Prologue: An Anishinaabe University — Notes
Prologue overview
Purpose and framing: The prologue introduces a critical re-reading of the University of Michigan through an Anishinaabe lens, foregrounding how education, land, and settler colonialism are enmeshed. It proposes a shift from historicization (simply telling history) to minaadendamowin—Anishinaabemowin for respect/acknowledgement—and a rethinking of the university’s uses and purposes in relation to Native and settler histories. It argues that historicizing alone is insufficient and that reparative justice and new futures for the university emerge when the institution is evaluated as rooted in land, labor, and capital.
Key term introduced: minaadendamowin (Anishinaabe concept akin to respect/acknowledgement toward Native people and history) [Footnote 4].
Central claim: Anishinaabe students and communities view the university as an Anishinaabe institution, which compels a reevaluation of settler colonial education and its legacies.
Methodological stance: The author positions himself as a settler scholar who acknowledges complicity in settler colonialism and uses counter-history to reveal the university’s entanglement with Indigenous lands and lifeways.
Paul Johnson and the Anishinaabe claim to the university
Paul Johnson: Anishinaabe man from Bay City, Michigan, whose Ojibwe ancestors historically inhabited the Saginaw Bay watershed (rich in fish, game, and manoomin, the wild rice).
Homeland and dispossession: The Saginaw Bay region served as a homeland for Johnson’s kin; in the mid-19th century, many Ojibwe were coerced to cede land and relocated to Isabella Indian Reservation, with some fleeing to the U.S.-Canada border (Medicine Line) due to the Jay Treaty constraints.
Economic dynamics: Bay City developed around lumbering, milling, and shipbuilding, accelerating land devastation and Native dispossession.
The 1,920 acres and the 40-acre exchange: In the 1820s, the University of Michigan claimed 1,920 acres in and around Detroit, far exceeding the 40 acres donated to the university by the Ann Arbor Land Company in 1837 to lure the university to Ann Arbor [Footnotes 1, 2, 3].
Johnson’s direct action: In 1971, Johnson petitioned the UM Board of Regents to honor the treaty that made land available to educate Anishinaabe children; after the board ignored his request, he filed a lawsuit to compel the university to fulfill treaty obligations toward Michigan’s Anishinaabe people.
Johnson’s trajectory at UM: He attended as a student, earned master’s degrees in social work and education, worked on outreach to Native students in admissions, and coached football, integrating his Anishinaabe heritage with the university’s life [Footnote 3].
The Treaty of Fort Meigs (1817): Johnson traced the ancestral land grant to an 1817 treaty in which Anishinaabe peoples granted land to a college at Detroit to educate their children; this land later became UM property on paper if not in practice [Footnote 3].
Contextual note: Johnson’s case foregrounds the paradox of a university built on Indigenous land and the attempt to reconcile or redress that history.
The Northwest Ordinance and Article 3: Education and land
The Northwest Ordinance’s Article 3 caused a central contradiction: it encouraged education as a means to governance and stability, yet it was tied to the dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Text of the Northwest Ordinance’s first sentence (visible on campus):
"Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
The second sentence (often not visibly displayed on campus):
"The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them."
Campus memorials: Pediment on Angell Hall features the first sentence; Regents’ Room panel (LSA Building) likewise memorializes the same sentence, flanking the State Seal of Michigan and the university’s Latin motto Artes, Scientia, Veritas; both sit on marble panels whose origin includes Native land usage (Indiana stone) and symbolically link education to settler sovereignty.
Symbolic tension: The memorials legible on campus present education as a noble project while erasing the second sentence that calls for peaceful relations and rights protection for Indigenous peoples. This erasure is read as a deliberate forgetting of treaty obligations that underwrite educational funding.
Memorialization and forgetting: The Regents’ Room and Angell Hall
The two monuments facing each other articulate a settler colonial genealogy:
Pediment of Angell Hall (first sentence of Article 3) foregrounds education as a founding value.
The Regents’ Room panel repeats the first sentence and places the State Seal with a gun and the Latin motto, visually tying education to settler power and violence.
The marble panel behind the Regents’ table was quarried from Native lands (Indiana), embedding colonial violence into campus architecture.
Spatial choreography: The arrangement on two opposite buildings aligns the university’s arts/knowledge/truth with a settler colonial project, where education rests on a lamp of knowledge “and” a settler long gun.
