University 'committed genocide', report says

MINNEAPOLIS — The University of Minnesota should hire more Native American faculty, offer students additional financial support and give back land to atone for its historical mistreatment of the state's tribes, a report concluded on Tuesday.

The report said the university's founding board of regents "committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples for financial gain, using the institution as a shell corporation through which to launder lands and resources".

Totaling more than 500 pages, the report marks the first time a major university in the United States has critically examined its history with Native people, said Shannon Geshick, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa.

The report is the result of a collaborative effort between the council and the university called the TRUTH Project — short for Towards Recognition and University-Tribal Healing — which has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, Minnesota Public Radio reported.

"The TRUTH Project just rips that open and really reveals a narrative that a lot of people I think just don't know," Geshick said.

The effort draws on archival records, oral histories and other sources to examine through an indigenous lens the troubled history between Native people and the state's flagship university. The university stopped short of saying whether it would adopt the recommendations, but thanked researchers in a statement for what they called "truth-telling".

The project started following a series of reports in the publication High Country News in 2020, revealing how universities around the country were founded on the proceeds of land that were taken from tribes through the 1862 Morrill Act.

That included a financial bonanza, dubbed the "Minnesota windfall", that channeled more than $500 million to the fledgling University of Minnesota from leases and sales of land taken from the Dakota tribe after the federal government hanged 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, in December 1862, ending the US-Dakota war.

Agencies via Xinhua