Category: Article
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Cornell University’s Mineral Rights in Wisconsin: A Legacy of the 1862 Morrill Act
The following research is apart of a broader CU&ID project, “Visualizing the Land Grab,” conducted by Jon Parmenter (History Department, Cornell University), Marina Johnson-Zafiris (Information Science, Cornell University) and Dusti Bridges (Archaeology, Cornell University) – with the support of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and the Cornell University Grants Program for Digital Collections.…
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Dr. Michael Charles presents webinar on ‘Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Land Grant Institutions: A Forgotten Debt’ with Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
WEBINAR ABSTRACT: Utilizing national datasets on food security, temperature, precipitation, and food productivity indices, Cornell University’s Charles Research Group aims to quantitatively contribute to the story of Indigenous displacement and Land Grant Institutions through a lens on Indigenous food systems. The team has developed a tool that enables users to explore and map out the…
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Proposal for Gayogohó:nǫˀ-controlled land base
Beyond Land Acknowledgement: Toward a Gayogohó:nǫˀ-controlled land base at Cornell’s Arnot Teaching and Research Forest By Audrey Baker Full paper download at bottom of page This white paper was developed through a Cornell Society for the Humanities seminar called Disturbing Settlement, taught by Amiel Bize, in Fall 2023. The ideas presented came from conversations with Christa Nunez, Michelle Seneca, and Jay…
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Reading Grist’s ‘Misplaced Trust’: The Vantage from Cornell
by Professor Jon Parmenter Cover Photo from “Misplaced Trust: Stolen Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system. Climate change is its legacy.” (Ahtone et. al, Feb. 7 2024). After Cornell University took center stage as the land-grant university that reaped the greatest financial windfall from the Morrill Act of 1862 in the…
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Confronting Cornell University’s Origins in Indigenous Dispossession
by Professor Jon Parmenter In this contribution to a forum on “The End of Early America” the author discusses his research-in-progress on Cornell University’s historical entanglement with the proceeds of Indigenous dispossession stemming from the Morrill Act of 1862. Analysis of the parcels of Morrill Act acreage located, entered, and subsequently managed by Ezra Cornell…
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Cornell and the Morrill Act: 120 Years of Land Acquisition
Published on the Any Person, Many Stories: History of Exclusion and Inclusion at Cornell blog. by Jacobi Kandel, Maggie Lam, and Zelazzie Zepeda October 2023 After learning about the dispossession of Native Land during the founding of their institution, students in Professor Kurt Jordan’s AIIS 1100 Indigenous North America class felt it was imperative to discuss…
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Our Goals and Methods
Our Goals and Methods: How the Cornell University & Indigenous Dispossession Committee Determined which Present-Day Nations and Communities have been Affected by Cornell’s Past and Present Land Manipulations by Kurt A. Jordan, Dusti C. Bridges, and Troy A. Richardson October 17, 2023 Introduction In June 2020, faculty and staff in Cornell University’s American Indian and…
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Good Intentions are Not Good Relations
Grounding the Terms of Debt and Redress at Land Grab Universities
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Assessing Cornell University’s Response to Recent Revelations Concerning the Origins of Revenues Obtained from the Morrill Act of 1862
by Professor Jon Parmenter Cornell University, chartered in 1865 as New York State’s designated recipient of federal land-grant university status, received approximately ten percent of the acreage allocated nationally by the Morrill Act of 1862. By 1900, nearly one-third of the total Morrill Act land-grant revenues generated by all the states had accrued to Cornell University. In March…
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My Back Yard, Equity Concerns, and Land Grant Truth-Telling
This article has been republished with permission by TheNaturalFarmer.org. This article was published as a part of TheNaturalFarmer.org’s spring 2022 issue. You can read the whole issue here. by Dr. Charles Geisler I live on land in upstate New York awarded to Revolutionary War veteran, Izaac Doty, for his military service. I also live on traditional homelands of…
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s notoriety in Indian country and Cornell’s campus landscape
by Dr. Meredith Alberta Palmer After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on September 18th, 2020, Cornell University committed to naming one of five new dorm buildings located in the North Campus Residential Expansion (NCRE) currently under construction, after her. Naming a building after Justice Ginsburg is an unsettling choice for anyone familiar with her…
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Cornell Administration revises text on webpage for Cornell’s Land Grant Mission
Cornell University’s administration revised its statement about the University’s land-grant mission by adding a new paragraph that acknowledges Cornell’s relationship to Indigenous dispossession both locally and continentally. This revision was based on the March 2020 High Country News article and the work of AIISP’s Cornell University and Indigenous Dispossession Project. The new paragraph was written in conjunction with AIISP…
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From Bad to Worse: Ithaca Common Council Rewrites History to the Detriment of Us All
by Professor Jon Parmenter On October 7, 2020, Ithaca’s Common Council voted to remove from DeWitt Park an historical monument erected in 1933 by the (now-defunct) local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. This marker commemorated the “First White Settlers” in Ithaca: two Revolutionary War veterans alleged to have erected cabins near what is now DeWitt Park. …
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Flipped Scrip, Flipping the Script: The Morrill Act of 1862, Cornell University, and the Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Indigenous Dispossession
by Professor Jon Parmenter Abstract New York State received nearly one-tenth of the “public land” granted by the 1862 Morrill Act, the income from which was to constitute an endowment for at least one college in the state providing instruction in agriculture and the “mechanic arts.” The subsequent administration of those resources by Ezra Cornell…
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Cornell University: The erasure of memory
by Professor Eric Cheyfitz Originally published in LA Progressive on June 7, 2020. On May 7 of this year, the NY Times published an op-ed by By Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee titled “Ask Who Paid for America’s Universities.” The article concerned the Morrill Act of 1862, which was the basis for the founding of land-grant universities and colleges. The focus of…
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Cornell: A “Land-Grab University”?
By Professor Kurt Jordan Much like every institution in the United States, Cornell University would not exist as we know it without Indigenous lands. Cornell’s Ithaca campus is located in the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ (Cayuga Nation), who were dispossessed through negotiations with New York State and the U.S. government in which they had…