It was 1818, and Colby College needed cash.

Five years after it was chartered by the Massachusetts Legislature, Colby, then named the Maine Literary and Theological Institute, had no buildings in which to teach or house its students.

So trustees turned to a township — some 29,164 acres along the western bank of the Penobscot River — that lawmakers had endowed upon the college as a form of startup funding.

Trustees worked vigorously to get something out of those lands, Ernest C. Marriner wrote in a history of the college.

They wrung what they could from the boggy woodland. They sold timber, marketed lots to settlers and pursued payment from squatters and thieves who used the land without the school’s permission.

Over a century and a half later, in 1975, a federal judge would rule that the treaty the state used to acquire that land from the Penobscot Nation was illegal.

In all, some 234,000 acres of Indigenous land in Maine was granted to Colby and Bowdoin colleges between 1796 and 1861. The institutions would parlay that into tens of thousands of dollars used to fund construction of their first buildings.

It was a small fraction of the 12 million acres to which Wabanaki Nations laid claim. Now, as the tribes work to regain some of that land, some Maine institutions are grappling with how — or whether — to address the legacy of their involvement in its dispossession.

SETTLING ‘UNAPPROPRIATED LANDS’

American colleges have entrenched and macabre ties to Indigenous land.

Dozens of public universities were endowed with swaths of property after Congress passed the Morrill Act in 1862, creating so-called “land grant universities.” The legislation distributed 10.7 million acres in the American West to various states, spurring investment in higher education.

A High Country News investigation revealed in 2020 that the plan relied on a violent, federally orchestrated dispossession of Indigenous land.

The University of Maine received 210,000 acres scattered across the United States and is generally recognized as the state’s only land-grant college.

That was decades after Colby, Bowdoin and several other private colleges had been given significant — and less widely known — land grants of their own, a recent article in the Washington University Law Review documented. These lands were often geographically closer to the institutions they endowed.

Local officials had, since colonial times, worked to shrink Wabanaki land possession in Maine and expand the holdings of settlers and the eventual state government.

“You give what you have and not what you don’t,” said Michael Banerjee, author of the law review article. “(The state) felt they had lands. What they didn’t have was cash.”

The Massachusetts Legislature, which governed the District of Maine until it became a state in 1820, granted to Bowdoin College a total of 182,000 acres of “unappropriated lands” in central Maine.

Colby received just over 52,000 acres.

Bates, chartered as the Maine State Seminary years later in 1855, received $15,000 instead.

SETTLING TITLE

Bowdoin’s and Colby’s land grants were made as a cash-starved government drove settlement across Maine.

Officials needed not only money, but to enshrine and consolidate possession of the state, which was subject to foreign incursion both during and after the American Revolution.

“However, before land could be granted to incoming settlers, Native title had to be extinguished, a process that gradually whittled Penobscot and Passamaquoddy lands to almost nothing,” Micah Pawling, a professor of Native American studies and history at University of Maine, and Donald Soctomah, Passamaquoddy historic preservation officer, wrote in their entry to the 2015 “Historical Atlas of Maine.”

Land — specifically land of which ownership and title could not be questioned — was key to the accumulation of wealth, and by proxy, power, said Harald Prins, an anthropologist and historian who has worked on behalf of both the Mi’kmaq and Penobscot nations.

“These land deeds that everybody pays so much attention to, they were not really made for … the Indigenous people from whom that land was ‘purchased,’” Prins said. “It had to do with defending title against another claimant. It’s a whole different ball game.”

The 1796 treaty with the Penobscots (signed under threat of violence, Prins noted) was accordingly viewed by state officials as a bill of sale; the state would provide to the tribe blankets, ammunition, hats, salt, corn and rum in exchange for title to most of the Penobscot land on either side of eponymously named river.

“There was a quid pro quo, but it was a very large quid for a very small quo,” Prins said.

That treaty, along with several others, lacked Congressional approval and was therefore illegal, according to the 1975 ruling.

The decision meant the Penobscot Nation and Passamaquoddy Tribe had a legitimate claim to some 10 million and 2 million acres, respectively, in Maine — roughly 60% of the state. If the tribes pursued those claims, internal executive branch memos from the time indicate, they were likely to prevail.

