landscape. These tracts, and several others not far from the highway, were Mescalero Apache territory. Kiowas and Comanches relinquished what became the other large groupings of parcels further north.

Between a federal campaign to eradicate buffalo on the plains to starve tribes, multiple military skirmishes including the Texas-Indian War and the Red River War, and increased pressure from Texans and settlers moving West, the Kiowa and Comanche were declared “hostile” by the United States. In the years after the Civil War a “peace commission” pressured Indigenous leaders for rapprochement that would secure land for tribes in northern Texas and Oklahoma. Within two years, federal agents dramatically reduced the size of the reservation with another treaty, triggering another decade of conflict.

The consequences were disastrous. Kiowas and Comanches lost their land to Texas and their populations collapsed. Between 1850 and 1890, Kiowas lost more than 60 percent of their people to disease and war while Comanches lost nearly 90 percent. 

Many members of Kiowa and Comanche military units that surrendered to U.S authorities in the wake of combat were sent to Fort Marion, Florida, to serve prison sentences alongside other captured “hostiles” including Geronimo. Between 1875 and 1878, many of the prisoners of war were taught English, military drills, and religion under the supervision of Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt. 

Under Pratt, educating Indians was an experiment, and his successes at Fort Marion inspired the lieutenant to open the first off-reservation boarding school for Indigenous children in the U.S. in 1878 — the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial school.

If this general pattern of colonization and genocide was a common one, the trajectory that resulted in Texas A&M’s supercharged trust land endowment was not.

Texas was never part of the U.S. public domain. Its brief stint as an independent nation enabled it to enter the Union as a state, and like the original thirteen states, it claimed rights to sell or otherwise distribute all the not-yet-privatized land within its borders.

Following the broader national model, but ratcheting up the scale, Texas would allocate over 2 million acres to subsidize higher education. 

[ELI: TEXAS A&M ON-THE-GROUND OR AERIAL SHOT. VIDEO PREFERRED, PHOTO OK TOO]

Established to take advantage of a Morrill Act allocation of 180,000 acres from the public domain, Texas A&M opened its doors in 1876. The same year, Texas allocated a million acres of trust lands, followed by another million in 1883, nearly all of it on land relinquished in treaties from the mid-1860s.

The Comanche and Kiowa would receive about two cents per acre through their treaties. The Mescalero Apache got nothing. 

Today the Permanent University Fund derived from the land, managed by the Texas General Land Office, is worth over $30 billion. That’s thanks to oil, of course, which has been flowing from the university’s trust lands since 1923. In 2022, alone they earned nearly [$TK].  

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Further west, Washington’s enabling act allocated 90,000 acres to support an agricultural college, and 100,000 acres for a scientific school. The state still controls more than 80 percent of the land on the surface, and nearly 98 percent of the subsurface rights, with proceeds flowing to Washington State University. 

For more than a century, logging has been the main driver of WSU’s trust land income, land taken from 21 different Indigenous nations, especially the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. More than 86,000 of the surface acres allocated to WSU are located inside Yakama land cessions, which started in 1855. Between 2018 and 2022, trust lands produced nearly $48 million in revenue for the university. 

“But the university does not receive the proceeds from timber sales directly,” said Phil Weiler, a spokesperson for WSU. “Lands held in trust for the university are managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, not WSU.”

In 2022, WSU’s trust lands produced about $17.3 million in logging revenue, which was deposited into a fund managed by the State Investment Board. In other words, the state takes on the management responsibility of turning timber into investments, while WSU reaps the rewards by drawing income from the fund capitalized with the revenue. 

“The Washington Legislature decides how much of the investment earnings will be paid out to Washington State University each biennium,” said Weiler. “By law, those payouts can only be used to fund capital projects and debt service. The disbursements cannot be used for any other purpose.”

From its two main trust land funds, this arrangement yielded more than $96.7 million dollars for WSU between 2018 and 2022, and has generally been on the rise since the Great Recession. In recent decades, the money has gone to construction and maintenance of the institution’s infrastructure, like its Biomedical and Health Sciences building, and the PACCAR Clean Technology Building – a research center focused on innovating wood products and sustainable design completed in 2016. 

