The Afterlives of Settler Colonialism: Indigenous Dispossession, Slavery, and the University of Michigan

Keywords: settler colonialism, Indigenous, land, higher education, treaties, Michigan, Detroit
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

From its founding in 1817, the University of Michigan (U-M) has been wrapped up in what historian Michael Witgen describes as the “political economy of plunder”—a mode of settler colonialism that used treaties, land cessions, and the theft of annuity payments to displace and undermine the Indigenous people of the Great Lakes Basin. U-M is intimately connected to this history through Article 16 of the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, which granted several thousand acres of Indigenous land to the institution and stipulated that the Anishinaabeg and their descendants could receive education there. Profits from the sale and leasing of these lands, alongside donations from slaveholders and land speculators in the region, provided the university with a path to fiscal solvency in a period of significant indebtedness. The university continues to benefit from these interwoven legacies today, both through its robust endowment and by asserting claims of rightful ownership of Indigenous lands.

This paper documents what institutional narratives have obfuscated: the university’s status as a beneficiary of Indigenous dispossession and its connections to the enslavement of African and Indigenous people in nineteenth century Anishinaabewaki, including geographies currently shared with the State of Michigan. It shows how wealth from slave labor and Indigenous dispossession were channeled by donors to fund the early university and reflects on how Native American and Black student activists have led efforts to acknowledge and redress that history to promote meaningful change on campus and across the region.