An Indigenous Task Force appointed by the University of Missouri President Mun Choi in 2020 to investigate the state of Indigenous affairs at the university has released its report after more than four years of work, calling on the university to honor its responsibility to Native nations and create more institutional support for Indigenous issues.
The task force’s report, released publicly last month, calls for appointing a tribal liaison and an Indigenous advisory council, creating physical space for Indigenous personnel and initiatives, granting tuition waivers or in-state tuition for Indigenous students and providing resources for programs and research.
“Overall, the Indigenous task force found that while the University of Missouri — as an AAU, land-grant, flagship institution — has promising possibilities regarding Indigeneity, substantial work needs to be done to create the necessary conditions for a thriving Indigenous presence at MU,” the report stated.
The report comes after MU dismantled its Division of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity last summer and forced a Black student group to rename its fall welcome BBQ amid a state and national backlash against diversity initiatives. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order terminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government.
Melissa Horner, a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department and a member of the Indigenous Task Force, said it was unclear who would act on the recommendations without the IDE division.
“Without that infrastructure, I don’t know where MU would put these recommendations,” said Horner, who is a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation and a descendant of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. “What does happen with all of the time and labor that the task force put into this?”
She noted that Indigenous issues go beyond IDE because Native American people are not just a racial group; they are citizens of sovereign nations.
After multiple attempts to determine the university’s position on the report, MU spokesperson Travis Zimpfer said MU is reviewing the report.
A history ruled by colonialism
Thirteen faculty members and students served on the task force, which had the unprecedented task of researching Indigenous affairs throughout the university.
Their report notes that MU is a land-grant university. In the 1870s, the U.S. government gave MU public lands to keep or sell. These lands were “strong armed” from the Osage Nation for only $655 and sold for $479,901, according to the “Land Grab University” investigation by High Country News. MU still has about 15,000 acres of land that it received from these grants, the report noted.
The task force explained that 32 distinct tribal groupings ceded land in what is now Missouri to the federal government. In 1821, an estimated 5,000 Indigenous people remained in the state; by 1839, no federally recognized tribes were left in Missouri, although Indigenous people still live here.
“The colonial structure of Indigenous dispossession and erasure can be seen on the MU campus today,” the report states. “Beyond the Four Directions student organization and the Indigenous Mural in the Student Center, the latter of which did not exist at the time of the task force’s commissioning, there is virtually no evidence of Indigenous cultures, knowledges, histories and futures on campus.”
The report called for MU to honor “its responsibility to the Native Nations, whose removal from Missouri aided in the creation of MU and the state of Missouri” and move toward uplifting Native sovereignty and development through collaborative partnerships.
The task force was supposed to be finished by summer of 2021, but members said they needed more time to refine their research and identify recommendations that MU could reasonably complete.
Call for institutional support
Robert Petrone, an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development and co-chair of the task force, said members of the group presented their findings to Choi in the summer of 2024. They also sent the report to the IDE division, the Council of Inclusive Excellence, the MU Faculty Council, and the Four Directions Indigenous Peoples and Allies student group.
After getting no response for several months, task force members moved to release it to the public.
A major finding is that Indigenous faculty and students feel invisible when it comes to their identity at MU.
When the task force began, MU had only 72 Indigenous students and six faculty members. That has since dropped to 52 Native American or Alaskan students and three faculty members.
The report said Indigenous people at MU face a “minority tax” – the burden of being called on to represent Native Americans as a whole in both formal and informal contexts on and off campus.
For Horner, that meant being repeatedly asked to explain what language should be used to address Native Americans or what kind of land acknowledgments should be used. Because there was no official channel to direct such questions, they often came to Four Directions, where she was a member and president.
“Some years that I was involved, I couldn’t even keep up with the emails that were coming through the Four Directions account, because the number of requests was just so large and there were not enough of us to distribute that kind of labor,” she said.
The task force called for creating institutional support, starting with an appointed Tribal Liaison.
This administrative position would be a centralized contact for Indigenous information on campus and help take some of the burden from students and faculty.
“Anyone at MU who is working on Indigenous issues – whether service based, research based or teaching based – they could reach out to that position,” Horner said.
Other proposals for incremental change
The report also called for creating an Indigenous advisory council made up of faculty, students and Tribal members to support advocacy, outreach and other initiatives.
The report said that many relationships with tribal nations rely on individuals, not MU as a university.
“When faculty leave or students leave Mizzou, there goes that relationship with that tribal community,” Petrone said.
Another recommendation in the report was to provide tuition waivers or in-state tuition for Indigenous students.
This isn’t a new idea. Iowa State University and University of Arkansas offer in-state tuition to Indigenous students.
The task force stopped short of asking the university to return the 15,000 acres of land taken from the Osage Nation. Although this recommendation was included in an earlier draft, the task force decided to prioritize creating infrastructure “that we saw as prerequisites to MU being able to successfully rematriate land to Indigenous stewardship,” Horner said in an email.
The university “hasn’t really attended to Indigenous issues in a way that many other institutions have,” Petrone said.
“We really tried to position this as an achievable incremental process, because there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to build an environment that would be conducive for the curriculum and the students and the faculty,” Petrone said.
Horner and Petrone said they hope the report lays the groundwork for future generations to keep building an Indigenous community at MU.
“MU could be a real home for Indigenous students, that Indigenous students seek out to live there, if they felt well supported. Missouri has always been a place where many Indigenous nations have traveled through, gathered, lived (and) thrived,” Horner said.