That revenue may look small in comparison to WSU’s $1.2 billion dollar endowment, but it has added up over time. From statehood in 1889 to 2022, timber sales on trust lands provided Washington State University with at least $1.1 billion in revenue when adjusted for inflation. But those figures are likely higher: between 1971 and 1983, the State of Washington did not submit detailed records on trust land revenue as a cost-cutting measure. 

“Washington State University (WSU) is aware that our campuses are located on the homelands of Native peoples and that the institution receives financial benefit from trust lands,” said Weiler. “Washington State University is committed to deepening our connections with Tribal nations and improving support for Native students.”

According to WSU, a fall 2023 cluster hire program focused on hiring scholars engaged in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, and the school secured funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to increase scholarships, recruitment and retention. In the spring of 2023, WSU re-upped a memorandum with the 13 Indigenous nations of Washington State to continue, and expand, cooperation with tribal leaders. 

Meanwhile, WSU students have demanded that the university divest from fossil fuel companies held in the endowment. Even if the Board of Regents agreed, it would not likely apply to the school’s state-controlled trust fund, which currently contains shares in ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and at least two dozen other corporations in the oil and gas sector.

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In states with trust lands, a reasonably comfortable buffer exists between beneficiaries, legislators, land managers, and investment boards, but that hasn’t always been the case. In Minnesota’s early days, state leaders founded the University of Minnesota while also making policy that would benefit the school, binding the state’s history of genocide with the institution. Those actions still impact Indigenous peoples in the state today while providing steady revenue streams to the University.

Henry Sibley began to amass his fortune around 1834 after only a few years in the fur trade in the territory of what would become Minnesota, rising to the role of regional manager of the American Fur Company at just 24. But even then, the industry was on the decline — wild game had been over hunted and competition was fierce. Sibley responded by diversifying his activities. He moved into timber, making exclusive agreements with the Ojibwe to log along the Snake and Upper St. Croix rivers. 

His years in “wild Indian country” were paying off: Sibley knew the land, waterways, and resources of the Great Lakes region, and he knew the people, even marrying Tahshinaohindaway, Red Blanket Woman, in 1840 — a Mdewakanton Dakota woman from Black Dog Village in what is now southern Minneapolis.

Sibley was a major figure in a number of treaty negotiations, aiding the U.S. in its western expansion, opening what is now Minnesota to settlement by removing tribes, and in 1848, he became the first congressional delegate for the Minnesota Territory, and eventually, the state’s first governor. But he was also a founding Regent of the University of Minnesota — choosing federal, state, private and trust lands and investments for the university based on personal, political, and industry knowledge of the region and using the institution as a kind of shell-corporation to speculate and move money made from dispossession. 

In 1851, Sibley helped introduce land grant legislation for the purpose of a territorial university, and just three days after Congress passed the bill, Minnesota’s territorial leaders established the University of Minnesota’s first charter. With an eye on statehood, leaders knew more land would be granted to institutions like the university, but first, the land had to be made available. That same year, with the help of then-territorial governor and fellow university regent, Alexander Ramsey, the Dakota signed the Treaty of Traverse De Sioux, a land cession that created almost half of the state of Minnesota, and, taken with other cessions, would later net the University nearly 187,000 acres of land – an area roughly the size of Tucson, Arizona.

Among the many clauses in the treaty was payment: $1.4 million would be given to the Dakota, but only after expenses. Ramsey deducted $35,000 for a handling fee, about $1.4 million in today’s dollars. After agencies and politicians had taken their cuts, the Dakota were promised only $350,000, but ultimately, only a few thousand after federal agents delayed and withheld payments or substituted them for supplies which were never delivered. 

The betrayal led to the Dakota War of 1862. “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the State,” said Governor Ramsey, and Sibley joined in the slaughter, becoming a colonel of volunteers dedicated to the genocide of the Dakota people. At the end of the conflict, the Dakota were defeated and Ramsey ordered the mass execution of more than 300 Dakota men in December of 1862 — a number later reduced by then-president Abraham Lincoln to 38, and still the largest mass execution in U.S. history. 

That grisly punctuation mark at the end of the war meant a windfall for the University of Minnesota, with new lands being opened through the states enabling act, and another federal grant that had just been passed: the Morrill Act. Within weeks of the mass execution, the University was reaping benefits thanks to the political, and military, power of Sibley and the Board of Regents. 

