Land-grant universities were created in the 1800s to meet a growing demand for agricultural and technical education, but at a cruel cost. The U.S. took nearly 11 million acres of land from approximately 250 tribes, bands, and communities to create these institutions.
As a land-grant university, UC Davis faces the challenge of fully reckoning with and growing from our history to ensure we are advancing equity, creating opportunity for Native American students, and fulfilling the promise to have a profound positive public impact on our world through teaching, research, and service.
Grand Challenges will support the work of addressing the harmful origins and complex aims of our land-grant university while developing a model of positive public impact and equity for others to follow.
The work of reimagining our university begins internally by increasing university system efficiency, addressing continuing challenges, forging meaningful and collaborative relationships with community partners and Native nations, breaking down disciplinary silos, and building pathways for collaboration and innovation that result in exceptional public good.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
The University of California Land Grab: A Legacy of Profit from Indigenous Land report contains key learnings and recommendations from a two-part forum held Sept. 25 and Oct. 30, 2020. The forum was organized by Berkeley staff, graduate students, and faculty, with key input from colleagues at UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, UC Davis, and UC Riverside.
In April 2020, High Country News published an extensive investigation of how the U.S. funded land-grant universities with expropriated Indigenous land. Click here to view the report. Historian Bobby Lee and Kiowa journalist Tristan Ahtone also tell the story of how large public universities benefited from the theft and expropriation of Indigenous land in an episode of The Red Nation Podcast.
The Wokini Initiative is South Dakota State University’s collaborative and holistic framework to support American Indian student success and Indigenous Nation-building. Ongoing collaboration between key campus and tribal stakeholders is central to the Wokini framework.
The Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative (IFAI) focuses on putting tribal sovereignty in food sovereignty, promoting tribally driven solutions to revitalize and advance traditional food systems and diversified economic development throughout Indian Country. IFAI provides Tribal governments, producers, and food businesses with educational resources, policy research, and strategic legal analysis as a foundation for building robust food economies.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has compiled a collection of resources to aid in understanding the land-grant context in Wisconsin. The collection has been curated to provide colleagues with tools that can help bridge historic divides and to cooperatively build programs together with tribal communities. By providing these tools, this library allows colleagues to do their work with sensitivity, cultural humility, and with a social justice lens.
How we are facing this challenge
We are building a campus-wide network of challengers, if you are interested in joining, please email us.
