Description and Brief History of Land-Grant/Grab Colleges: The Pennsylvania State University was founded as state land-grant college, focused on the teaching of agriculture, science, and engineering. It was later designated as a federal land-grant college and subsequently received funding from the Morill Act of 1862. The Morrill Land-Grant Acts used the proceeds from sales of federally owned land, often obtained from Native American tribes through treaty, cession, or seizure, to establish institutions of secondary education.
Visit https://www.landgrabu.org/ for more detailed information about the land parcels used to create Penn State and other universities, the Indigenous people displaced, and the deep implications of this history.
In recognition of the fact that university lands were once the traditional homelands of Indigenous people, many land-grant universities have written land acknowledgments. See below for Penn State’s official land acknowledgement, written in collaboration with PSU’s Indigenous Peoples’ Student Association (IPSA) and the Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance (IFSA).
PSU Land Acknowledgement
The Pennsylvania State University campuses are located on the original homelands of the Erie, Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora), Lenape (Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe, Stockbridge-Munsee), Shawnee (Absentee, Eastern, Oklahoma), Susquehannock, and Wahzhazhe (Osage) Nations. As a land grant institution, Penn State acknowledges and honors the traditional caretakers of these lands and strives to understand and model their responsible stewardship. We also acknowledge the longer history of these lands and our place in that history.
For further reading on land acknowledgements, please visit https://nativegov.org/news/a-guide-to-indigenous-land-acknowledgment/
To learn about the Indigenous histories of the lands you live, learn, and work on, visit this interactive map.