Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Land-Grant Universities

Abstract

Moments of performative racial consciousness, however urgent and necessary, often fail to reckon with long-standing demands against injustice from communities of color. In the case of Indigenous Peoples in higher education, these demands frequently include an end to derogatory mascots and racialized campus violence. This article attends to those issues by merging and extending settler-colonial theory and racialized organization theory to examine how the logics of Indigenous elimination and dispossession permeate higher education. With a specific focus on land-grant universities, I argue that racialized organizations are embedded in institutional fields and that both operate within a broader settler-colonial project. I introduce the concept of settler simultaneity to further historicize the study of racialized organizations and uncover how they target persons, collectives, and ideas that pose obstacles to settler goals of subordination, extraction, and profiteering both locally and globally. I look to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a case study that illustrates how these logics work across time and conclude by considering how critical engagement with the logics of elimination can help us to better understand, and hold accountable, the policies and programs of racialized organizations in other areas of social life.

Keywords

settler colonialism racialized organizations racism American Indians land-grant universities

In response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, mass uprisings across the United States brought new attention to the ongoing use of state-sanctioned violence against communities of color. On June 2, 2020, the music industry and countless businesses throughout the nation participated in “Blackout Tuesday” in protest against racism and the nation’s continuous state of police violence. Everyday citizens, and even national sports teams including the now renamed “Washington Football Team,” participated in the day of observance. In support, the Team tweeted out a black square with the hashtag #BlackOutTuesday¹ and received swift criticism for their contradictory solidarity. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, tweeted this response: “Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name.”² Nearly 700,000 Twitter users “liked” this statement. Despite consistent demands from Native Peoples to change the name over several decades, it took only one month until the Team relented and dropped its derogatory name and iconography. This change occurred after the Team was pressured by a collection of financial investors including FedEx and companies such as Nike, Walmart, and Target removed the team’s merchandise from their stores (Baer 2020).

This rapid uptake in performative racial consciousness, however urgent and necessary, shields the nation’s attention from reckoning with another long-standing set of demands involving derogatory mascots and racialized violence against Indigenous Peoples, namely, those multiple violences occurring within higher education settings. In this article, I argue that a singular focus on the unfolding events surrounding the renaming of the Washington Football Team in 2020 willfully ignores the settler-colonial logics of Indigenous elimination and dispossession that permeates American society, logics that produce and normalize this racialization against Indigenous Peoples across social and cultural settings. To uncover the ties that bind settler colonialism and contemporary attempts to subordinate and denigrate Indigenous Peoples, I focus on the creation of American land-grant universities and ask the following questions: What are the origins of racialized anti-Indigenous³ violence in popular society? What role do educational organizations play in perpetuating and ultimately profiting from this violence? What can the simultaneity of the Black Tuesday events tell us about the intentions, continuity, and overlap in settler-colonial interests?

To answer these questions, I focus my analysis on one organizational setting—higher education—and begin by moving chronologically from 1823 to the present to show how the ideological lineage of settler colonialism manifests in anti-Indigenous racism. As a primary socializing agent, I argue that universities are inherently settler-colonial organizations given that higher education is derived from, and carries out, the goals of settler colonialism despite contemporary claims in favor of multicultural inclusion. While settler-colonial logics equally inform the policies and programs of other types of colleges and universities—as well as boarding schools and primary schools commonly used to assimilate Native youth—I narrow my focus to land-grant universities given their explicit connection to Indigenous land theft, unique legislative history, and contemporary prominence in higher education. I support my primary argument about the role of such schools by first merging settler-colonial theory (Glenn 2015; Wolfe 2006) with racialized organization theory (Ray 2019) to reveal the transformation of Indigenous Peoples into American Indians as a racial project (Omi and Winant 2014) that undergirds higher education more broadly. Next, I examine how early American law functioned as a tool of Indigenous elimination and dispossession by focusing specifically on the Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the Homestead Act of 1862. From here, I position the Morrill Act of 1862 as a cultural vehicle that diffused and legitimized beliefs about Native elimination across organizational settings, most notably from law to education. Ultimately, I argue that racialized organizations are embedded in institutional fields and that both operate within a broader settler-colonial project and must be studied as such.

Second, I introduce the concept of settler simultaneity to further historicize the study of racialized organizations and to show how settler-colonial logics inform multiple types of anti-Indigenous racism present in higher education today. In the process, I also show how such logics inform the mechanics and temporalities by which racialized organizations such as land-grant universities continue to profit from Indigenous communities while dispossessing them. Using settler simultaneity as an analytical tool, I uncover how social organizations target different persons, collectives, and ideas that pose obstacles to settler goals of subordination, extraction, and profiteering both locally and globally. I define settler simultaneity as the manifestation of co-occurring settler colonial actions that further white supremacist intentions and disorient communities of color to ensure group subordination. This analytical lens situates seemingly disparate events that happen under the auspices of settler colonial organizations as interrelated and intentional. This connection is strikingly apparent at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), an ideal case study that illuminates the relationship between Indigenous elimination and the profit-driven ideologies that underlie settler-colonial social organizations. I focus on two sets of events that situate UIUC’s reciprocal profit-elimination machinery as an ideal case study: (1) a long-standing resistance to abandon the university’s racist “mascot” and the ongoing campus turmoil surrounding the continued, unofficial use of that mascot at sporting events and student gatherings, and (2) the recent programmatic attacks against the American Indian Studies Program (AIS) which operated in tandem with the unhiring of Steven Salaita, a scholar of global indigeneity.

