Established in 1885, almost 30 years before Arizona was a state, UArizona was one of 52 land-grant universities supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from Indigenous nations to fund a network of colleges across the fledgling United States.
By the early 20th century, grants issued under the Morrill Act had produced the modern equivalent of a half a billion dollars for land-grant institutions from the redistribution of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous lands. While most land-grant universities ignore this colonial legacy, UArizona’s Native scholars program appeared to be an effort to exorcise it.
But the Morrill Act is only one piece of legislation that connects land expropriated from Indigenous communities to these universities.
In combination with other land-grant laws, UArizona still retains rights to nearly 689,000 acres of land — an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles. The university also has rights to another 705,000 subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other resources underground. Known as trust lands, these expropriated Indigenous territories are held and managed by the state for the school’s continued benefit.
State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.
The parcels themselves are scattered and rural, typically uninhabited and seldom marked. Most appear undeveloped and blend in seamlessly with surrounding landscapes. That is, when they don’t have something like logging underway or a frack pad in sight.