MSU’s Origin Story: Settler Colonialism, Agricultural Science, and Militarism

This is an excerpt from Against the MSU War Machine, a zine printed by MSU students in February of 2024. The writing has not previously been available online.

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Michigan Agricultural College was founded because white settlers didn’t know how to grow food well enough to sustain the genocide of Indigenous people and build a settler state. The following excerpt from Michigan State: The First One Hundred Years, published by the university’s press in 1955, describes the conditions from the settlers’ point of view:

The Erie Canal across New York State was completed in 1825, and at once a flood of settlers poured into Michigan and spread westward from Detroit across the wrist of the mitten. They were not frontiersmen fleeing the restraints of an older society, but ambitious people who hoped to build a civilization in the image of the one they had left behind in New England and upper New York. … When [E.H. Lothrop, orator for the first State Fair] spoke in 1849, Michigan agriculture was suffering from conditions that suggested a need for better-educated farmers. Wheat yields were declining and some leaders feared that Michigan farms might go the way of many in Vermont or Virginia unless their owners studied the science of soil fertility. Railroads were opening the beef and mutton markets of the East to the Michigan producer but to compete in them he must improve the quality of his cattle and sheep.

The question of settler agricultural science is not how people can live healthily on this land. The Anishinaabeg have been living here for at least 9000 years, and the settlers who founded MSU were not seeking to learn from their ecological knowledge, agricultural practices, or lifeways. Settlers across Turtle Island intentionally destroyed “Indigenous traditional economies through acts including genocide of bison, burning of seed stocks, and the violent restriction of fishing, hunting, farming, and gathering on traditional lands.” The Anishinaabeg struggled against this violence and continue to live locally, study at MSU, and sustain their knowledge and lifeways against and beyond white supremacy today.

“The most famous photograph of bison extermination is a grisly image of a mountain of bison skulls. It was taken outside of Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Mich., in 1892. At the close of the 18th century, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the continent. By the time of this photograph, that population was reduced to only 456 wild bison.”

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The settler history’s mention of the beef and mutton markets of New England is revealing: So-called Michigan was developing as a colonial outpost, a place where land could be exploited in order to provide privileges to the colonial core. To produce this way of living, two things were necessary: The destruction of the existing ecology, in the form of clearing, draining, and tilling; and the development of a way of extracting food from land that does not rely on generational knowledge of that land or pre-existing ecological relationships. Hence, scientific agriculture.

A faith in scientific agriculture could almost be said to date from the publication in English in 1840 of Justus Liebig’s work entitled Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology. The German chemist explained that only a few mineral elements such as lime, iron, potash, magnesia, and silica were essential to plant life.

The question being answered is: How do you grow mass amounts of food on land you don’t know? MAC faculty and students, then, set out to raze the land. In this way we can see that industrial agriculture and the land grab university are a form of war, developed alongside genocide, displacement, and the establishment of an extractive economy.

The land was seized through violence that continues today, and the early formalities of war are what is most remembered in settler spaces: We know that so-called East Lansing is part of land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. The treaty was coerced via expanding violence from the U.S. following the conclusion of the War of 1812, when Britain was forced to withdraw its support for an “Indian border state lying between Canada and the United States.”

Not enough has been written about the circumstances that led up to the treaty. … Native Americans in Michigan were left to come to terms with the United States on their own. They were destitute, exhausted by the war, and abandoned by their British ally. Violent resistance would only lead to more destruction. They could resist U.S. encroachments violently, or they could try to come to an agreement through which they could hope to preserve their way of life.

The 1819 Treaty of Saginaw marked a low point in the history of the Saginaw Chippewa people and the beginning of decades of hardship. The cultural resurgence that has occurred among the Great Lakes Anishinabeg in the last half-century could not even have been contemplated at that time. That resurgence is built on remembering, not forgetting, the past. Remembering the past is not the same as celebrating the past. September 24, 1819, the day the treaty was signed, is not celebrated, but it is remembered.

