MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – The University of Minnesota should hire more Native American faculty, offer students additional financial support and give back land to atone for the historical mistreatment of the state’s tribes, a report conducted through collaboration with the school concluded Tuesday.
The report said the university’s board of regents “committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples for profit, using the institution as a shell company to launder land and resources.”
A total of more than 500 pages, the report marks the first time a major American university has critically studied the history with the natives, said Shannon Geshick, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa.
The report is the result of a collaborative effort between the council and the university called the TRUTH Project – short for Towards Recognition and University-Tribal Healing – which has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, Minnesota Public Radio reported.
“The TRUTH Project just opened up and exposed a narrative that a lot of people I don’t understand,” Geshick said.
The effort draws on archival records, oral histories and other sources to examine through an Indigenous lens the troubled history between Indigenous peoples and the nation’s flagship university. The university stopped short of saying whether it would implement the recommendations, but thanked the researchers in a statement for what it called “the truth”.
The project began after several reports in the publication High Country News in 2020 that showed how universities across the country were established from the proceeds of land taken from tribes through the Morrill Act of 1862.
This included a financial bonanza – the so-called “Minnesota windfall” – that channeled more than $500 million to the fledgling University of Minnesota from the lease and sale of land taken from the Dakota tribe after the federal government hanged 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, in December 1862. , ending the US-Dakota war.
Meanwhile, it found that the university’s permanent trust fund controls approximately $600 million in royalties from iron ore mining, timber sales and other profits derived from land taken from the Ojibwe and Dakota tribes.
The report also found that the university failed to teach the full history of the land it was founded on and questioned how medical research was conducted.
The university has taken significant steps to address the issue, tribal leaders said. In 2021, the university created a program that offers free or reduced tuition to many members of the state’s 11 federally recognized tribes.
University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel, who is about to take over the University of Pittsburgh, created a high-level position in her administration focused on Native American issues and tribal relations, and held quarterly, face-to-face meetings with tribal leaders. But Geshick, along with the Minnesota Council of Indian Affairs, said more could be done.
For example, he and others have called for an expansion of the scholarship program, which has been criticized for benefiting only a portion of indigenous students.
“It’s a good start. But it’s definitely not the end,” said Robert Larsen, president of the Lower Sioux Indian Community and chairman of the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council.