Penn State should account for land it took from Indigenous people, says faculty report

More than 160 years ago, Pennsylvania State University received 776,514 acres from the federal government under the Morrill Act of 1862 to serve its fledgling mission of teaching, research, and service.

The transaction that earned its designation as a “land grant” school included more land than any other university in the country, except for Cornell in New York. The land in 16 states was expropriated by the federal government from 114 tribal nations and bands; for some of it, the United States grossly underpaid, and the rest it just took.

In fact, the government paid only $38,089 for the land it gave Penn State, even though the university was able to raise $439,171 through its sale for what would become the university’s original endowment, now valued at $4.5 billion, faculty members say.

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It’s time Penn State steps up to reconcile the land grab, says a faculty senate committee that presented a report to the full senate Tuesday afternoon. The report was approved 118-1, which will send its recommendations to Penn State president Neeli Bendapudi for action.

Penn State spokesperson Rachel Pell said the senior administration has received the report and would be reviewing it.

“Penn State in all its history has had only one Indigenous program, an American Indian Leadership Program, that ran from 1970 to 2010,” said Douglas Bird, an associate professor of anthropology and ecology, who chairs the faculty senate committee on education equity and the campus environment. “That’s the only contribution that Penn State has ever made to Indigenous communities, despite the fact that every single cent [of its original endowment] came from expropriated Indigenous land.”

Only 95 students, or 0.13%, of the more than 73,000 undergraduates at Penn State self identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, and only 13 graduate students do, or 0.1% of 13,449, the report said.

Of faculty, only about one-third of 1% are American Indian or Alaska Native. Representation among staff is even smaller, and there are no administrators and executives that identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, even though more than 2% of the U.S. population is American Indian or Alaska Native, the faculty report said.

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There isn’t one Indigenous student scholarship at Penn State, Bird said.

“This is simply to get some action and some level of support for Indigenous studies here at Penn State,” said Bird, who teared up on the senate floor as he presented the report.

The resolution is the culmination of more than two years of work by Indigenous student and faculty and staff groups, which included lobbying successfully for a land acknowledgment from the university in 2021.

The latest measure calls for the university to create a special joint task force “to implement a truth and reconciliation process regarding Penn State’s original federal endowment,” and the work should be done in collaboration with Penn State’s Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance (IFSA), the Indigenous Peoples Student Association (IPSA), and the Office of Educational Equity.

The task force should identify supports for Indigenous students, faculty and staff, including appointing an “Indigenous liaison at the level of senior administration.” It also recommends the creation of a program of Indigenous studies, the holding of an Indigenous Peoples Day event, and setting aside space on campus to “engage in justice,” celebrate peace, and honor “the continued vitality of the First Nations and historic tribes” whose land Penn State currently sits on.

Penn State campuses remain on lands once owned by the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Shawnee, Susquehannock, Monongahela, and Wahzhazhe First Nations, faculty said in the report.

“Why doesn’t Penn State invest in a place, a space that is a nexus of peace,” Bird said, noting that Haudenosaunee members have suggested it during meetings on campus last year. “It would be a place where Penn State can acknowledge the traumatic history.”

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One of those Haudenosaunee members, who asked to be identified by her Mohawk name, Wa’kerakátste, said she visited Penn State twice in 2022 and met with faculty.

“Understanding what the Morrill Act did, we wanted to make a point that we know and that we wanted it addressed,” said Wa’kerakátste, 62, of Akwesasne, in upstate New York, on the Canadian border. “There’s a debt that needs to be paid.”

Some of the faculty were not aware of the history and were very empathetic when they heard about it, she said. She was encouraged that Penn State faculty were bringing up the matter on the floor of their senate.

She hopes ultimately that Penn State will start a school for peace, “open to students from all over the world to come to learn about Indigenous philosophy … and how to be peace ambassadors.

“ … It’s just so vital in a world right now where there is so much war going on.”

Other universities around the country have begun to take steps to address the issue. Cornell, in June 2020, launched the Indigenous Dispossession Project, which led to the publication of a website, Commitment to Indigenous Communities and Nations in North America. The University of Arizona, in September 2020, established the Office of Native American Advancement and Tribal Engagement, which has led to an “Indigenous Resilience Center,” a Native American Financial Aid Advisory Committee and other efforts.

The efforts followed a 2020 report in High Country News, a magazine that covers the Western United States, that said the nation’s 52 land grant universities, including Penn State, Rutgers, and the University of Delaware, benefited from the nation’s sale of 11 million acres expropriated from tribal nations.

At Penn State, faculty have created a database showing the location of each parcel Penn State received, the tribal nation from which the land was expropriated, how the government got it, links to documents showing what happened, the amount paid for the land, and the amount of endowment it eventually provided. Faculty are calling on the university to make the database available to the public.

Bird said they were able to compile the database with the help of the authors of the High Country report, which showed how Penn State’s land came from more than 100 tribes, including the Yakama, Menominee, Apache, Cheyenne-Arapaho, Pomo, Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox Nation, and Klamath. The federal Bureau of Land Management also helped with the database.

The $439,000 that Penn State got from the original land would be equivalent to about $7.8 million when adjusted for inflation, the magazine said.

“As far as the modern institutions that you know, obviously, that funding is kind of a drop in the bucket of the operation of these institutions,” Nathan Sorber, who wrote Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt: The Origins of the Morrill Act and the Reform of Higher Education, told High Country magazine. “But at the time, the reason they’re here, the reason they were able to weather the difficult financial times of the 19th century, was because of that initial land.”

Tim Benally, a Penn State graduate student from the Navajo Nation in Ganado, Ariz., recalled the isolation he felt when he arrived at Penn State in 2017 as an undergraduate.

“There were no groups, let alone university-supported groups for Indigenous students on campus,” said Benally, a graduate student in recreation, parks, and tourism management. “I had to go around and build a web of advocacy.”

He became known as the “token Native person,” he said, helping to plan student recruiting trips to Navajo Nation, which spans Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. He cofounded the Indigenous Peoples Student Association to begin to build a community. He received the Stand Up Award from the Rock Ethics Institute Institute in 2021 for his work in founding the group and helping to draft the university’s land acknowledgment.

The group has more than 50 members including Indigenous students and their allies, he said.

In December 2019, Tracy Peterson, who grew up in the same Navajo community as Benally, joined Penn State’s College of Engineering as its director of student transitions and pre-college programs and cofounded the Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance. They began to work together, he said.

Benally said he would like to see Penn State commit to researching the culture and history of the tribal nations whose land it derived so much benefit. He also would like to see Penn State offer free tuition to Indigenous students whose ancestors used to occupy those lands — or, at the very least, in-state tuition.

Coming from Arizona, Benally had to pay out-of-state tuition as an undergraduate. Meanwhile, he said, the University of Arizona gives free tuition to all Native, Arizona resident undergraduate students.

“That would be a really good step, considering many other universities do the same and more,” he said.