UW schools benefit financially from thousands of acres of former tribal land

Bascom Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Ron Cogswell | used by permission of the photographer)

During the fall 2023 semester there were fewer than 700 Native Americans enrolled at Universities of Wisconsin schools, about 0.4% of the total student population, according to system data . Yet despite that minuscule proportion, Wisconsin’s Native American tribes 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.

Wisconsin’s present day tribes — the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, the Ho-Chunk Nation, the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, the Sokaogon Chippewa Community and the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin — lost land in 13 cession events that now directly financially benefit South Dakota State University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, the data shows.

“This is a history that most Americans don't know, it's a history most Wisconsinites don't know, but I think most importantly, it's one the university doesn't really know,” Villeneuve, who is of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa descent, says. “So I think this is part of that reckoning, where we sort of discover the ways that this process of land extraction and wealth is ongoing, and then it raises this question of what should we do about it?”

Late last year, UW-Madison announced the Tribal Educational Promise , a new program to cover the costs for undergraduate, law and medical students who are members of Wisconsin’s 11 tribes. While Villeneuve says the program is a start of the process to “take stock” of the ongoing ways in which the university system benefits from tribal lands, others are more skeptical.

UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin announces a new program to cover the costs of education for Native American students. (Screenshot | UW Madison)

Mark Denning, a Milwaukee-based Native American educator and community organizer, says he has concerns about the university’s ability to meet the needs of  Native American students once they arrive on campus, so the offer of free tuition as the system continues to profit off of tribal lands isn’t enough.

“I think it's more than a stick in the eye. I think when people think about issues of justice and American Indians, they think of things in the past,” Denning says. “They don't think of what's happening right now, and that they are being victimized right now.”

The BCPL’s three members are Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski, Attorney General Josh Kaul and state Treasurer John Lieber. In an email, Lieber, the only Republican on the board, defended the Normal School Fund, saying the state received the land from the federal government and that many of the parcels of land in the fund today were purchased privately later.

“The state wasn’t involved with the purchase of this land from the tribes,” he said. “All treaty negotiations occurred between tribes and representatives of the federal government. None of the lands passed directly to the state from a tribe, the federal government granted lands to the state years later. Also, many of the parcels currently held by the normal school fund are relatively new additions, purchased from or exchanged with both public and private owners.”

Spokespeople for Godlewski, Kaul and the Universities of Wisconsin did not respond to a request for comment.

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