In the UIUC case, I show that settler intentions and implications stretch beyond racialized imagery and reach into the very heart of the supposed democratic function of higher education. Ultimately, I argue that the derogatory mascot, persistent anti-Indigenous racism, and Salaita’s unhiring constitute examples of racial violence made possible through the mechanics of racialized organizations—all of which find their origins within settler-colonial terror and violence. As a conceptual framework, settler simultaneity exposes how the intentions, continuity, and overlap in settler-colonial interests strategically manifest in seemingly disparate moments of reckoning at UIUC but also nationally through state violence, Black Tuesday, and the renaming of the Washington Football Team. The duality of this settler-racial approach exposes the necessity of settler simultaneity as an analytical tool in sociological research more broadly. As a result, this research also suggests that racial and settler-colonial violence cannot be uncoupled and instead must be analyzed and theorized alongside one another. To do otherwise is to risk analyzing the symptoms and by-products of settler colonialism while missing the structures of inequality and oppression that undergird them altogether.

Settler Colonialism Creates Racialized Organizations

In March 2020, just months before Black Tuesday and the mass mobilizations against police violence that narrated the summer of 2020, historian Robert Lee and journalist Tristin Antone released a comprehensive and damning newspaper expose titled “Land-grab Universities,” an article which ran with the concisely titled subheading, “Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system.” This article circulated far and wide, opening long-overdue conversations about the historical and financial reality that land-grant universities profited from the expropriation of 10.7 million acres of land under the 1862 Morrill Act, all of which was made possible by the violence of Indigenous removal. The research also identified 500,000 acres of allocated land with mineral rights that continue to generate revenue for “land-grab universities,” lands that remain in trust to state universities and not their ancestral caretakers (Lee and Antone 2020).

To make sense of these intersecting moments of racialized violence in the sociological literature, I link settler-colonial theory (Glenn 2015; Wolfe 2006) with racialized organization theory (Ray 2019) to show how the settler logics of Indigenous elimination and dispossession permeate the present moment. I focus explicitly on the legacy of land-grant universities and higher education to ground my analysis. In addition, I link these literatures to show how the law constructed a series of bureaucratic and organizational rules for resource distribution that patterns the exclusion and subordination of Indigenous Peoples. Opposed to an analysis of individual actors, I emphasize how the law functions as the central site and production manager of social conflict (Frank 1983; Turk 1976) where lawmakers co-constructed self-perpetuating patterns of domination and subordination to make the mechanics of conquest appear to be an “agentless enterprise” (Huhndorf 2001). This obfuscation is not without deliberate intention.

Settler Colonialism

Colonialism defines the logics and actions of polities that seek to control, develop, and extract human and material resources for economic gain in ways that benefit their nation-state, often to the physical, psychological, and cultural detriment of the colonized population (Sassen 2010). Settler colonialism, a distinct form of colonialism, involves the violent displacement and removal of Indigenous Peoples with the intention of replacing them with settler communities and societies (Glenn 2015; Veracini 2011; Wolfe 2006). In settler-colonial societies, land acquisition and permanent settlement are of paramount importance to extraction and exploitation and their possession is informed by a guiding ideology known as a “logic of elimination” (Wolfe 2006). Put another way, settler colonialism “destroys to replace” (Wolfe 2006) and structures the incorporation of Indigenous Peoples into white society using possessive forms of whiteness (Moreton-Robinson 2015). In this way, settler colonialism is simultaneously an ongoing social process and a theoretical lens by which to understand how the global expansion of European nation-states and predatory accumulation throughout the last five centuries is neither complete nor benign (Go 2018; Harvey 2005). Examples of settler colonies include the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.

The history of race and racism in the United States is deeply intertwined with the logic, project, and structure of settler colonialism. Namely, the contemporary system of racial domination and racial stratification evolved, in part, from European colonizers and their burgeoning belief systems about Indigenous Peoples as uncivilized and inferior due to their non-Christian worldview (Mills 1997). Indeed, European settlers legitimized genocide and violent land acquisitions as permissible by claiming Indigenous Peoples as moral nonpersons (Mills 1997) and by relying on the Doctrine of Discovery. This international law supported European theft by claiming that Indigenous lands could be “discovered” and seized for the benefit of colonial nations (Deloria 1969; Mills 1997). Despite immeasurable violence, Indigenous Peoples endured and resisted while the nascent nation grew rapidly by constructing the U.S. racial order upon both Indigenous displacement and the enslavement of Africans. As the logic of settler colonialism matured and expanded in the United States, blacks and Natives were pushed into divergent racialized trajectories still visible in contemporary society.

This critical connection between the local and the global on matters of race and colonialism has not been lost on sociologists. W. E. B. Du Bois (1920), for example, was attentive to the relationship between imperialism and national race issues that shaped “self- and group-identity formation under conditions of racialization” in ways that interrogated global exploitation (Itzigsohn and Brown 2017:232). Several contemporary sociologists have taken up this connection as well. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2015) explicitly links the settler-colonial logic of elimination with the history of race and racism in the United States, arguing for the necessity of a settler colonialism framework through which to understand race and gender formation. Despite the powerful scholarship of Du Bois and Glenn, sociological theorizing on the relationship between settler colonialism and race in the United States remains underexplored (McKay et al. 2020). Julian Go laments this gap, explaining, “the problem is that much of mainstream sociology fails to analyze colonialism and barely acknowledges its existence, to the effect of extricating colonialism from its accounts and theories entirely” (2018: 442). This gap is immeasurably problematic given the centrality of imperialism to the making of the modern world (Go 2018). In response, Go (2018) convincingly argues that a postcolonial sociology of race would put colonialism “front and center” in ways that identify, critique, and bridge the construction of race under empire and contemporary society (2018: 442). Relatedly, Katrina Quisumbing King urges scholars to resist binary interpretations of Du Bois’s famed “color line,” opting instead for comprehensiveness when engaging with colonialism, suggesting that such vigilance is fruitful to the sociology of race because “thinking about the United States as an empire state facilitates the study of the multitude of U.S. color lines” that exist within it (2019: 20). From this nonbinary vantage point, we can begin to see that “racisms operate at various, articulated scales and depths” (Jung 2015:32). This article demonstrates how those scales are often tied to settler projects of Indigenous elimination and permeate the operating policies and practices of contemporary social organizations.

