Bascom Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Ron Cogswell | used by permission of the photographer)
During the fall 2023 semester there were fewer than 700 Native Americans enrolled at Universities of Wisconsin schools, about 0.4% of the total student population, according to system data . Yet despite that minuscule proportion, Wisconsin’s Native American tribes continue to have a large impact on the UW System.
In the 2023 fiscal year, through a land trust managed by the state’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL), the Universities of Wisconsin received more than $1 million earned by lands that had been taken from the state’s tribes during the 19th century.
The UW System is one of 52 land-grant universities that was supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from indigenous tribes to fund the creation of public universities.
But the Morrill Act was just one piece of the actions, from the federal and then-newly formed state government, that used tribal land to prop up the University of Wisconsin. In the 1780s, the Northwest Ordinance opened the created incentives to encourage the settlement of the Wisconsin territory while creating the system in which lands are held in a trust to fund education, according to Matt Villeneuve, a professor of history and American Indian studies at UW-Madison.