Last year, Dr Lee and co-winner Tristan Ahtone – then Indigenous Affairs editor for High Country News, now editor-in-chief of the Texas Observer – published a hard-hitting report revealing how 52 American universities built their fortunes using 11 million acres of Native American land, signed over amid violence, corruption and coercion.
Through exhaustive research over several years, the Land-Grab Universities project located 80,000 parcels of land scattered across 24 states, identified their Indigenous owners, and traced every dollar endowed with profits from dispossession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The investigation reconstructed a land area about the size of Denmark that was taken through over 160 land cessions. The dispossessed included the Dakota, Navajo, Apache, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Ojibwe among nearly 250 other tribes, bands and communities. Read more about Dr Lee’s research here.
On 6 April 2020, High Country News launched an interactive website enabling the public to explore the fully mapped data for themselves and published an open-source data set Lee assembled for future researchers and journalists to build upon.
Since then, a number of the universities at the heart of the story have responded by launching initiatives, changing their land acknowledgment practices and using the report, website, and data set in their teaching.
Image: Dr Robert Lee
Credit: Dr Robert Lee
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge