CSU caught up in Land Back controversy

Longest U.S. war? Afghanistan? Wars against American Indians ran for more than a century: 1785-1890.

— Meteor_Blades (@Meteor_Blades) August 31, 2021

In 2019 during an episode of The Keepers, a podcast produced by the Kitchen Sisters and NPR, the lead Archivist at the National Archives told listeners lawyers are combing the records for treaties with tribal nations none of which have been honored by the United States. 

Despite the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862 that distributed unceded lands in the public domain to raise funds for colleges. The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are directly linked to the Native American Genocide and Colorado State University is just one of those offenders.

On Nov. 29, 1864, U.S. soldiers attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people and killed at least 230, mostly women, children and older people. The Sand Creek Massacre is one of the worst mass murders in U.S. history. [The Proclamations Used To Incite The Sand Creek Massacre Have Been Officially Rescinded, 157 Years Later]

In 1980 attorney Mario Gonzalez filed the federal court case stopping payment of the Black Hills Claim award to the Oglala Lakota Nation. Gonzalez contends that the commission charged to make peace with tribes inserted language into the Fort Laramie Treaty signed in 1868 that Red Cloud had neither seen nor agreed to in negotiations. After the defeat of the 7th Cavalry at Greasy Grass in 1876 and the Great Sioux War Congress abrogated that treaty in 1877 and the Utes, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne and others who migrated, lived and hunted all along the Front Range were driven into concentration camps.

The city of Fort Collins has promised to include the Native American community in future discussions about the Hughes Stadium land if CSU, the city and a private landowner complete a three-way deal for the 165-acre site in west Fort Collins. Before the three-way land deal was announced, the Intertribal Alliance for Hughes Land Back asked the city and CSU's Board of Governors to return the unceded treaty land back to native stewardship. CSU, in an official statement honoring the ties of Indigenous people to land on which the university operates, acknowledges the land it is on today "is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute Nation and peoples." [As CSU moves to sell former Hughes land, Indigenous people are asking for the land back]

The relatively small distance along the Front Range between the Canadian River in New Mexico and the Missouri at Fort Peck reminds me again how the earliest humans in North America thwarted by glaciers, the dire wolf, and Smilodon on everything north of the Sangre de Cristos terminating at Santa Fe, blazed the Pecos Trail from west to east into the southern Great Plains and Mississippi Valley to find an inland paradise teeming with prey.