Movement of the panel: In the early 2000s, the marble panel was moved from the Regents’ Room to a lobby near the dean’s office; the aim, per Francis Blouin, was to place the Northwest Ordinance in public view, even as the second sentence remains largely absent in campus display.
Interpretive point: The relocation signals an attempt to surface the value of education while continuing to suppress the full text of Article 3 and its implications for Indigenous rights.
The second sentence of Article 3 and its deletion
The second sentence’s absence on campus is read as a deliberate deletion that preserves a partial narrative: it sustains the idea that education and legitimate expansion can occur without addressing Indigenous rights protections.
Analytical point: The text implies that the very question of education in the United States has always been inseparable from land and Indigenous dispossession; thus, forgetting (or erasure) constitutes a key mechanism of settler colonialism.
The author’s claim: The university’s self-historicizations reconcile their memory with ongoing colonial projects by selectively quoting the first sentence and omitting the second.
Morrill Acts, land-grant universities, and colonial settlement
Land-grant context: The Morrill Acts (1862 and 1890) funded public land-grant universities, underwriting higher education with land donated by Native lands to accelerate agricultural/scientific development.
Critical readings: Several historians (e.g., K. Wayne Yang, la paperson) describe the Morrill Acts as foundational to settler colonialism—transforming Native land into capital, turning wilderness into productive agricultural estates, and directing research to profit from dispossession.
The “Land-Grab Universities” project: Documents the expropriation of Indigenous land that funded land-grant universities, noting that such institutions were built on Indigenous land and operated as a project of settler colonialism with profit from dispossession.
Both affirmative and critical histories of land-grant universities converge on a central claim: universities are inextricably linked to settler colonization, either as beneficiaries or as active participants in dispossession.
Early colonial educational projects: Before land grants, colleges founded to educate Native youth were often aimed at Christianizing and civilizing Indigenous people, revealing the colonial logic embedded in education from the start.
The paradox: Some Native-led or Native-created schools emerged in the 19th century as a strategy to negotiate colonialism on Native terms, rather than simply resist or absorb it.
Summary claim: The University of Michigan, like many institutions, has participated in land seizure and settlement; its origin and growth are tied to a broader history of Indigenous dispossession that predates and illuminates the Morrill Acts.
Early colonial education for Native youth and Native-led education
Early colonial attempts to educate Native populations (to Christianize and civilize) were institutional attempts to convert Native lives to settler norms, often failing due to Native resistance.
Native responses included forming schools themselves, led by Native communities, to educate themselves in the colonial order on their own terms.
This dynamic demonstrates that education can both facilitate and contest colonial projects depending on who controls it and for what ends.
The University of Michigan’s origin, in this frame, is part of a longer arc in which Native and settler histories collide, cooperate, and conflict within the project of higher education.
The counter-history: colonial non-memory and the origin of the university
Core claim: The university’s historical arc is inseparable from land seizure and colonial non-memory—the deliberate forgetting or erasure of Indigenous rights and treaties.
The author’s methodological aim: To reconstruct a counter-history that foregrounds Indigenous memory and the land-based foundations of the university.
The prologue’s thesis: The university’s neglect of its treaty obligations and its involvement in settler colonization are not aberrations but constitutive features of its history.
The counter-history is meant to destabilize standard narratives that celebrate the university’s legacy without acknowledging its complicity in dispossession.
The role of land, labor, and capital in the university’s foundation
The Northwest Ordinance and its memorialization reveal a relationship between land policy, education, and settler governance.
The pedagogy of hierarchy and expansion: Education is presented as a tool for governance, while land dispossession enables the financial and material basis of education.
The book proposes a rethinking of the university’s mission: to acknowledge its foundational ties to land, labor, and capital—and to imagine futures that address reparative justice.
The author’s reflective stance: settler identity, shame, and the undercommons
The author speaks as a settler scholar who benefits from the university yet recognizes its role in oppression and dispossession.
The emotional dimension: A sense of shame arises when approaching the Northwest Ordinance’s language and the university’s memory practices; this shame is described as an effect of settler colonialism on its beneficiaries.
The author’s practice: He describes entering the “undercommons” (a space beyond official governance and control) to study and unlearn, acknowledging that much of the disabling history of the university lies beyond conventional institutional discourse [Footnote 20].
