Land-grant institutions are colleges and universities designated to receive benefits of the morrill acts of 1862 and 1890.

In 1862, the president abraham Lincoln signed the morrill act, which distributed thousands of acres of “public domain lands/ public federal land” to raise funds as seed money for higher education institutions across the nation. It's crucial to point out that the land “donated” was not public federal land, it was stolen Indigenous Land that had been forcibly and/or violently taken from tribes and Indigenous Groups of Peoples. The land was relabeled as public federal land after seizure.

For example, almost half of the Colorado State University’s grant was land taken from the Arapaho and Cheyenne Peoples, less than a year after the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, where more than 200 members were killed by the US Government. The 150,000 acres selected for the University of Arizona were nearly all seized without payment at the end of the Apache War.

Another clear example is how the Dakota’s land cession of 1851 occurred around five weeks after the mass execution of 38 Dakota men hanged for participating in a resurrection after the US Army had been deployed in their land and food rations had been scattered. The Dakota’s land cession funded the endowment of 35 different universities. Nearly 830,000 acres from this treaty — an area almost three times the size of Los Angeles.

The morrill act was a way to quickly redistribute massive quantities of stolen Indigenous Land. The land was subdivided into thousands of parcels and much was resold to individuals, creating thousands of now “legitimate” owners with a title that held them as the sole and only proprietors. The goal of the morrill act was not only to use land to create profit to fund and support universities, but to make the return of the stolen Indigenous Lands to Indigenous Peoples nearly impossible.

According to the Land Grab Universities investigation by, nearly 11 million acres were redistributed; to exemplify, it is an area larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. The land was then broken up into almost 80,000 parcels, scattered mostly across 24 Western states.

The Morrill Act turned Indigenous land into college endowments:
First, all money made from land sales must be used in perpetuity, meaning those funds still remain on university ledgers to this day. And secondly, at least 12 states are still in possession of unsold Morrill acres as well as associated mineral rights, which continue to produce revenue for their designated institutions”

The University of Minnesota was founded in 1851, closed during the Civil War due to debt. In 1868 the University of Minnesota received an endowment from the land seized from the Dakota people, and the institution was brought back to life.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, was founded in 1861, and a year later, the Civil War started.