With war in mind, the authors of the Morrill Act of 1862 prioritized military developments at “land grant” universities from the beginning: As quoted in a present-day sign on MSU’s campus, the act sought to establish colleges where “the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.”

The MSU Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC)’s website confirms that “military training had been present on campus” even before 1884, when MSU’s Department of Military Science was founded. The infantry officer brought in to lead the department in 1884 had participated directly in the massacres and forced removal of the Sioux and other Indigenous people of the Great Plains:

Lieutenant Lockwood was detailed to Michigan Agricultural College … at the request of the college administration at a time when the government was assigning professional soldiers to land grant colleges for the purpose of improving the military instruction. A veteran of frontier service in Dakota and Montana Territories and a recent graduate of the Cavalry and Infantry School at Fort Leavenworth, Lieutenant Lockwood quickly set about the task of organizing the cadet corps, revising the instruction and supervising the construction of the Armory, which stood on the site of the present music building. …

In 1888, military science became a compulsory course for all students except seniors.

ROTC remained a compulsory two-year training program for all men students until 1962, when it was demoted to an elective due to years of student activism.

An image from the 1957 MSU yearbook, the Red Cedar Log, shows a bomb in a MSU classroom.

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For decades, military training was a major component of the university’s activities and education. Although they are no longer compulsory, the Department of Military Science and ROTC programs are still active on campus today. The Spartan Battalion now includes about 150 students who train to become leaders in the U.S. Army. The ROTC’s self-created “Hall of Fame” includes Brigadier General Arthur G. Austin, Jr., who served at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the detention center known for “systemic use of torture.”^, The current staff of the program includes military officers who participated in the atrocities of U.S. imperial interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Korea, among others.

Returning to MSU’s origins, there is a misconception that “land grant” universities were only “granted” the land on which they sit. The so-called East Lansing campus today, including the surrounding farmland, is about 5,000 acres. The total land stolen from Indigenous tribes, bands, and communities by the federal government and granted to the State of Michigan specifically to fund MSU’s development included at least 235,193 acres; this land was split between 7,114 parcels mostly located across the northern lower peninsula as shown in the map on landgrabu.org. Today, MSU owns about 26,300 acres and profits from allowing oil companies to drill on land owned by the university.

As the settlers at MAC cleared the land, what kind of societal culture did they seek to create? Senator Henry Dawes, author of the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, which divided reservation lands that were initially communally-owned into private allotments, explains his reasoning.

“The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole [Cherokee] nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not owe a dollar. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common… there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the root of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens… they will not make much more progress.”

The architects of settler society chose selfishness as its core value. The founders of MSU were careful to include fascist cultural discipline as part of agricultural education: President Joseph Williams, a Harvard graduate and the first president of MAC, stated, “First, we would begin with the farmer himself. … Morally, physically, intellectually, he must be a man, before he can be a farmer. … [he must learn to] subordinate himself, and all animal and vegetable life around him, to those inexorable laws, moral and physical, the violation of which meets with swift retribution.”

The white supremacist, capitalist values of early settlement have been formative for MSU, U.S. settler society, and the strategies of U.S. imperialism abroad. The warcraft that preceded and followed MAC’s founding continues today, and early military training on campus expanded to form the Department of Criminal Justice, MSUPD, and the proliferation of military partnerships in so-called Michigan and abroad that are discussed in this zine. Although liberalism paints its pictures, we have yet to experience a systematic revolution in values or lifeways. And yet, people do find freedom, in moments, in relationships, in community, and people do cause change: The changes in our university and our society that can honestly be called progress have been the result of direct, collective resistance to white supremacy and colonialism.

I have found no records indicating that MSU has ever returned any land to the Anishinaabeg. As land acknowledgements and “decolonizing education” gain popularity, we must heed the words of Indigenous scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang that “decolonization is not a metaphor.”