Drawing on Du Bois (1920) to couple the underlying goals of settler colonialism with the enduring effects of racial projects and King’s (2019) timely conversation about “the multitude of U.S. color lines,” I theorize how empire produced the overt anti-Indigenous racism that remains a mainstay at contemporary land-grant universities such as UIUC. I do so by first establishing that settler colonialism is a “structuring structure” (Wolfe 2006) that creates a foundation of violence (white supremacy, racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy) upon which settler-states construct all dominant social institutions. That is, settlers move from an emphasis on territoriality to an emphasis on the production of social institutions, efforts supported by a web of laws and policies that normalize settlement, Indigenous exploitation, and predatory accumulation. Social institutions are complex structures that organize social life around a set of norms and values. They also socialize community members on issues of family, law, economy, education, and religion, and, in the process, establish the settler-colonial and white supremacist parameters in which social organizations function. It is within this context of violence and Indigenous dispossession that the legal, political, cultural, social, and economic legacies of colonialism that were once inscribed onto the land are subsequently reinscribed onto the societies they produce. To be clear, I do not suggest that imperial and racialized subordination are one in the same. Instead, I suggest that by framing the United States as a settler-colonial project, we can trace the presence and intersections of multiple “color lines” through the nation’s primary social institutions, across historical periods and into the present. This approach reveals concrete organizational policies that continue to promote settler-colonial desires and demand sociological study and focused policy intervention.

Racialized Organizations

Social organizations are commonly understood as agencies and associations that coordinate activities among a social group in ways that accomplish collective goals and correspond to a set of shared values (Aldrich 1999). Organizations often use task specialization, standardization, and formalization, allowing these entities to live on despite the presence or absence of specific persons (Weber 1978). What this common definition has long obscured is that organizations are fundamentally racialized spaces in which racial meanings inform an agency’s operations in ways that reinforce racial stratification (Ray 2019). According to racialized organization theory, organizations are racial structures that link racial meaning and interactions with the accumulation and dispersal of resources along racial lines to differentially constrain human agency within everyday social life. In addition to simultaneously limiting resources and subordinating targeted social groups, racialized organizations legitimize this unfair resource distribution and decouple progressive values from the policies and practices that inform the operation of the organization (Ray 2019). Organizations also rely on the credentialing of whiteness to legitimize this disproportionate allocation of resources in the context of racialized institutions embedded in racialized social systems, which in turn, amplifies the interests of white supremacy (Ray 2019). This theoretical approach critically illustrates how race shapes organizations, while also showing how race, racialization, and racism are filtered through social organizations to promote organizational continuity (Ray 2019).

I extend racialized organization theory (Ray 2019) beyond its twentieth-century lens and argue that racialized organizations emerged from the violence of settler colonialism, and that these two predatory sets of ideologies (race/racism and settler colonialism) continue to operate in a dialectic that produces material and psychological harm for all but are particularly acute for communities of color.In the process, I operationalize racialized organization theory to attend to the anti-Indigenous racial project that undergirds higher education and show how these harms are mediated and constituted through social organizations. This project constitutes a key mode through which organizations enact the settler logics of elimination and dispossession in ways that inform how organizations operate, and in turn, how they rationalize the distribution of educational resources. By looking at one case, we can see how this dialectic operates in real time. This approach engages the notion of a racial project which is both an interpretation of what race means and an explanation of how race is organized in the social world (Omi and Winant 2014). Guided by this definition, I frame anti-Indigenous racism as a fluid racial project whose subordinating powers manifest in a variety of ways within all social institutions and organizations, including land-grant universities. In sum, conceptualizing the United States as a settler-state facilitates a critical examination of contemporary racialized organizations and their pivotal role in determining how social groups access a variety of resources, including land and higher education.

Racialized organizations further settler logics by acting as socializing agents of settler interests, maintaining power and control over dispossessed Indigenous lands to the detriment of Native Peoples, and by shrouding these intentions and actions behind the language of race and multicultural inclusion. Education, like all social institutions, requires a set of meso-level organizations with rules and procedures organized by a bureaucratic division of labor to coordinate activities that further a set of shared educational goals and values. Less well understood, however, is that like all other social institutions, education was established to do the work of the settler-state. Thus, education functions as a socializing agent of settler interests without the need to express this directive explicitly because the interests themselves are embedded within the shared goals and values that social organizations manage and make possible. That is, educational settings reproduce race in part by deploying racialized institutional logics. Racialized organizations are inherently settler, a space in which the settler simultaneity of elimination and racialization manifest and co-constitute alongside and within the other. Racialized organizations become the space in which settler interests are rehearsed, take meaning, and are acted upon. As a result, settler-colonial violence is the umbrella of racial violence, the ideological manifestation that authorized and made it possible for racialized organizations such as UIUC to shape resource distribution and life chances in ways that amplify the interests of white supremacy and its reciprocal profit-elimination machinery. In the following section, I draw our attention to how these organizational processes are derived from settler-legal logics that in time manifest in the creation and continuity of land-grant universities through the Morrill Act of 1862. Thus, land-grant universities are a distinct class of organizations that firmly situate settler-colonial desires with contemporary racialization and subordination in seemingly benign organizational spaces.⁴

