At Minnesota Public Radio, Dan Kraker and Melissa Wilson report in Researchers reveal U’s painful past with Minnesota’s Indigenous people:
A massive new report details the University of Minnesota’s long history of mistreating the state’s Native people and lays out recommendations, including “perpetual reparations,” to improve relations between the university and Minnesota’s 11 tribal nations.
Among its troubling findings, the report by the TRUTH (Towards Recognition and University-Tribal Healing) Project concludes:
The U’s founding board of regents “committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples for financial gain, using the institution as a shell corporation through which to launder lands and resources.”
The U’s permanent trust fund controls roughly $600 million in royalties from iron ore mining, timber sales and other revenues derived from land taken from the Ojibwe and the Dakota.
The university has contributed to the “erasure” of Native people by failing to teach a full history of the land on which it was founded.
Researchers didn’t put a dollar figure to their call for reparations but urged the University to do more to help tribal nations, including providing full tuition waivers to “all Indigenous people and descendants” and hiring more Native staff and faculty. . . .
The TRUTH effort draws on archival records, oral histories and other sources to examine through an Indigenous lens the troubled history between Native people and the state’s flagship university.
It launched following a series of reports in the publication High Country News in 2020 revealing how universities around the country were founded on the proceeds of land taken from tribes through the 1862 Morrill Act.
That included a financial bonanza — dubbed the “Minnesota windfall” — that channeled more than $500 million to the fledgling University of Minnesota from leases and sales of land taken from the Dakota after the federal government hanged 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minn., in December 1862, ending the U.S.-Dakota war. . . .
That's certainly a story I've heard about the consequences of the 1862 War from my romantic partner, a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate citizen whose family lived on the Dakota reservation along the upper Minnesota River before and at the time of the war.
The TRUTH project describes itself on the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council site:
The Towards Recognition and University-Tribal Healing—TRUTH—project is a Native-organized, Native-led, community-driven research movement that offers multiple recommendations on how the University of Minnesota community can be in better relation with Indigenous peoples. Few universities had ever considered the contemporary impacts of their formations from the land dispossession used to create the Morrill Act of 1862 until Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone published “Land Grab Universities” (High Country News, 2020) and the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council called for such an accounting of Mni Sóta Maḳoce’s land grab. The first of its kind, TRUTH is an exploratory study to assess what has been erased and effaced in order to reclaim what was grabbed by the University of Minnesota. TRUTH uses place-based, Tribally-led research designed to, for the first time, tell the story of Tribal-University relations from an Indigenous perspective. This is done through the centering of land, practicing relationality and amplifying Tribal voices.
Here's the report that's on the TRUTH Project webpage:
Oshkigin Noojimo'iwe, Naġġġi Waƞ P̣ P̣ P̣etu Uƞ Ihduwaṡṡṡ'ake He 'ake He 'ake He Oyate Kiƞ Zaniwic̣ay... by Sally Jo Sorensen on Scribd
Bluestem recommends that readers check out the report, as well as Land-Grab Universities A High Country News Investigation.
Photo: From left, Misty Blue, An Garagiola, and Audrianna Goodwin. The three worked on the TRUTH Project, helping produce the massive report released Tuesday examining the university's long, troubling history of mistreating Minnesota's Native people.Kerem Yücel | MPR News 2022.
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