The ensuing litigation would have involved 200,000 defendants and snaked through the courts for 15 years or more, all the while clouding title to most of the land in Maine, which threatened opportunities for governments and businesses to take out loans.

Yet a settlement passed by Congress in 1980, its effects in Maine ratified by the state Legislature, prevented all that.

The settlement and implementing acts provided $81.5 million to the tribes but included language that limited their sovereignty and privileged state authority when federal Indian law interferes with state jurisdiction.

Wabanaki leaders today are working to unravel parts of the settlement that have created unforeseen or unfair obstacles for tribal nations. One prime example? Of 150,000 acres of trust land owed to the Penobscot Nation under the deal, the tribe has only secured 95,000 to date.

Bowdoin and Colby’s land grants were but a brief chapter in the far larger story of Indigenous land in Maine, said Darren Ranco, a Penobscot anthropologist who oversees Native American programs and research at UMaine.

The Kennebec and Pejepscot Proprietors had laid claim to several million acres in Maine in the 18th and 19th centuries, and their owners included Massachusetts political elites, among them Gov. James Bowdoin, for whom the college was named. Merchant and Pennsylvania Sen. William Bingham also came to acquire 2 million acres — more than eight times what the colleges received.

But to the colleges, the grants could not have been more significant.

At Bowdoin, the legacy of that history stands enshrined in brick.

REMINDERS STILL STANDING

Just three stories, Massachusetts Hall is a modest but enduring fixture of Bowdoin’s architecture. The oldest building on campus, finished in 1802, the hall is swaddled in collegiate lore, having once provided not only classroom space, but also a home to the college president, his family and the students.

Funding the construction was, in the late 1790s, a challenge of existential proportions.

By 1806, the college once again needed money and made an appeal for more land. Lawmakers obliged the request and bestowed to Bowdoin a township of 23,000 acres known then as Etna.

The college immediately sold the land for $11,300, Hatch, the historian, wrote, and used the proceeds to fund the construction of Maine Hall. The building, now a first-year dormitory, was completed in 1808.

That same year, the Massachusetts Legislature gave ownership of two more 23,000-acre tracts to Bowdoin, which are still called Bowdoin College Grant Township East and West.

Colby would not receive its first grant, on the west side of the Penobscot River — in what would later become Argyle Township and Alton — until 1815.

It received two half-townships located in western Maine in 1861.

Colby was out of the real estate business by 1899 and likely squeezed some $75,000 — approximately $3 million today — out of its lands. It was a rather insufficient sum, the college’s historian indicated, but one which nonetheless “made a lot of difference to a college treasurer who too often had to close his books in red ink rather than black.”

Bowdoin’s ultimate profits are difficult to calculate. Three of the eight townships it possessed had generated nearly $50,000 in total by 1806 (approximately $1.3 million today). Treasurers’ books indicate the college sold lots as small as 100 acres to settlers and often accepted partial payment with promissory notes, likely raking in thousands more.

Neither college still owns any part of its original land grants.

RECOGNITION AND REPAIR

Like many of its peers, Bowdoin posted a land acknowledgment online recognizing “the painful legacy of the region’s colonial history.” Two placards on campus preserve the words in bronze.

“This is a topic that has long been researched and discussed at Bowdoin,” said Doug Cook, the college’s communications director.

But acknowledgment alone is insufficient, said Ranco, the UMaine anthropologist. It must be accompanied by action, he said.

UMaine, for example, followed its land acknowledgement with a 2018 memorandum of understanding with the Penobscot Nation outlining tribal involvement in research and management of culturally sensitive items.

Organizations including the Appalachian Mountain Club and the Conservation Fund are among those working to return Indigenous land to tribal control, most recently with a 1,700-acre donation in central Maine.

Cook pointed to course material on Wabanaki Nations, a partnership between Bowdoin’s Special Collections and Archive and the nonprofit Wabanaki REACH, and campus events on Wabanaki subjects as evidence of the college’s commitment.

Colby College did not respond to questions about its land holdings.

The overtures at self-examination made by both schools, Ranco said, have not kickstarted any consequential reconciliation.

“They’ve explored it,” Ranco said. “I don’t see that they’ve taken particularly deep cuts or looks into it.”

Reuben M. Schafir is a Report for America corps member who writes about Indigenous communities for the Portland Press Herald.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 1 to correct the year Bates was chartered.