Land, wealth and higher education

How the ancestral ground of Montana’s Indigenous peoples came to generate millions for in-state campuses.

This article is part of a three-part collaborative series produced by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, ICT and Montana Free Press, and utilizes data obtained through the national news nonprofit Grist’s “Land Grab University” investigation.

To the motorists locked in midafternoon traffic on Missoula’s Reserve Street corridor, the vacant lot at the southwest corner of South Seventh looks like any other undeveloped tract of urban property. Tangles of cottonwood, birch and quaking aspen loom above the roughly two-acre swath of brown grass, bisected by an irrigation ditch and flanked by residential homes. A red-and-white sign perches near the curb, carrying the logo of Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which is dwarfed by large type advertising “Property for Lease.”

Passing commuters could easily miss the logo’s clue to a deeper story suffusing that soil. The tract, like all of Missoula, lies within the aboriginal territory of the Salish, Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille peoples, who for generations lived in and around the Missoula Valley. Today, unlike most of Missoula, it’s managed by the DNRC with the express purpose of generating revenue for Montana State University.

How did a tiny slice of Indigenous land get pressed into service for the benefit of Missoula’s longtime collegiate rival? The answer lies at the start of Montana’s rise to statehood, and in a complex network of millions of acres commonly known as “state trust lands.”

“State trust lands” is a phrase familiar to many Montanans in the context of K-12 education. Roughly 90% of state trust lands are dedicated to supporting Montana’s public K-12 schools, generating millions of dollars each year from grazing leases, timber harvests, recreation fees and natural resource development. The undeveloped parcel in Missoula speaks to the other 10%, which, through a succession of treaty agreements and acts of Congress more than a century ago, came to benefit the state’s higher education system.

Similar tracts throughout the American West function in this same manner, a facet of the state trust lands tale that was recently the focus of a Pulitzer Center-supported reporting project by the nonprofit news outlet Grist. According to data obtained by Grist and shared with Montana Free Press, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and ICT, acreage purchased or seized by the federal government from dozens of Indigenous tribes now generates billions of dollars annually for 14 universities including the University of Minnesota, Texas A&M and Washington State University.

“Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia and a climate researcher, told Grist. “It’s not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.”

In Montana, more than 260,000 surface and subsurface mineral acres are now held in trust for MSU, including that Reserve Street tract. They’ve been producing revenue for the campus for well over a century and, according to the DNRC, have generated more than $17 million over the past decade, primarily through leases for agricultural and grazing use and timber harvests. Tyler Trevor, deputy commissioner for budget and planning for Montana’s university system, said trust lands don’t account for much as a revenue source  — about $2 million a year for MSU, which has an annual budget of about $270 million. “But,” he added, “it’s one we highly respect and one with a long tradition.”

MSU Vice President of Communications Tracy Ellig told Montana Free Press via email that the university has used those funds in accordance with expenditure requirements set by the Montana Board of Regents, namely for paying off building bonds and non-recurring maintenance and equipment costs. Ellig did not respond to repeated requests for an interview with MSU President Waded Cruzado. But Cruzado has spoken in the past regarding the genesis of the funding: the passage of the federal Morrill Act in 1862 and the consequent creation of agriculture-focused “land-grant” colleges throughout the United States, a network MSU joined at its founding in 1893.

“The land-grant system is a unique model of higher education in the world,” Cruzado said during a 2012 summit at North Dakota State Universitycelebrating the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act. “It helped inspire 150 years of global leadership by the United States thanks to the promotion of access and affordability, its focus on both practical and liberal education, and its tripartite mission of teaching, research and outreach.”

Decades after the Morrill Act, Congress took a similar approach in granting Montana statehood, transferring lands from federal to state ownership to serve as a sort of property piggy bank to help develop the fledgling state’s higher education infrastructure. A new portfolio of state-controlled lands was designated to benefit a land-grant university, and other tracts were flagged specifically to help establish schools dedicated to fields such as mining and forestry. Today those lands continue to generate revenue for the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana Technological University in Butte, MSU Billings and UM Western in Dillon.

The part of the story often overlooked in memorializing speeches and land-grant literature is that the lands buttressing the new enterprises had been expropriated from Indigenous tribes throughout the West. Seated in her office overlooking the Mission Mountains, Salish Kootenai College President Sandra Boham cut straight to that history’s harsh truth.

“That’s where the land grants came from,” Boham said. “It was granted by the federal government, but if you look at where the land is and aboriginal title, it’s Indian land.”