Between 2018 and 2022, those lands produced $17.1 million in revenue, primarily through mining and mineral leases for iron and taconite, a low-grade iron ore used by the steel industry. But like other states that rely on investment funds and trusts to generate additional income, those royalties are only the first step in the institution’s financial investment. In that same time period, the Permanent University Fund, in which that raw revenue is invested, paid out $42.5 million to U of Minnesota. 

IMAGE	TEXT
Minnesota Landscape (need IPs in image)	At the time of the University of Minnesota’s founding, the Board of Regents established the Permanent University Fund, or PUF.
MNLand – pop up mining and land sale graphs	The PUF holds money from land sales or resource extraction and is designed to support the institution in perpetuity.
$ from pop-ups flows to PUF	One of the first major cash injections to the PUF came from the sale of Morrill Act lands for $579,000 sold mostly in the late 1800’s. In the years since, the fund has been fed mostly by Trust Land activities and the reinvestment of those funds.
$ flow	Iron and taconite leases make up the majority of financial revenue coming from trust lands. Between 2018 and 2022, trust lands produced $17.1 million in revenue for the University of Minnesota.
MN land	But once run through the PUF: $42.5 million. Since 1891, when mineral rights on trust lands were first leased, the PUF has accrued nearly $192 million in revenue from mining on treaty lands.
Investment	In 2022, the PUF was valued at $918.6 million

Today, Sibley, Ramsey and other regents are honored by UMN and the state of Minnesota. Their names adorn parks, buildings, counties and street names, their likenesses replicated in statues and portraits.

The iron and taconite mines that owe their success to the work of these men have left lasting visual blight, water contamination from historic mine tailings, and elevated rates of mesothelioma among taconite workers in Minnesota. The 1863 federal law that authorized the removal of Indigenous peoples from the region is still on the books today and has never been overturned. 

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Less than half of the universities featured in this story responded to requests for comment, and neither did the National Association of State Trust Lands, the non-profit consortium that represents trust land agencies and administrators. Those that did, however, highlighted the steps they were making to engage with Indigenous students and communities.

Still, investments in Indigenous communities are slow coming, and of the universities that responded to our requests, those that directly referenced how trust lands were used deferred to the state agencies that managed them, saying they had no control over how the land was used. And to some degree, they’re correct: states managing assets for land-grants have fiduciary, and legal, obligations to act in their beneficiaries best interests. 

But that could give land-grant universities a right to ask why maximizing returns doesn’t factor in the costs of climate change or the value of righting past wrongs. 

[ELI: Split screen here of parcel + university. Could be NM or other?]

“We have all the data and information that we could need to know that things are unsustainable and unjust, and often education treats these things as if there were informational problems,” said Sharon Stein from the University of British Columbia. “We can know very well that these things are happening and that we’re part of the problem, but our desire for continuity and certainty and security override that knowledge.” 

That knowledge, Stein adds, is easily eclipsed by investments in colonial and capitalist systems that obscure the depths of university complicity and override the desire to make different decisions. 

Though it’s a complicated and arduous process changing laws and working with state agencies, universities regularly engage with the process. In 2022, the 14 land grant universities profiled in this story spent a combined $4.6 million on lobbying on issues ranging from agriculture and defense. All lobbied to influence the federal budget and appropriations.

Even if those high-level actions are taken, it’s not clear how it will make a difference to people like Alina Sierra in Arizona, who faces a rocky financial future after her departure from the University of Arizona.

In 2022, a national study on college affordability found that nearly 40 percent of native students, almost an entire generation, accrued more than $10,000 in college debt with some accumulating more than $100,000 in loans. Sierra still owes UArizona more than $6,000.

“I think that being on O’odham land, they should give back because it’s stolen land,” said Sierra. “They should put more into helping us.” 

However, in January, Sierra enrolled as a full-time student at Tohono O’odham Community College in Sells, Arizona—a tribal university on her homelands. The full cost of attendance, from tuition to fees to books, is free. The college receives no benefits from state trust lands.

She is hoping for the best and still dreams of obtaining a college degree.  

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