Talk: "Land Grant Universities" by Tristan Ahtone (OVCRI)

• Event Date: Thursday, February 19, 2026
• Time: 5:30 pm–7:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

• Talk

This talk is part of At Risk U: the Past, Present & Future of Academic Freedom (external link).

Tristan Ahtone (external link) is a member of the Kiowa Tribe and is Editor at Large at Grist. He previously served as Editor in Chief at the Texas Observer and Indigenous Affairs editor at High Country News. He has reported for Al Jazeera America, PBS NewsHour, Indian Country Today, and NPR to name a few. Ahtone’s stories have won multiple honors, including a George Polk Award, Richard LaCourse awards, a National Magazine Award nomination, and investigative awards from the Gannett Foundation and IRE: Investigative Reporters and Editors. A past president of the Native American Journalists Association, Ahtone is a 2017 Nieman Fellow.

Abstract

This presentation examines the entangled histories of Indigenous land dispossession, the founding of the land-grant university system, and epistemicide in settler colonial institutions. Building on the Land-Grab Universities (external link) and Misplaced Trust investigations (external link), and drawing from current efforts by the Trump administration to eliminate diversity initiatives at U.S. institutions, this talk draws a direct line between the violent expropriation of Indigenous territories to the erasure of Indigenous peoples on campuses and in American institutions at large, ultimately arguing that ideas of academic freedom cannot be disentangled from questions of historic justice and decolonial action.