Recognizing the legacy of theft and injustice against America’s Indigenous peoples is an increasingly popular practice commonly manifested in “land acknowledgments.” They appear on government websites, in political speeches, even on local movie screens, recognizing the cultural ties of particular tribes to specific patches of ground. But those admissions are delicately crafted, often emphasizing the act of dispossession while leaving the actor unnamed. Such acknowledgments have led some anthropologists and Indigenous groups to question their actual value and argue that they’re little more than “feel-good public gestures” if they aren’t backed up by actions that reinforce tribal sovereignty and advocate the return of stolen lands.

In a way, Boham’s campus represents one such effort within the land-grant system. In 1994, she said, tribes “got our land back” in the form of land-grant status for 36 tribal colleges, including those on the Blackfeet, Rocky Boy’s, Fort Belknap, Fort Peck, Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations. For Salish Kootenai College, Boham continued, that status has put the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes “back in touch with the direction and understanding and management of our own lands.” Now, the perspective of cultures that have called the Flathead Valley home for centuries is informing local approaches to invasive weed control, fisheries management and gardening.

But even land-grant status for tribal colleges has been no guarantee of equity. Advocates continue to press Congress to address financial disparities in the land-grant system for tribal and historically black colleges, and Boham traveled to Washington, D.C., earlier this month to lobby alongside other tribal college leaders for additional assistance. Boham notes that nearly two-thirds of Salish Kootenai College’s budget comes from gifts and grants, a stark contrast to the tuition payments and state allocations that fill non-tribal campus coffers.

Beyond such institutional inequities, Boham sees a greater need to support individual students who hail from the very tribes whose ancestral land now supports higher education. That means supporting not just their academic costs, but alleviating the financial pressures that can impact their success, from housing to food to childcare.

“If you fund students at an adequate level and they can focus on being a student, they will graduate and complete their programs,” Boham said. “And then the economy sees that money back, many times over.”

Montana’s university system has enacted several initiatives designed to tackle the challenge. According to data from the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education, Montana this spring awarded 634 students $1.3 million in American Indian Waivers— a needs-based program that helps cover tuition for enrolled members of tribes in Montana. And campuses have recently boasted about gains in student recruitment and retention, with UM reporting last fall a 30% increase in the number of enrolled Indigenous students since 2018. Campus officials often point to online application portals and scholarship programs like Montana 10 as further evidence of the system’s efforts to make higher education more readily accessible to Indigenous students.

As part of that mission, UM Tribal Outreach Specialist Karla Bird said she’s giving particular attention to the families of prospective students. In Indigenous communities, family members and elders often serve as a critical support network, offering motivation and inspiration to younger generations. Bird, a UM and MSU alum and a former president of Blackfeet Community College in Browning, said it’s important for UM to work with those families and provide similar support for students when they arrive on campus.

“When we have our students come to the University of Montana, even though it seems relatively close, it’s still a different world,” Bird said. “And they’re far removed from all of these support networks and this sense of belonging and connectedness that we have.”

Along those same lines, UM offers a one-year program exclusively for Indigenous freshmen designed to foster mentorship opportunities and community-building. Last year, the university also received a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to incorporate Indigenous expertise into the campus curriculum under the guidance of 12 tribal elders in Montana. 

At MSU’s Department of Native American Studies, associate professor Kristin Ruppel said she remains conscious that “we’re always all on Indigenous land.” Ruppel is one of a group of faculty working with tribal partners like the Piikani Lodge Health Institute to promote research on Indigenous land conservation and planning, an effort known as the Native Land Project. Ruppel said such initiatives have helped attract grants and internship and fellowship opportunities for Indigenous students.

“Regardless of how badly it was done and how it’s based on the act of stealing land, nevertheless, the school land grant, the land grant universities, are a great boon, right?” Ruppel said. “They provide all sorts of value to all sorts of people — some more so than others, but they’re a great value to our culture, to our economy, to all sorts of different things.”

Ruppel said it’s unfortunate that similar investments haven’t been made in tribal colleges, which she sees as equally important, if not more so, in regenerating culture and “acknowledging in a real way where all these riches actually came from, which is the land we’re sitting on.”

Land generates wealth. That’s how Boham put it. The economic and social disparities Indigenous students continue to face today are rooted in the soil along a busy Missoula thoroughfare and embedded in thousands of other tracts across the state. According to Grist’s data, the Salish, Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille tribes were paid $1.48 per acre for their ancestral lands under the Hellgate Treaty — putting the price paid for that vacant lot along Reserve Streetat $1.90. In 2021, the parcel was appraised at $1.4 million, and in November 2022, the DNRC advertised it alongside a list of other trust land propertiesavailable for commercial leasing.

“You generate wealth based on the land,” Boham said. “If you don’t have the land, you’re not going to generate that wealth. And we didn’t have the land.”