SDSU Student's Association recognizes college land grab

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are directly linked to the Native American Genocide and South Dakota State University is just one of those offenders. SDSU was funded using 160,000 acres of land-grant scrip or parcels. A significant portion of the lands allocated for South Dakota's land-grant fund came from territory originally recognized under treaties with the Sioux (Oceti Sakowin) nations, including the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 and subsequent agreements that were systematically altered or violated by the federal government as white settlement expanded.

Ordinance 26-1-O passed during Monday night’s Students’ Association (SA) meeting, establishing a formal and acknowledgement for all SA Senate Meetings. The ordinance was created in collaboration with the American Indian Students’ Association (AISA). SDSU’s land acknowledgement, created through the Wokini Initiative, will be read after the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of each SA meeting. Senator At-Large Paul Fasen said he spoke with members of his constituency after initially reading the ordinance and asked them whether or not they care about the land acknowledgement. “Resoundingly, the constituents that I talked to said that they didn’t care,” Fasen said. “One person actually said that he would prefer it if we didn’t include this land grant.” [Students’ Association passes land acknowledgement]