'Let Us Tell the Story of Our Land and Place': Tribal Leaders on the Seizure and Sale of Territories Benefiting Land-Grant Universities

The Stepping Out and Stepping Up (SOSU) Native American Racial Justice Project initiative, developed in partnership with First Nations Development Institute (FNDI), was designed to address the dispossession and sale of tribal lands used to establish the Ohio State University. This work was inspired by the publication of the "Land Grab Universities Report" (Lee & Ahtone, 2020), which provided exact details regarding amounts of land taken from specific tribal nations and meticulously documented the circumstances surrounding the dispossession and the sums of monies raised in the sale of each parcel that was used to fund 52 Land-Grant universities through the 1862 Morrill Act. According to the "Land Grab Universities Report," more than 100 tribes experienced the dispossession of over 640,000 acres of land that were provided to the state government of Ohio to establish the Ohio State University. This article focuses on the SOSU activities centering on the viewpoints of the leaders of those tribal nations whose land was seized and sold to help found the Ohio State University. It reports on the results of the first 12 interviews conducted with the leaders of current tribal nations. It is the authors' hope in writing this article that it will launch a process across all Land-Grant universities whereby it can honor the spirit of a statement made by one of the tribal leaders: "Let us tell the story of our land and place." In so doing, they wish to create a platform that supports the advocacy for reparative activities such as the investment in 1994--1862 Land-Grant partnerships addressed in a previous article (Williams, Gavazzi, Roberts, et al., 2021). [For the previous article, "Paying Old Debts," see EJ1345435.]