How Wisconsin’s education endowment factors into the Lac du Flambeau land dispute

Boozhoo ("hello" in Ojibwe) and miigwech ("thank you") for reading the First Nations Wisconsin newsletter.

Last week, there finally seemed to be some movement forward to settle the 19-month long dispute over four roads on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in northern Wisconsin.

Officials with the nontribal town of Lac du Flambeau, located on the reservation, asked state and federal officials if they would consider giving land back to the tribe to settle the dispute.

Last year, tribal authorities had barricaded four roads on the reservation, stranding dozens of nontribal homeowners living on properties they own that are located within tribal land. Tribal officials said they made the move because the lease to use the illegally-built roads expired more than 10 years ago, and they felt they were ignored over trespassing concerns and were protecting “what little land we have left.”

The barricades have since been removed under a temporary payment plan with the town, but the tribe is still demanding $10 million to pay for past leasing fees, trespassing fines and legal fees, which the town says it doesn’t have.

Tom German, executive secretary of the town of Lac du Flambeau board, explained at a meeting last week that the state does have land in the area that it could possibly give back to the tribe to help settle the dispute.

What’s interesting is how the state had come into possession of this land.

We all know that the federal government took millions of acres from Indigenous tribes in Wisconsin, including the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe Nation. But what did it do with this land?

It gave 1.5 million acres to the Wisconsin Board of Commissioners of Public Lands for the purpose of creating endowments to support public schools and libraries.

Going back to 1848, the Board, which Leiber currently sits on, had sold nearly all the land, which has resulted today in more than $1.4 billion in School Trust Fund assets to be used to benefit public school libraries and the University of Wisconsin. This revenue from the lands taken from Indigenous nations is still today a major source of funding for the University of Wisconsin, a “land-grant” university.

The Board still manages about 75,000 acres of School Trust Lands and Leiber said some of it is located near the Lac du Flambeau Reservation, which could possibly be given back to the tribe.

What’s also interesting is that my Journal Sentinel colleague Kelly Meyerhofer reported that not until this fall did University of Wisconsin-Madison officials start to offer free tuition and board to students enrolled in a federally recognized tribe in Wisconsin, based on land that was taken from the Ho-Chunk Nation for the benefit of the university.

Other land-grant universities that benefit from the sale of Indigenous lands — in Maine, Montana and Michigan, for example — have offered tuition waiver programs for tribal students for decades.

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About me

I'm Frank Vaisvilas, the Indigenous affairs reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin based at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel . I cover Native American issues in Wisconsin. You can reach me at 815-260-2262 or fvaisvilas@gannett.com , or on Twitter at @vaisvilas_frank .

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: How Wisconsin’s education endowment factors into the Lac du Flambeau land dispute