Settler Stakes In Indigenous Dispossession And Land-Grant Universities

Settler societies, intent on actualizing their logics of Indigenous elimination and dispossession, manifest their desires in various social institutions, including law, education, family, and the economy. These institutions function as anti-Indigenous socializing agents in ways that promote, and simultaneously obscure, the link between Indigenous elimination and the accumulation of profits and the distribution of resources within racialized organizations. Here, I specifically examine the emergence of land-grant universities as settler-colonial organizations, organizations made possible by the Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the Homestead Act of 1862. I look to Illinois and its flagship campus, the UIUC, as a case study to materially ground how these laws positioned states to capitalize on the Morrill Act of 1862, a law designed to establish land-grant universities in each state. Entrenched in American Indian subordination, these judicial opinions and federal policies sought Native disenfranchisement, and ultimately led to the distribution of resources and enhanced life chances that benefited non-Natives in Illinois and beyond. As I will discuss below, the law has yet to abandon this goal and continues to prioritize financial profits at the continued expense of Indigenous well-being and the well-being of communities of color more broadly.

Johnson v. McIntosh (1823)

Named after the local Indigenous confederacy of Illinois Peoples, Illinois became the 21st state⁵ in the Union in 1818, during a time of rapid westward expansion and the creation of federal policy to physically control and remove Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral homelands (Blasingham 1956). Four months after Illinois entered the Union, the U.S. Congress authorized the Civilization Fund Act in March 1819 to promote the building of boarding schools by “benevolent societies” and religious groups that were eager to assimilate Indigenous Peoples out of existence (Civilization Fund 1819).⁶ These schools were rooted in Indigenous dispossession and would function in tandem with the emergence of federally funded land-grant universities. Shortly thereafter, new trade regulations shifted the mechanics of Indigenous trade from public control to partnerships between private individuals and companies, actions that sought to manage the agency of Native economies and homelands and place them squarely into the hands of federal power.

Within the first five years after Illinois joined the Union, Chief Justice John Marshall enshrined the states’ role in the violence of conquest by applying the Doctrine of Discovery to settle an Illinois land dispute in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823)⁷—a European doctrine that encouraged Christian colonizers to take first rights to Native lands and resources. The dispute involved the plaintiff, Thomas Johnson, who contracted private land purchases with land venture companies in 1773 and 1775 on behalf of the Illinois and Piankeshaw, the ancestral caretakers of the land (Duthu 2008).⁸ The defendant, William McIntosh, traced his title back to the U.S. government after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 (Duthu 2008). The Court decided in favor of William McIntosh, determining that Johnson’s property rights could not be honored because the federal government did not allow the Illinois and Piankeshaw Peoples to retain the right to sell their land. To further legitimize the taking of Native lands, the Supreme Court enmeshed capitalist notions of property with Christian notions of civility, dismissing any ownership of the land altogether as a result of the supposed cultural inferiority of Indigenous Peoples.⁹

Chief Justice John Marshall’s legal framework explicitly justifies non-Native land possession by rendering “Indian tribes guests in their own ancestral homelands” (Duthu 2008:70) and delegitimizing the sovereignty of tribal nations by framing one’s “Indianness” as a negative credential (Rocha Beardall and Escobar 2016) that warrants exclusion. Marshall’s decision, however, dispossesses Native Peoples of more than the rights to the lands they occupy. Johnson v. McIntosh renders both the land and the Native body subject to simultaneous dispossession and possession. Native lands and bodies are thus refashioned into entities and commodities to be governed, owned, and eventually sold for profit, a framing that invites us to analyze the continued significance of Indigenous dispossession for the benefit of non-Natives in two additional moments: the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the subsequent repopulation of Indigenous lands with non-Natives through the Homestead Act of 1862.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and Homestead Act of 1862

After Johnson v. McIntosh, the federal government sought to expand its control over American Indians in new ways, including removal, the management of Native annuities, and assimilation programs such as missionary-run boarding schools. To facilitate these programs, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun created the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1824 and placed Thomas L. McKenney at its helm.¹⁰ Importantly, McKenney and other influential political figures of the era “were long-time and ardent promoters of Indian removal” (Tyler 1973). In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was passed with the help of strong southern supporters who stood to gain financially from Indigenous removal. Under the new law, President Andrew Jackson was provided with “unrestrained authority to survey and subdivide millions of acres west of the Mississippi as he saw fit,”¹¹ creating a federal public land system that would link removal to the creation of public land scrips under the Morrill Act and settler farms under the Homestead Act.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862. Homesteaders who met specific requirements were able to settle 160 acres of western “public land” (Homestead Act 1862). These lands would be “free” to the homesteaders so long as they maintained consistent residence over five years and either “improved” the land or paid a nominal fee. The Homestead Act was in effect until 1986. In total, homesteaders acquired over 270 million acres in 30 states, or approximately 10 percent of all U.S. land today. Major goals of the Homestead Act involved the creation of revenue and the promotion of westward migration that would profit the Union Pacific railroad. To this point, in 1862, President Lincoln also signed the Pacific Railroad Act which provided the opportunity for railway companies to build a transcontinental rail system. From the years 1851 to 1870, railroads acquired more than 175 million acres of land and held superior rights to those of homesteaders. In effect, these two acts accelerated Indigenous removal and Indigenous dispossession by helping to fill Native lands with settlers and railways that could promote both economic and westward expansion. They also clearly reveal the profit-making intentions that underlie the creation of settler societies and their motivation for violence to Indigenous lands and bodies.

