The history of land dispossession in the area known today as Gainesville in the state of Florida began with Spanish forays into the interior from the coast during the colonial period (ca AD 1513 - 1763). At the time of the Spanish incursion, the people living in the Gainesville area were known as the Potano, an indigenous group with linguistic and political affiliation with the Timucua - a Native American cultural group that once thrived in the coastal region known today as Jacksonville/Northeast Florida. It is thought that the Potano succumbed to genocide, disease, and slavery by the end of the 18th century.
The Seminole have ancestral ties to Florida going back many thousands of years. In the 1700s, the Seminole people established the town of Alachua in the Gainesville area while Florida was still a colony of Spain. They resided there until their forceful removal due to a series of wars with the United States, known as the Seminole Wars. While the conflicts with the United States began in the early 1800s, it wasn’t until the Second Seminole War (1835 – 1842) that the Seminole people were forcibly removed from their towns, farms, and homes by the US government and military. The survivors resettled in southwest Florida (Seminole Tribe of Florida) and in Oklahoma (Seminole Nation of Oklahoma).
The removal of the Seminole people from the Gainesville region along with the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 created space for settler culture and institutions to grow. The lands formerly belonging to the Seminole people (and the Potano before them) were reallocated by the US government to both individuals and institutions. The precursor to the University of Florida, the East Florida Seminary, was a beneficiary of such reallocations as the leases of former Seminole land were used to generate the funds necessary for its establishment in 1853.
The Morrill Act (Land-Grant College Act) of 1862 was implemented in the effort to support education in the United States and funded by the off-selling of public lands. The public lands sold were those ceded, seized, and stolen from Indigenous peoples living west of the Mississippi river, furthering the dispossession of Native lands across the country. Due to the influx of funding from the sale of lands in California, Colorado, Kansas, and other states, the East Florida Seminary was granted Land-grant status and was renamed the Florida Agricultural College in 1884, and later the University of Florida in 1906. For more detailed information about the specific treaties (ratified and not ratified) and seizures of land that contributed directly to the founding of the University of Florida, please visit the Land-Grab University project.
For additional information regarding the history of UF's relationship to race and particularly Native Americans, please refer to the 2022 report under this link or download the document below.
|