The central claim: Understanding the university through a settler lens requires recognizing alienation and dehumanization produced by participation in settler colonialism, even for those who profit from it.
Personal transformation: The author’s engagement moves from external critique to writing a counter-history that integrates Native perspectives and land-based histories into the university’s life.
The 1948 Indians Gave and the memorialization of Indigenous sacrifice
The Michigan Alumnus (October 1948) featured a piece titled “The Indians Gave,” which linked the Northwest Ordinance’s call to encourage education with private philanthropy and land grants dating back to treaty settlements.
The author reads this as an example of how the university mobilizes Indigenous ancestry to legitimize alumni philanthropy and the ongoing education enterprise, while continuing to erase the second sentence of Article 3 and its implications for Native rights.
The critique: Such memorial narratives instrumentalize Indigenous histories to support present-day fundraising and institutional legitimacy, obscuring ongoing dispossession.
Conclusion of the prologue: setting up a counter-history for the university
The prologue closes by outlining a project to tell a counter-history of the University of Michigan—one that foregrounds Indigenous histories, land relations, and the university’s role in settler colonialism.
It frames the book as a move toward reparative justice and new futures for higher education, where the university acknowledges its foundational ties to land and Native lifeways and interrogates how it might reconfigure its mission in light of that history.
Key terms and concepts to remember
minaadendamowin: Anishinaabe concept of respect/acknowledgement toward Native people and history.
colonial non-memory: A pattern of forgetting or erasing Indigenous treaties and histories within institutional memory.
Anishinaabe university: A framing of UM as an institution embedded in Anishinaabe homeland and lifeways, deserving reparative examination.
Land-grant university critique: The view that Morrill Acts institutionalized settler colonial dispossession by funding education through Indigenous lands.
undercommons: Spaces outside formal institutions where critical study and unlearning can occur apart from official governance.
Key dates, numbers, and references to recall
1794 Jay Treaty: Allowed Native people to cross the Medicine Line but restricted soldiers; context for Indigenous mobility and border politics.
1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs: Anishinaabe land grant to educate their children; associated with UM land holdings in Detroit (1,920 acres) and later 40 acres donated to UM in Ann Arbor in 1837.
1837: Ann Arbor Land Company donates 40 acres to lure the university to Ann Arbor.
1862 and 1890: Morrill Acts establishing land-grant universities (context for the university’s funding model).
1887: The Northwest Ordinance sentence about education displayed in University Hall’s auditorium.
1920s–2000s: Architectural and institutional memorials (Angell Hall pediment; Regents’ Room bronze panel) and later relocation of the marble panel in the early 2000s.
1948: The Indians Gave fundraising narrative in Michigan Alumnus illustrating the intersection of Indigenous history with alumni philanthropy.
1817–1837: Transition from Detroit to Ann Arbor, including the Michigan Territory’s settlement by white settlers and dispossession of Native lands by force or pressure.
Connections to broader themes in the course
The interaction of higher education and settler colonialism in U.S. history.
The role of memory, memorials, and public display in shaping institutional identity.
The tension between reparative justice and continued practices of exclusion or erasure.
The use of Indigenous perspectives to reframe the purposes and futures of universities.
Notes: Footnotes referenced in the prologue indicate supporting details and scholarly debates, including:
1, 2: Johnson’s grandfather’s treaty-based entitlement claim and university admissions denial.
3: Details of Johnson’s 1817 Fort Meigs treaty link and Detroit land claims; 1,920 acres vs. 40 acres donation; Johnson’s lawsuit.
4: Minaadendamowin as a core concept.
5–6: The Regents’ Room and Blouin’s commentary on public display and the panel’s relocation.
7: The second sentence of Article 3 and its omission from public display.
8–9: Morrill Acts and Turner’s frontier rhetoric; the scientific conquest framing.
10–12: Land-Grab Universities, settler colonialism, and Native education.
13–16: Early colonial education attempts and Native-led education movements.
17–18: The broader historical arc of education and land seizing intertwining with Indigenous dispossession.
19: Ruthven’s 1948 fundraising narrative connecting alumni to Native ancestors.
20: The undercommons and the author’s reflective practice.
This prologue thus establishes the framework for a counter-history that situates the University of Michigan within a longer, land-based, Indigenous-informed narrative, foregrounding reparative possibilities and new futures for higher education.