The Morrill Act of 1862 Paves the Way for the University of Illinois in 1867

The 1823 Johnson v. McIntosh case, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the 1862 Homestead Act collectively solidified the colonial myth of terra nullius (uninhabited land), remade the American Indian into a political and social subordinate, and used these qualifiers to acquire and legitimize the taking of westward lands. These laws also set the stage for the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant College Act in 1862 which claimed Native homelands for “the democratization of education” (Simon 1963:105). Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the Morrill Act legitimized the past and future removal of Native bodies by granting each state land scrip equivalent to 30,000 acres of federal public lands for each member of the Senate and House of Representatives. The scrip would be used in service of a perpetual education fund (Morrill Act 1862), with investment interest providing for the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college for the purpose of military arts, agriculture, and mechanical arts (Simon 1963). If the state held unsold public lands within its borders, then it was required to use those lands to build their endowment. If not, the state would receive scrip that entitled it to new lands in other states (Simon 1963). In total, the Morrill Act of 1862 created 49 colleges.¹² Established in 1867, the UIUC was provided an initial allocation of 480,000 acres of land scrip (Gates 2011).

The ostensible need to democratize higher education provided by Senator Morrill and his political allies is misleading for several reasons. First, it was well known that the call for a national system of land-grant colleges was not Senator Morrill’s idea. In fact, Morrill’s name on the legislation, and his lack of interest in agricultural advocacy of any kind, “served as a signal that something more than educational philanthropy was at stake” to his fellow members of Congress (Simon 1963:105). Writing over 100 years later, former University of Illinois Vice President Eldon L. Johnson (1981) echoed this suspicion, describing how “education was often the legitimizing factor, while the real objective was something else, perhaps pioneer settlement, speculation, or economic development” (p. 335). Second, many land-grant institutions had difficulty recruiting students, even to the agricultural and technical programs for which UIUC and other land grants are most famous—likely because “the economic benefits were long-range and intangible, lacking the immediacy of homestead grants” and “farmers looked with suspicion on the very concept of agricultural education” (Simon 1963, p. 103). For these reasons, university financial aid programs for land-grant universities were created in the 1860s to lure students to the Illinois Industrial University (Maher and Whitledge 2011) with incentives such as free housing.

In effect, financial aid programs operated much like land speculation projects of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries by working to repopulate Indigenous lands by filling the seats of the new Illinois campus with non-Native students. Instead of discounted land, however, the university was offering discounted higher education and instead of recruiting white families to Illinois land, UIUC was actively recruiting their children. Thus, to democratize access to higher education at UIUC, the Native body was erased, physically and legally from the land. The land-grant institution reaped a substantial, enduring financial benefit from the violence of this erasure in Illinois and other Indigenous lands that earned revenue for the university’s land scrip. Given this long, lucrative history of American Indian dispossession on Illinois lands, it is unsurprising that this landscape would continue its involvement in Indigenous erasure and anti-Indigenous racism in the years to come.

Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Uiuc

With an understanding of how the legal and ideological lineage of settler colonialism manifested in anti-Indigenous policies in Illinois, I now turn to reveal how these policies grew into anti-Indigenous racism and violence at the state’s flagship university in recent decades. In this section, I elaborate on the concept of settler simultaneity and reinforce my central argument that higher education organizations are derived from, and carry out, the intentions and goals of settler colonialism despite contemporary claims of multicultural inclusion.

Simultaneity is often defined by two or more events taking place in either temporal or substantive proximity, which could be construed as either coincidental or intentional. In the context of settler colonialism, simultaneity manifests through co-occurring settler-colonial actions that white supremacist intentions and disorient communities of color to ensure group subordination. The study of settler simultaneity requires that researchers analyze seemingly disparate events that happen under the auspices of settler colonial institutions as potentially interrelated and intentional. Using settler simultaneity as an analytical tool, I show how settler colonial logics inform the mechanics and temporalities by which racialized organizations such as land-grant universities continue to promote anti-Indigenous racial animus and profit from Indigenous elimination and dispossession. I do so by analyzing two sets of events at UIUC: first, the university’s long-standing resistance to abandon their racist “mascot” and the ongoing campus turmoil surrounding the continued, unofficial use of that mascot at sporting events and student gatherings; and second, the programmatic attacks against AIS and the unhiring of Steven Salaita in 2014.

Racist Mascots Promote Anti-Indigenous Racism and Provide Financial Profits for Racialized Organizations

The University of Illinois has a long history of promoting anti-Indigenous racism, most famously for misappropriating and commodifying Native imagery and culture in the reverence of “Chief Illiniwek,” the unofficial university mascot (Rosenstein 1997). The use of a faux American Indian as a school mascot began in 1926 when then student, Lester Leutwiler, first performed as Chief Illiniwek during halftime of a football game (Heckel and Wurth 2007). Leutwiler performed a “war dance” and created a costume based on his experience as a Boy Scout (Wurth 2015). This practice continued and grew for the next 60 years until controversy surrounding the use of Native American mascots arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s (The New York Times 1989). The Chief gathered support from students, community members, administrators, and politicians, and in 1990, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees voted to retain the Chief as the symbol of the University. In 1996, the Illinois House of Representatives introduced and passed a bill declaring that Chief Illiniwek is and shall remain the symbol of the University of Illinois (Illinois General Assembly 1996), solidifying the university’s legal rights for future use and financial profit.

