October 28, 2020

By Brian Snyder
Executive Director, InFACT
snyder.1534@osu.edu

Early this year, just as the COVID-19 crisis began to take hold, an article came out in High Country News that, while not revealing anything previously unknown, has shaken the world of land-grant institutions and will continue to reverberate for many years to come. The piece, written by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, was entitled “Land-grab universities: Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system,” which exhibits right away the thesis and significance of this journalistic landmark.

Not relying simply on the written word to tell an important story, the infographics included with the land-grab article are a testament to the power of web-based graphic design for taking otherwise mundane raw data and turning it into an effective call to action. It is impossible to explore the interactive display and not wonder about the land associated with the original 1862 land-grant institutions and anyone unjustly affected by its taking. We all have a responsibility to understand and react to this history with humility and in ways that lead to whatever healing is possible.

Encountering this article also caused me to remember my younger days, growing up in a rural part of Indiana. My childhood was fairly typical of a privileged white kid from the sticks, except for one thing. I first felt really alive when my younger brother and I “discovered” the 18-acre patch of woods on which my grandparents lived and began to explore all the wonders contained therein. The property was magical in many ways, centered on a small hill of sand, like an island within a sea of corn fields that continued to expand throughout our growing years. Our grandfather used to tell us stories about how “the Indians used to hunt all around these parts,” and when the farmer's plow first hit a small part of that sandy hill the proof of this hypothesis began to spill forth in the form of artifacts consistent with such activity. But it wasn't until years later, while sitting in a college geology class, that I learned how my grandfather's woods, that exact spot, had literally been an island within a vast wetland and hunting region for Indigenous peoples of the past.

The metaphor from my childhood experience is unmistakable. Every square inch of North America used to be Indigenous land and belonged to peoples who, for the most part, have long-since been removed to other locations or from history altogether. To invoke the concept of belonging may be misleading, since property rights were an imposition of colonialism, but that doesn't relieve us of the burden to remember who came before us and what happened such that the land could “belong” to its subsequent occupants. Such memory leads to some of the tragic circumstances of modern times and areas of focus for the Initiative for Food and AgriCultural Transformation (InFACT) and its programs.

As documented in books like Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World by Jack Weatherford, and 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles C. Mann, the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere made huge contributions to the well-being of civilization in terms of food and farming systems, and we continue to learn more about this extensive impact all the time. It is, in fact, difficult to imagine how several of the most significant food cultures around the world would even exist without corn, beans, squash, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and chocolate—all native crops that were originally developed and cultivated by Native Americans. It is tragically ironic that the original claim to “feeding the world”—in many ways, the first Green Revolution—was due to the efforts of people who are now among the most food insecure anywhere.

To make matters worse, surviving American Indian communities are some of the most vulnerable to the current pandemic. A recent U.S. News & World Report article shares the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's alarming statistic that “American Indian and Alaska Native people are 5.3 times more likely than white people to be hospitalized due to COVID-19, the largest disparity for any racial or ethnic group.” This is due in part to rampant preexisting diet-related illnesses associated with metabolic syndrome. Such disease had essentially been nonexistent in indigenous communities until the infusion of surplus commodities in modern times, but is now a major cause of disease, even among children with “adult onset” diabetes.

So we have a situation where whole peoples, having been driven in a few decades from land that had met their needs and those of their forebears for centuries, are now food insecure and suffering in numbers that would never be tolerated among others—and this is all in part tied into the founding of land-grant institutions across our comparatively very wealthy nation. Unlike many problems universities face, this one might be addressed directly, and healing can be the legacy of land-grant institutions with respect to their original benefactors and descendants who live among us today.

It is a common practice these days to begin university activities with a land acknowledgement, wherein an attempt is made to honor the original inhabitants of the land on which the institution is located. In those formulaic statements, it is often customary to refer to those who came before as the “stewards” of the land, as though they were just taking care of it until the predestined white settlers arrived to assume real ownership. But when I think back to my childhood experiences, on my grandparents' land, I realize that we are now the stewards, taking care of land often acquired unjustly from others. Our land acknowledgements should make that clear, and also commit ourselves and our institutions to making amends however possible.

We are squatters, and this is hallowed ground upon which we precariously dwell. Indeed, the whole Earth is like an island and we are stuck here, in need of self-discovery and atonement for what has been squandered. But we still have a fighting chance to learn from its original inhabitants about caring for our common home, before it is too late.