History
Elizabeth Dudle
A land-grant university is a collegiate institution in the United States that was designated by a state to receive funding created by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. The Morrill Acts set aside federal lands in order to erect colleges that would benefit agricultural and mechanical arts. Unfortunately, most of the federal domain lands were possessed by indigenous communities. Through expropriation and violence, the Morrill Acts converted native lands into college endowments. These colleges represent a dark history of “settler colonialism” as they were founded upon the eradication of indigenous rights and cultural history.
Auburn University is a land-grant university that was also established on indigenous Creek land. According to an investigative journalism website operated by High Country News, Auburn University benefited from the sale of 2,635 land parcels (239,646 acres) in the U.S. Upon the sale of the land, Auburn University was able to be founded with $0 spent of its own funds. Though the university paid no money for its creation, the true price of Auburn University is great and tragic.
Auburn’s land grant took land from 178 different tribal nations, dispossessing their people and uprooting their way of life without compensation or apology.
Much of the preliminary information about the Morrill Act was found thanks to Land-Grab-U, a website and database created as a part of the High Country News investigation of "How the United States funded land-grant universities with expropriated Indigenous land."
The site features all land-grant universities that benefited from this act, with a webpage specifically detailing Auburn University: https://www.landgrabu.org/universities/auburn-university
On Land-Grab-U, nearly every parcel of land that was stolen and sold in order to generate land grant funds was found and documented on a great, interactive map.
One map links every parcel that went towards Auburn University's endowment. To show this in more detail, this infographic was developed to highlight just one of the hundreds of native land parcels that Auburn benefited from.
Here you can see what the land looked like around the time of sale, what the land looks like on a map now, how this specific parcel was "acquired," and when it benefited Auburn University.