Despite considerable protest, Chief Illiniwek performances went on until 2005 when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) stepped in. The NCAA (2005) banned Illinois, and 17 other universities, from hosting any postseason competition because of their continued use of American Indian imagery. UIUC appealed this organizational decision twice and lost (Eppley 2013; Harrison 2006). Characteristic of the behaviors and priorities of racialized organizations, the university legitimized the use of racist mascots and allocated resources to defend their position in the courts. Several tribal communities joined in collective protest. The Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, for example, requested that the University “recognize the demeaning nature of the characterization of Chief Illiniwek and cease use of this mascot” (Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma 2000) and the Oglala Sioux Tribal Nation (2007) requested the return of the Chief’s costume. Like the Black Tuesday events involving the Washington Football Team and settler simultaneity might both suggest, it was not until the financial benefits of the use of the Chief turned into a liability that the University opted to retire the derogatory mascot. During this time, the NCAA banned UIUC from hosting the first two rounds of the 2006 men’s tennis tournament, indicating the seriousness of the financial road ahead (Klatell 2007). In 2007, UIUC announced that the Chief would no longer perform, and his name and logo would no longer be used (Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2007).

The official retirement of the Chief in 2007 has not stemmed the use of racist language and demeaning anti-Indigenous imagery at UIUC today. In fact, public use of the Chief Illiniwek trademark continues (The Daily Illini 2013) within popular campus societies and drinking celebrations. Students, community members, parents, staff, and alumni have also kept the Chief alive in spirit and in person through what is locally known as The Honor the Chief Society. In 2013, the Society successfully negotiated the legal rights to “continue to use Chief Illiniwek as part of its full name—most notably for performances . . . that pay tribute to the dance” (The Daily Illini 2013). As a result, the “Chief” can appear and perform for audiences but is not permitted to speak. Chief Illiniwek continued to be a highly visible and popular figure on the UIUC campus with over 9,000 UIUC students supporting the Chief as the campus mascot and tradition in 2013 (The Daily Illini 2013a).

The Fighting Illini trademark also makes annual appearances at a popular campus drinking celebration called “Unofficial” that brings profit to local businesses in Champaign and Urbana. This celebration takes place every March and brings together large sections of the campus community to celebrate a localized take on St. Patrick’s Day. In preparation for this event, new t-shirts are printed and sold in high volume as some students clamor to support the “tradition” of the university’s former racist mascot. In 2013, a bright green t-shirt depicting a faux American Indian in a headdress made of beer bottles was very popular. Another recent racist t-shirt printed in 2015 features a large Native caricature with the deeply hateful phrase, “Wait in line to get drunk? Bitch, I’ve got a reservation.”¹³ Attachments to racist imagery spur a variety of additional student responses. Some students also engage in “war whoops” at university sports games. Other students have responded with death threats against students actively involved in discontinuing the use of the derogatory Chief (Hermon 2007; Thacker 2007). In 2007, for example, students posted in a Facebook group titled “If They Get Rid of the Chief I’m Becoming a Racist” that they hated “redsk*ns,” hoped that “all those drunk casino owning bums die,” and encouraged one another to “throw a tomahawk” in the face of one female student organizer in response to her leadership in the movement to remove the racist mascot (Thacker 2007). In addition to these overtly demeaning acts, culturally subordinating choices and purchases also create immeasurable harm. For example, individuals that purchase “Chief” apparel items are engaging in expressive behavior, relational activity, and political boundary maintenance—all of which signals one’s habitus toward others that are different from themselves.¹⁴

Taken together, these events and anti-Indigenous racist sentiments illustrate how settler-colonial intentions are embedded within social institutions and enacted among and across racialized organizations. In addition, this genealogy of events demonstrates a set of psychological and culturally subordinating outcomes that reinforce and stabilize hierarchical power structures that prioritize the needs and comforts of whites over other racial groups. Psychologically, these “unofficial” anti-Indigenous racist acts are made possible by both tacit approval from racialized organizations and a lack of significant consequences that prevent these acts from continuing. In addition, when racialized organizations such as UIUC allow these acts to persist, they create a hostile and abusive learning environment and demonstrate how relations of domination are enabled, promoted, and reified across generations.These multiple forms of psychological violence have very real consequences for students, faculty, and staff and thus should be considered with great care. In a Resolution from 2000, for example, the Peoria Tribe argued that mascots constitute a “degrading racial stereotype that reflects negatively on all American Indian people” (Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma 2000). In response, students and faculty may not feel safe on campus and, in some cases, may become invisible from the campus community to protect themselves. After Native artwork was vandalized, one student remarked, “The attacks continue, and the campus climate remains unsafe for us and anyone who wants to see the campus move Beyond the Chief” (The Program in American Indian Studies 2009). Another student talked about self-isolating because of the hostile environment: “I refuse to attend any of the basketball or football games because the band still plays the Chief music during halftime. Yeah they retired the dance, but the music plays on. They’re a cult and they are dangerous” (The Program in American Indian Studies 2009). Native students’ fears about their safety and subsequent self-imposed isolation denies them the opportunity to engage in the social aspects of campus life available to white students.

Anti-Indigenous rituals that take place within racialized organizations also expose the connection between individualized expressions of racial animus and the underlying settler-colonial investments in Indigenous elimination and profits by dispossession. Racialized organization theory (Ray 2019) suggests that organizations such as UIUC accumulate resources along racial lines, limit access to resources to racially subordinated groups, and rely on the credentialing of whiteness to legitimize the disproportionate allocation of resources in ways that privilege whites over others. This was the case historically when the American Indian was racialized and cast among a set of other nonwhite bodies “incapable of progress.” Once set into motion, these necessary justifications for colonization would in time shape educational outcomes and opportunities for Native students, faculty, and staff.

