George Polk Award and an
Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for their for their two-year investigation into the expropriation of Indigenous lands for the land-grant university system.
In “Land-Grab Universities,” published in our March 2020 issue, Tristan (Kiowa), now editor-in-chief of the
Texas Observer, and Lee, who is at Cambridge University, located 99% of the nearly 11 million acres taken from 250 tribes through broken treaties, illegal seizures and outright genocide, and then transferred to fledgling land-grant colleges under the Morrill Act of 1862.
This “well-documented account sent shockwaves through campuses across the country where students and faculty demanded that institutions like MIT, Cornell and Cal-Berkeley find ways to right a 150- year-old wrong,” the Polk Award press release noted. IRE judges commented, “This investigation produced a foundational piece of journalism that forces a reckoning with dark origins of many of our nation’s u