The Morrill Act of 1862 established agricultural and mechanical arts colleges by granting public lands to states to promote the liberal and practical education of U.S. citizens of average means. The resulting land-grant university movement brought liberal ideals to (white, male, Christian) Americans by reducing geographic and class barriers to education, while also serving settler colonial interests via redistribution of Indigenous lands and institutionalization of agricultural knowledge production that has entrenched white supremacy. In this paper, I draw on recent scholarship by Lee and Ahtone (2020) to look at the question of land itself in relation to the Indigenous communities who were dispossessed, with a focus on the University of California. I explore the possibilities and limitations of data on the University of California’s specific land dispossessions, and how they might serve existing efforts by California Indian communities to rematriate land, obtain reparations from the state, and decolonize the university.

The Morrill Act of 1862 established agricultural and mechanical arts colleges by granting public lands to states to promote the liberal and practical education of (white, male, Christian) U.S. citizens of average means. In this paper, I use Charles Mills’ (1997) Racial Contract framework and Patrick Wolfe’s (2007) concept of corpus nullius to situate the Morrill Act in a white supremacist political system that intimately entwined settler-colonial expansion, agricultural knowledge production, and the founding of U.S. public higher education through creation of the land-grant universities.