As seen in the previous section, Johnson v. McIntosh, removal, and western homesteads sought to dispossess Natives from their ancestral homelands and the Morrill Act legitimized and profited from this land dispossession when lawmakers appropriated public lands to create land-grant institutions of higher education that were accessible to non-Natives only. When read through both a settler-colonial and racialized organization lens, the profits associated with the land become intimately interconnected with the profits of higher education. One clear example is how nineteenth-century land speculation projects influenced public university financial aid programs that were developed after the passage of the Morrill Act. That is, in addition to the federal government recruiting white families to colonize and farm Illinois land, UIUC was actively recruiting their children to settle in as university matriculates—settling once again upon lands that, as a result of the violence of American Indian removal, could now create, legitimize, and allocate financial benefits and resources to non-Natives across future generations. Relatedly, and in Illinois specifically, the belief in an incompatible/incapable American Indian had serious consequences for Natives in higher education. One consequence was the incredible economic and political obstacles for Native student enrollment at the university. Wasseja (Carlos Montezuma) became the first American Indian graduate of the University of Illinois in 1884 (Sullivan 2015); however, there is a limited record of Native enrollment thereafter. As recent as Fall 2020, American Indian and Alaska Native enrollment at UIUC was no greater than 0.03% percent (UIUC Inclusion 2019). Relatedly and as recently as 2021, the American Indian Program includes two Native faculty members (The Program in American Indian Studies 2021), a marked shift from the eight Native faculty members in 2014 prior to the unhiring of Dr. Steven Salaita and one that undoubtedly affects course offerings, programming, and opportunities for students to be mentored and trained by Native faculty.

In addition to gatekeeping essential resources, the UIUC case also demonstrates how possessive investments in organizational resources and whiteness can translate in a slippage from a sense of ownership of places and things into a sense of ownership of persons. For example, UIUC voluntarily turned over the lucrative use of the racist mascot to a predominately white organization fully aware that such use would continue to dehumanize Native Peoples in name and body. These actions demonstrate the organization’s intent and willingness to distribute financial and legal resources along racial lines. However, the use of the Chief is not only hurtful and hateful toward the Native community, it also signifies how the habitus of Chief supporters can translate into a sense of ownership over the Native body. When UIUC discontinued the use of the Chief in 2007, for example, two white males who portrayed Chief Illiniwek sued the NCAA. These men argued that “the chief and the logo are the property of all citizens and taxpayers of Illinois,” and as a result of the NCAA’s decision, the two would lose out on “many valuable employment and career opportunities and professional associations . . . [available] to those who have had the privilege and honor of portraying Chief Illiniwek.” These men’s claims explicitly demonstrate how whiteness functions as property and how, over time, settler-colonial organizations of higher education connect the Morrill Act’s usurpation of Indigenous lands for the advancement of white settlers in the nineteenth century with twenty-first-century challenges.

Academic Eliminations: From Land Theft To Destabilizing An American Indian Studies Community

In the UIUC case, I have shown how settler-colonial logics manifest in racist imagery that harms Native Peoples and enables white community members to possess Native bodies for personal gain. In 2014, these events collided with the dissolution of AIS and the unhiring of Dr. Steven Salaita, a tenured Associate Professor of English and a scholar of global indigeneity. After a nationwide search for the newest addition to an award-winning slate of American Indian Studies faculty, the UIUC search committee voted to hire Salaita and he was set to begin teaching in the fall semester of 2014.¹⁵ He was unhired, from this position in August 2014, when then Chancellor of the University of Illinois Dr. Phyllis Wise and Vice President Christophe Pierre e-mailed Salaita to rescind the job offer, alerting him that they would not forward his appointment to the Board of Trustees.It was eventually revealed that this decision was made in response to Salaita’s tweets about Israeli attacks, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian children (Center for Constitutional Rights [CCR] 2015). Salaita received this e-mail after returning his signed teaching contract and resigning from his previous academic position with tenure. On September 11, 2014, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees met and officially rejected Salaita’s academic appointment to UIUC as tenured faculty. Salaita sued the university, the Board of Trustees, and select administrators for breach of contract and for violating his constitutional rights to free speech (CCR 2015). In local and national solidarity, members of the UIUC campus community participated in walkouts, rallies, and more than 5,000 academics agreed to boycott the university (CCR 2015). In 2015, the involved parties reached a settlement in which UIUC paid $875,000 to cover both attorney’s fees and direct compensation to Salaita (CCR 2015). On the same day, Chancellor Wise resigned from her position in response to evidence showing that she had been actively involved in tampering with and obstructing access to key e-mail evidence regarding Salaita’s unhiring (CCR 2015).

The unhiring of Salaita is profound for several reasons, much of which illuminates the settler nexus of racial animus and profit. Using settler simultaneity as an analytical tool to make sense of Salaita’s unhiring, we see how land-grant universities profit from dispossession and strategically target persons, collectives, and ideas that create obstacles against possessive investments in Indigenous subordination. Most critical here is the relationship between anti-Arab racial animus and organizational profit, and more specifically how this animus shielded our view of the underlying cause of the unhiring. For example, Chancellor Wise reported that her decision to unhire Salaita was informed by his “incivility” and concerns about promoting an inclusive campus environment, while others pointed to anti-Arab racism suggesting that animus toward Arab Americans served as the catalyst for revoking his tenured position. Extensive reporting by several research and media outlets reveals, however, that much of the pressure to fire Salaita had less to do with student concerns about civility and had much to do with pressures from wealthy donors. Freedom of Information Act documents revealed that large university donors had threatened to withhold their financial contributions if Salaita’s faculty position was confirmed at UIUC (Des Garennes 2019). Salaita’s academic appointment was not in and of itself the site of extraction, it was the obstacle toward furthering organizational profits for the university that comes into focus. From this perspective, higher education is less a space of thinking and learning and instead remains a site of continued settler extraction. To be sure, racialization matters and mattered; however, his unhiring was the most profitable outcome for the institution. In fact, anti-Arab racism offered a foundational or self-explanatory cover for his removal.

