Last year, Grist published the groundbreaking investigation “Misplaced Trust” – an investigation into how 14 land-grant colleges continue to profit from more than 8.3 million acres taken from 123 Indigenous nations. Using publicly available data, Grist’s Indigenous Affairs team was able to report that these lands produce revenue in the billions every year for colleges like the University of Arizona, New Mexico State University, Texas A&M, and the University of Washington. Between 2018 and 2022 alone, these lands produced at least $6.7 billion for land grant institutions.
To build America, the U.S. government enacted laws to redistribute Indigenous lands they had taken. Some land was given to individuals and corporations to build homes or private empires, through laws like the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act, while the Morrill Act offered up freshly seized territory as capital for states to establish land-grant universities. Separately, the legislation that transformed frontier territories into full-fledged states — known as Enabling Acts — contained handouts of land that state governments could use to pay for public institutions. Those offerings are generally called state trust lands and are one of the best-kept public secrets in America.
Our reporting was honored with The University of Florida Award in Investigative Data Journalism by ONA, the project marked a major achievement for Grist’s Indigenous Affairs desk and has inspired countless news stories, podcasts, interviews, and symposiums. But we didn’t stop there.
While reporting Misplaced Trust, we saw some surprising entries in our dataset. Many of the trust lands we found exist within the boundaries of federal Indian reservations — despite their status as sovereign nations. Trust Issues, the first follow-up in our series and a collaboration with High Country News, expanded our investigation to find more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations in 15 states that are used to support public institutions, overwhelmingly K-12 schools, in order to reduce the financial burden on non-Native taxpayers.
Our reporting revealed that the trust land system operates at the expense of tribal citizens, tribal sovereignty, and Indigenous land management practices. In fact, some tribes actually pay rent to the state to use trust land within their own borders. In “Wiped Off the Map” we detailed how a federal clerk’s filing error allowed 90,000 acres of the Yakama Nation to be transferred to the State of Washington, and how the financial revenue from state trust lands remain one of the only barriers to returning that land to the tribe.
But state trust lands have even wider impacts, and in the latest investigative story, 10 states fund prisons using stolen Indigenous lands, we revealed that U.S. states fund their prison systems using revenue generated from nearly 2 million acres of land taken from 57 Indigenous nations. Our reporting found that this injustice is also compounded by the fact that Indigenous people are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates-a direct consequence of colonial policies that have undermined Indigenous economies, cultures and governments.
