Under the Campus, the Land
Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan
A critical examination of the role of U.S. universities in colonization
Description
In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial settlement of Anishinaabe homelands hardly extended beyond Detroit in what settlers called the “Michigan Territory.” Four days after the Treaty of Fort Meigs was signed, the First College of Michigania was founded to claim the land that the Anishinaabeg had just granted. Four years later, the newly-chartered University of Michigan would claim this land. By the time that the university’s successor moved to Ann Arbor twenty years later, Anishinaabe people had been forced to cede almost all their land in what had become the state of Michigan, now inhabited by almost 200,000 settlers.
Under the Campus, the Land narrates the University of Michigan’s place in both Anishinaabe and settler history, tracing the university’s participation in the colonization of Anishinaabe homelands, Anishinaabe efforts to claim their right to an education, and the university’s history of disavowing, marginalizing, and minimizing its responsibilities and obligations to Anishinaabe people. Continuing the public conversations of the same name on U-M’s campus in 2023, Under the Campus, the Land provides a new perspective on the relationship between universities and settler colonialism in the US. Members of the U-M community, scholars of Midwest history, and those interested in Indigenous studies will find this book compelling.
Andrew Herscher is Professor of Architecture and Faculty Affiliate of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Michigan.
Reviews
“A sobering account of the founding and development of a major American university, told as the story of Native American dispossession, negotiation, erasure and struggle, Under the Campus, The Land reveals one of the first conversions of Indian land into an institution of higher learning—and the ways in which Anishinaabe people maintained their own dreams and investments in that same education. The University of Michigan may not know it yet, but when it comes to getting right with history, Andrew Herscher has done the institution an enormous favor.”
- Philip J. Deloria, Harvard University
“Histories of broken promises are never pretty, yet Under the Campus, the Land is beautifully researched and written. From the very first page, the book seethes with the future and the present even as it excavates the past of the University of Michigan. Anishinaabe dispossession and colonial amnesia are elements of the story that we might expect—certainly the institutional will to disappear Indigenous peoples, treaties, and responsibilities is well documented in this book—but what distinguishes it is Andrew Herscher’s attention to the Anishinaabeg’s diverse strategies to forge an Indigenous future during the recent two hundred years of U-M on their territory. From 1817 tribal negotiations of the First College of Michigania, to 1970s Native student activism, to 21st century efforts by the Native American Student Association to rescue the university from its own forgetting, Herscher offers his writings to this second story of an Anishinaabe university still in the making. Every institution needs its version of this book.”
- K. Wayne Yang, University of California San Diego
“An engaging and compelling narrative that embarks from an era when a mere 4,000 non-Native settlers precariously inhabited the Territory of Michigan to the present when a similar number would struggle to fill The Big House student section on a sunny football Saturday. As one of the most prestigious public universities in the world enters its third century perhaps it, along with many other public land grant institutions, will at last fully reconcile and atone for a settler colonial land grab that continues to ignore, dismiss, and dispel the indigenous foundations of generosity upon which their successes are built.”
- Shawn Spruce, Native America Calling
“Under the Campus, the Land is an important, fascinating, and forensic look at the Anishinaabe origins of the University of Michigan, and a commentary on the active forgetting of those Indigenous origins in subsequent decades right up to the present. In a moment where more and more organizations are taking stock of their past and acknowledging their complicity, this is a timely study that puts Native peoples front and center. Andrew Herscher makes a clear and compelling case that not only has the University misinterpreted its own history, but it has also been at the center of the settler colonial process in Michigan—it is complicit in the dispossession of Native American lands. This book is an important piece of scholarship that serves as a corrective and makes a significant argument that should not be ignored.”
- Michael McDonnell, University of Sydney
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