Robert Lee, University of Cambridge 

When I presented the initial research that led to “Land-Grab Universities,” I didn’t know what final form the project would take, but I had a clear idea of what I didn’t want it to be: a research article or monograph.  

That might sound like sacrilege for an early-career historian. Traditional research “outputs” remain the coin of my professional realm. They establish your research bona fides, make you competitive for fellowships, and justify career advancement if you’re lucky enough to get a job.  

Although the history profession is slowly broadening its view of what constitutes scholarship, this was five years ago and I had just finished my PhD. I was fortunate to have a multi-year postdoc, but plunging into a collaborative project that would take several years and sidestep academic publishing probably wasn’t the most prudent move. Still, I think it was the right one.

To explain why, I need to explain what the project became.  

Launched in 2018, “Land-Grab Universities” was multimedia history-journalism collaboration published with High Country News. The study identified Indigenous lands “donated” by the federal government to land-grant colleges to build endowments.  

As a piece of research, it relied on a custom-built geodatabase that mapped nearly 80,000 parcels redistributed under the Morrill Act of 1862, the law that nationalized the land-grant university system in the United States. Until recently, scholarship on the Morrill Act ignored how the funding of land-grant colleges depended on Indigenous dispossession. We aimed to change that by reconstructing the complete footprint of a major US land law for the first time. Our database located individual parcels and linked them to the homelands of tribal nations (as defined by treaties) and university beneficiaries. We ultimately located over 10.7 million acres, more than 99% of the area redistributed under the law.  

Published in 2020, the project included a long-form magazine article, a website with interactive maps, a geodatabase, and methodological and bibliographic essays. 

When I first presented on the initial design of the database at the Mahindra Center’s Native Cultures of the Americas seminar back in 2018, I had figured out the empirical reconstruction underlying the project was possible and made some headway along those lines.  

Taking cues from studies of universities’ ties to slavery, it also seemed to me that this kind of research didn’t necessarily need to follow traditional publication pathways. 

Newspaper reporting, university reports, and websites had become some of the most compelling avenues for publishing new research on how universities were materially entangled with histories of colonization. Few of these studies were single-author and made all the better for it. They certainly seemed to be faster to print, which matters for work with potential policy implications. As a historian using digital methods to scale-up research, I also doubted if books or articles were well suited to publishing geodatabase-driven research. Non-digital formats could scarcely demonstrate the depth and range of the findings for readers.  

In short, research on land-grant universities’ ties to colonial extraction, I thought, might be sped up and made more effective by recruiting collaborators and seeking new venues for research. I just wasn’t sure what that could look like, or frankly, how to go about doing it, so I ended my presentation with a call for help. 

Luckily, Tristan Ahtone, then editor of tribal affairs desk at High Country News was in the audience and came up to talk afterwards. Together we built the collaboration that included a photographer, coder, data journalist, cartographer, editor, fact checker, and several interns who made the “Land-Grab Universities” project possible. 

As a work of scholarship, the project was experimental: it attempted to take original academic research and marry it to journalistic publishing and storytelling techniques with the hopes of reframing how we talk, think, and write about land grant universities. There were challenges, of course. Funders dismissed it as too historical or too journalistic. Then the Covid-19 pandemic broke out just we went to print, drawing away partners who intended to write local stories with the data. We didn’t know if anyone would read it, either. It turns out that people being stuck at home in front of laptops in 2020 created a captive audience for our digital publication.   

Ultimately, I like to think the project was more impactful for its hybrid form. It’s being taught and cited as a work of history and journalism, and inspiring both new research and policy changes around the United States.