Salaita’s unhiring made it clear that AIS’s decision making around faculty recruitment and retention was not respected by administration, treatment that eventually led to the dissolution of a large, renowned, and rapidly growing Program. Faculty were quickly recruited elsewhere, scattering these Indigenous scholars who were actively globalizing analysis around settler colonialism and theorizing on land, indigeneity, and relationality. Some Native scholars referred to Salaita’s unhiring, and the subsequent events in AIS, as the “new Indian removal,”¹⁶ drawing critical comparisons between Salaita’s employment and the destruction of AIS as a contemporary form of forced removal of unwanted Indigenous Peoples from the lands upon which the University of Illinois flagship campus stands. In this sense, not only had settlers used the bureaucratic cover of the law to remove Native Peoples from their Illinois homelands in the nineteenth century, but these same eliminatory logics were also seeping into contemporary departmental autonomy over faculty recruitment. Salaita (2015) draws yet another connection between the university’s refusal to allow him to begin the position for which he was hired, and their subsequent vote of “Entry Not Approved”—the university was engaging in settler-colonial behavior akin to anti-Indigenous checkpoints in which Palestinian families are denied entry to particular lands. Each of these elements frame settler colonialism as the agent that works on and works through UIUC as a racialized organization to perpetuate settler-colonial interests and goals, a stage upon which settler interests are rehearsed and acted upon. This systematic silencing of Arab and Native faculty, alongside pressure from wealthy donors, also illustrates how co-occurring settler colonial actions disorient communities of color to ensure group subordination and further white supremacist intentions. Furthermore, these seemingly disparate concerns – anti-Indigenous racist imagery and Salaita’s unhiring – appear interrelated and intentional when we analyze the destabilization of AIS using a settler simultaneity lens. manifestation of co-occurring settler colonial actions that further white supremacist intentions and disorient communities of color to ensure group subordination. This analytical lens situates seemingly disparate events that happen under the auspices of settler colonial organizations as interrelated and intentional.

Conclusion

Racist caricatures of American Indian stereotypes at college sporting and student events demonstrate that anti-Indigenous racism is interwoven into the fabric of American higher education (Fenelon 2017). Less apparent are the ties that bind these colleges and universities with global social processes of domination from which this anti-Indigenous violence originates. This article fills that gap by moving chronologically from 1823 to the present to uncover the settler-colonial logics of Indigenous elimination and dispossession embedded within, and perpetuated by, higher education settings. By merging and extending settler-colonial and racial organization theory, I show that the landmark Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh of 1823 set the stage for Indigenous dispossession, while the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forcibly removed tribal communities from their ancestral homelands. Operating in tandem with these early judicial and legislative actions, the Homestead Act of 1862 quickly repopulated Indigenous lands with non-Native settlers while the Morrill Act of 1862 recruited the children of settlers to colleges funded by the violence of Indigenous removal, involving both land and body. The land-grant universities that exist today could not be possible without this intentional violence. To ground my interventions in time and place, I explore the UIUC as a case study to show how historical subordination manifests and how racialized organizations profit from this violence.

In conclusion, I hope to encourage a broader discussion in Sociology about the need to understand contemporary organizational struggles as phenomena that are intimately connected to Indigenous lands, ongoing settler projects, and histories of erasure. The discipline must also continue to critically question the motivations of settler colonial violence, examine how it is embedded within all U.S. organizations, and as a result, evaluate how these organizations continue to operate in service of empire. This article lays out the historical genealogy of one racialized organization and I focus on education as an entry point for future analysis about how other social institutions create organizational programs and policies that substantiate settler logics and interests. I encourage future scholars to extend these contributions and analyze how additional educational settings operate, and are embedded within, a racialized institutional field. Future research, for example, might pursue cross-organizational questions and strategically compare settler simultaneity across institutional fields, considering how those organizations situated closer to the core of the field differ from those located at the periphery (e.g., the implications of racialized embeddedness between land-grant and non-land grant universities as well as historically white colleges and universities and historically Black colleges and universities). Future scholarship might also examine how racialized organization histories inform cultural practices within universities such as land acknowledgement statements, cross-disciplinary curriculum about the violence of settler colonialism, and whether universities create partnerships with displaced tribal communities in an effort to remedy their predatory histories. In each of these projects, the lens of settler simultaneity encourages us to consider how, and undo whenever possible, organizational behaviors that negatively affect Native, Black, and other communities made marginal by the state.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eman Ghanayem, Melissa Weiner, Raquel Escobar, Katie Beardall, Collin Mueller, and Danny Gascon who provided me with meaningful guidance at various stages. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback, all of which greatly improved the complexity of this piece. All mistakes are my own.

Notes

Author Biography

Theresa Rocha Beardall is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Her scholarship examines how legal actors and legal systems create and reinforce various modes of state violence, specializing in issues of indigeneity, tribal sovereignty, dispossession, policing, and surveillance. Her work can be found in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, Nevada Law Journal, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and the Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture, and Resistance.

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