I recently attended the Land-Grab Universities Roundtable Discussion: Reckoning with the Past to Build the Future of Education at my university, NC State. The discussion focused on the award-winning investigative story, “Land-grab universities, Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system.” The College of Education’s Student Services and Advising Center hosted author Tristan Ahtone (member of the Kiowa Tribe and Editor at Large at Grist) and cartographer Margaret Pearce (Citizen Potawatomi tribal member and 2022 National Geographic Wayfinder Award recipient) to answer questions and engage in discussion about their approach to inquiry and how educators can make use of their methods in the classroom.
Land-grab universities combines narrative, historical timelines, data visualizations, maps, photography, interviews, and investigative research. It’s a rich and in-depth example of data storytelling.
The Land-grab universities project inspired me (a pre-service teacher) to incorporate technology in the classroom with its creative combination of numerical data, historic fact finding, and storytelling techniques. You can review the project here and see how they visualize data in a variety of maps to show how land grant universities benefitted from the Morrill Act signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862.
For the project, photographer Kalen Goodluck of High Country News contributed many striking images showing how the lands taken from Indigenous possession are being used today, from trailer parks to the home of the Directors Guild of America to motels and churches. These photographs make the maps and data feel more real and help us to see with x-ray vision the Indigenous lands all around us.
Big Takeaways For the Classroom
Build an Oceans 11 Team
Author Tristan Ahtone talked about the interdisciplinary nature of the Land-grab universities project and how he needed to assemble a team with specialized skills outside the newsroom. He needed to “find people who know how to do stuff.” He had a story to tell and needed technical people who could help him work with the data and create interactive web environments, as well as someone with cartography skills to create a variety of maps using the data. The team also engaged in a lot of skill teaching between members and collaborated on a shared document with a record of everything in case someone left the project and a new person had to step in. Everyone needed to know what was going on. When I think about transferring this to the classroom, I think about utilizing the unique skills and interests of each student to investigate problems as a team. I think about all the interesting elements of storytelling, from data visualizations to narrative to photography to maps. There are so many ways to spark a student’s interest and curiosity.
Tap Into Community Resources
Cartographer Margaret Pearce talked about the challenges of their data set (land records from 1800s) and how it could be difficult to find or verify information. It occurred to her to pick up the phone and contact Tribal leaders as a resource because they also had records of land dispossession. This is a great reminder of the importance of community building in the classroom. Margaret inspires me to connect students to local resources and foster relationships with local sources.
Make the Data Real
Use technology to understand the data, then go out into the field. The speakers encouraged us to take students out to visit land parcels, photograph them, and see what’s there now. You never know what you’ll discover when you visit a place in person—or who you may meet.
Promote Journalism in the Classroom
Encourage students to ask questions, investigate facts, untangle complicated ideas, and inspire action. Teach many different modes of inquiry. Ensure the students are surrounded by diverse resources and multicultural voices. Teach students to evaluate materials (such as land acknowledgements); to question what they imply, who they affect, and what isn’t being said. Question entrenched myths by holding them up against facts. For example: this mural romanticizing colonization and how the land grant college benefits society.
Think Critically About Justice
Tristan talked about the need to think critically about the arc of justice over time. What would justice look like now, today? Who should be at the table for restorative justice discussions? What reconciliatory actions are being taken by other groups? Often these movements are led by students.
Read the award-winning investigative story Land-grab universities.
How they investigated the land-grant university system.
Further reading on HCN’s land-grants university investigation, dive deep into our bibliography.
Overview of the project with interactive maps.
Report on how North Carolina State University gains from the Morrill Act