"Entitled to Our Land": The Settler Colonial Origins of the University of California 14 California Law Review Online 2023

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14 Calif. L. Rev. Online 23 (2023)
"Entitled to Our Land": The Settler Colonial Origins of the University of California

handle is hein.journals/callro14 and id is 23 raw text is:

Entitled to Our Land: The Settler

Colonial Origins of the University of

California

Amy Reavis & Nora Wallace*

Many may recognize the land grant moniker that several dozen
U.S. universities like the University of California carry, but what many
do not realize is that the land granted to fund these universities was
land that the federal government had recently expropriated from
Native Nations through violent seizures and coercive treaties. While
scholarship already exists on the colonial history of land grant
universities, this article zeroes in on the history of the University of
California. It describes how the school's governing body the
University of California Regents aggressively managed the state's
land grant in the recent wake of state-sponsored genocide of Native
Californians to raise funds necessary for the university's development
into an elite institution. It also describes how the Regents brought
records of their land grant management to California's 1879
Constitutional Convention. There the Regents lobbied for the
university to be declared an autonomous public trust, independent
from legislative control. This article concludes with a case study to
argue that this history has resulted in cruel irony. California Tribes'
modern ability to seek legislative redress for harms ratified by the
University of California is limited by the university's legal status as a
public trust -a sovereign-like immunity that the Regents built, in part,
from their participation in Native dispossession.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38WO8WH7T
Copyright © 2023 Amy Reavis and Nora Wallace.
*. Berkeley Law Classes of 2022 and 2021, respectively. This article was written as part of the
Truth and Justice Project at University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Professor Tony
Platt. The original research for the piece was completed during the Fall 2020 Federal Indian Law Writing
Seminar taught by Professors Seth Davis and Tony Platt. We are also indebted to Professor Nazune
Menka and Dr. Robert Lee for their feedback.
1. A quote by Joseph Winans, University of California Regent and delegate at the 1878
California Constitutional Convention, defending the University of California's management of its land
grant to the education committee. Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State
of California, Convened at the City of Sacramento, Saturday, September 28, 1878, at 1353 (1881) (Why
does he stab in the dark? Why, if he has anything to say against the Regents, does he not come out and

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