Land Grant: Complicating Institutional Legacies
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Land Grant: Complicating Institutional Legacies ALYSSA BRALOWER ALLISON ROWE Figure 1. Billy Morrow Jackson, We the People: The Land Grant College Heritage, 1987. Oil on canvas, 55 x 80 in.Introduction Board of the University of Illinois on behalf of its Krannert Art Museum. Museum Commission of the John Needles Chester Fund, 1987-19-1. In 1987, Billy Morrow Jackson (1926–2006) was commissioned to create the large-scale painting We the People: The Land-Grant College Heritage (1987) for the President’s Office at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where it still hangs in the reception room (fig. 1). In addition to an overview of a multiplicity of activities being undertaken on the UIUC campus, the central elements of the painting are portraits of three of the key founders of the Federal Land-Grant College Act, or the Morrill Act, 50 SHIFT which was passed in 1862 and enabled the construction of the university in 1867.1 On the left is Illinois native Jonathan Baldwin Turner, who advocated for agricultural reform via public education. Towering in the center is Abraham Lincoln, who holds in his hands a piece of parchment, a document meant to signify the Morrill Act. To the right of Lincoln is Justin Smith Morrill, a Vermont congressman who sponsored the legislation.2 Below these three figures, the university is depicted as a well-oiled machine, with numerous educational and research operations taking place around their looming presence. The Morrill Act established 130 universities on 30,000 acres of public land with the intention of educating farmers and low-class industrial workers in the fields of agriculture, engineering, science, and technology.3 These universities were built on public lands attained by force against peoples indigenous to the land including the Cahokia, Ho- Chunk, Kaskaskia, Meskwaki, Myaamia, Odawa, Peoria, Piankesaw, Potawatomi, Quapaw, and Wea, among many others.4 While often cast as an important accomplishment during the U.S. Civil War, the Morrill Act of 1862 was, as scholar la paperson notes, “truly intimate to war and to the production of a Yankee North American empire.”5 While Justin Morrill introduced the legislation, Lincoln’s signing of the act solidified it into a law that created a foundation for the development of many institutions which have, in multiple ways, erased and diminished Indigenous presences. We the People is one such example in that the painting does not depict these Indigenous peoples or the processes of violence that underwrite Jackson’s vision of the land-grant university. This violent history is wholly erased within the idyllic campus scene and is replaced with the inclusion of a singular primitivist caricature of a Native American man in the lower right corner of the painting. The erasure of lived Indigenous presence on campus, along with the inclusion of this caricature, constitutes a dual act of violence. This caricature—a “portrait” of the university’s former mascot, which was retired in 2007 after decades of Indigenous-led protest for its removal—is used to signify a romantic past amidst the flurry of innovation and progress that is portrayed throughout 1 Muriel Scheinman, “We the People: The Land-Grant College Heritage, 1987,” ExploreCU, accessed September 5, 2018, https://explorecu.org/items/show/11. 2 Muriel Scheinman, A Guide to the Art at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 38-39. 3 37th Congress, Session II, July 2nd, 1862, Ch. CXXX, section 4, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875, 504, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi- bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=012/llsl012.db&recNum=535. 4 Sharon Irish, “Institutional Racism and the Morrill Act,” Digitized Heart (blog), October 14, 2012, http://sharonirish.org/2012/10/14/institutional-racism-and-the-morrill-act/. Edgar Heap of Birds also acknowledged many of these tribes in his exhibition Beyond the Chief, discussed later in this article. 5 la paperson, “Land. And the University is Settler Colonial,” A Third University is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), n.p., https://manifold.umn.edu/read/7ba69a54-7131-4598-9fec- 815890725d91/section/561c45d2-9442-42d5-9938-f8c9e2aafcfc#ch02. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 51 the rest of the scene.6 We the People affirms Jodi Byrd’s observation that “American Indians and other indigenous peoples have often been evoked . as past tense presences. Indians are typically spectral, implied and felt.”7 Rather than acknowledge the violence of the founding of UIUC and other land-grant universities—a legacy that still affects the campus today—Jackson’s painting favors a mythic presentation of the university. In its disavowal of this history, this myth reproduces the violent relationship between the university, the land it is built upon, and Indigenous peoples. The fantastical space of We the People casts the land-grant university as a positivistic, utopian space. In doing so, the violence embedded in the promise of a public land-grant institution is erased or refigured as an inevitable episode in the march toward progress. This article traces the logic underlying objects and artworks owned by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign like We the People that, when put on display in a relational manner, assert a fraught but nonetheless critical interpretation of the 150-year history of the university and its relationships to land and Indigenous peoples. We argue these items reveal the legacies of settler colonialism that are still at work within land-grant university systems and question their entitlement to public lands. The objects discussed in this paper were included in Land Grant, an exhibition hosted at the Krannert Art Museum (KAM) from January to June 2017 (figs. 2, 3, 6, 9). The exhibition was the culmination of research conducted in Dr. Terri Weissman and Dr. Amy Powell’s fall 2016 curatorial practicum seminar.8 During this seminar ten graduate students,9 including the authors, spent the semester researching local history, visiting archives, and scouring off-campus university collections with the intention of curating an exhibition from these items. In advance of the practicum, Dr. Weissman and Dr. Powell arranged a series of visits to campus archives and collections including the University of Illinois Archives, the Spurlock Museum, the University of Illinois Rare Book and 6 Robert Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing at the University of Illinois: Heap of Birds’s Signs of Indigenous Life,” Profession (2011), 46. Warrior writes, “Most universities with Native-themed sports mascots had ended their use by the early 1980s, but some schools in areas without a visible presence of Native people persisted in their use. Supporters of Illinois’s mascot continued through the decade to hold to the position that having a white student dress in a buckskin outfit and feathered headdress while performing a dance routine having nothing to do with any North American Native dance tradition was a form of honoring Native North American Peoples.” 7 Jodi A. Byrd, “Introduction: Indigenous Critical Theory and the Diminishing Returns of Civilization,” Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xx. 8 The seminar was entitled Graduate Seminar in Contemporary Art: Practicum in Curatorial Methods, and Land Grant was conceived of as an exhibition that would coincide with the sesquicentennial of the establishment of the University of Illinois. 9 Land Grant was truly a collaborative effort, and thus we would like to thank and acknowledge the other members of Dr. Weissman and Dr. Powell’s curatorial practicum: Yue Dai, Evin Dubois, Maria Garth, Michael Hurley, Cory Imig, Lilah Leopold, Jenny Peruski, and Luis Gonzalo Pinilla. We also would like to especially thank Dr. Weissman, Dr. Powell and the staff of the Krannert Art Museum for their insight, guidance, and support throughout the creation of this exhibition. 52 SHIFT Manuscript Library, the Ricker Library of Architecture, the Krannert Art Museum, and the President’s Office. We collectively considered the information from these visits in concert with literature on contemporary curatorial practices to establish three thematic, intersecting focuses for the exhibition: Indigeneity, land use, and the university. Figure 2. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017. Installation view features Billy Morrow Jackson, We the People: The Land Grant College Heritage (1987) installed on the left wall of the gallery, flanked by a transistor panel from the Illiac II (1985); Kevin Hamilton, A Place in Time (2012); and several editions of the Illini Wise student handbooks (1950-57). These focuses were further investigated by curatorial teams of three or four people, each charged with undertaking additional object research and developing proposals for items to be included in the show. There were some items, such as the archival photograph Morrow Plots, Corn and Oats, 1903 (fig.7), which all thematic curatorial groups identified as valuable to the exhibition. Other objects, like a rather ambiguous grey lump of crinoid fossil, were defended by only one person in the room. We used collective decision making to make a final selection of artworks and artefacts based on how they would interact with one another in an exhibition context. Land Grant, and this article, consider notions of both real and imagined university spaces, pedagogical practices, and the university’s complex relationship to Indigenous histories and local landscapes. This complicated history of violence, erasure, and progress is embedded within the land of the UIUC campus and has been re-inscribed and reified Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 53 through many of the objects and archival materials displayed in Land Grant. Central to the exhibition was Billy Morrow Jackson’s regionalist painting, which depicts a progressive narrative of the university as a site of linear betterment; a notion that continues to carry weight.