Year of Award

2025

Document Type

Professional Paper

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Name

History

Other Degree Name/Area of Focus

Graduate Certificate, Public History

Department or School/College

Department of History

Committee Chair

Dr. Leif Fredrickson

Commitee Members

Dr. Wade Davies, Dr. Patrick Lozar

Keywords

Morton Elrod, Flathead Reservation, University of Montana, conservation, Flathead Lake Biological Station, western Montana

Subject Categories

History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | United States History

Abstract

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the University of Montana (UM) developed from a small frontier college into an influential research institution. During its maturation process, the University relied on the acquisition of land to expand. In addition to its main campus in Missoula, the university sought land for research and recreation. When Congress passed the Flathead Allotment Act (1904), UM became one of many non-Native beneficiaries of federal land dispossession policy in the United States. Existing scholarship has largely homed in on “land grant” universities established through the Morrill Act (1862), which effectively dispossessed ten million acres of tribal land to support higher education in America. UM is not a land grant university, but nonetheless benefited from the practice of dispossession. UM received reservation land for the Flathead Lake Biological Station and used its new position on the reservation to participate in conservation projects like the establishment of the National Bison Range. Using primary sources from newspaper and UM archives, tribal histories, and secondary scholarship, this research explores how the university acted in its own interest at the expense of tribal sovereignty on the Flathead Reservation. My research seeks to engage more critically with the realities of colonization and the university as a settler institution to consider constructive ways that it might reckon with higher education’s participation in the dispossession of Indigenous land in western Montana.

This paper was completed with support from the Matthew Hansen Endowment for Wilderness Studies.

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