Board calls for Baker to give land back
Members of the Haskell National Board of Regents have voiced deep concerns about the planned New Boston Crossing development as well as the possible sale of land near the Baker Wetlands Discovery Center for affordable housing development.
In a letter addressed to Baker University, developers of the New Boston Crossing and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, board members said the projects are “a continued assault on Haskell’s historic Wakarusa Wetlands and the continuation of local governmental- and commercial-driven land grabbing.”
Board members wrote that they “would encourage Baker University to return all their ill-gotten Haskell-Wakarusa Wetlands to Haskell Indian Nations University in an exemplary act of Land Back.”
After an inquiry from our news team, Baker University released a statement last month saying that the university had been approached by a private investment company seeking to build affordable housing. That land parcel is about 17 acres of wet prairie in a triangular shape just to the north of the Baker Wetlands Discovery Center. The prospect has drawn criticism from wetlands advocates and a group of Baker students who held a protest a few days after the news broke.
Lawrence city commissioners in March approved rezoning the land for New Boston Crossing, about 177 acres southeast of the Iowa Street and South Lawrence Trafficway interchange. Developers’ plans for the mixed-use project include single-family homes, townhouses or rowhouses, and multidwelling residential units. It also includes an entertainment district in the middle and some green space and a large pond toward the southeast.
The Board of Regents letter, signed by board President Brittany Hall, Shawnee, summarizes some of the history of Haskell and the wetlands. The school was formerly a boarding school where Indigenous children were stripped of their names and cultural identities and forced to assimilate.
The board “wants to make clear Haskell’s wetland complex (the wetland and associated prairies and woodlands) has been under assault since the beginning of Haskell’s history,” the letter states. “Historic Haskell land-grab activities were a product of the paternalist days of the Department of the Interior (DOI) management of lands set aside for the education of Indian children.”
Portions of the wetlands were subsequently sold or given to various entities. Baker University received 572.68 acres of wetlands free through a 30-year Quit Claim Deed in August 1968.
“By the end of the 20th century, approximately 70 percent of Haskell lands had been given away by paternalistic acts of mismanagement that took precious land secured for the education of the people of our Tribal Nations,” the letter states. “Tribal Nations had no part in these decisions — that were made for us — in the bad old days of Federal Indian Affairs.”
Many children ran away from the boarding school at Haskell. A cemetery on campus holds the remains of at least 103 children.
The board of regents demands ground-penetrating radar studies, to be overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to look for children buried in unmarked sites on the floodplain of the New Boston Crossing project. Developer Phil Struble of Landplan Engineering told city commissioners they had contracted with a group to do an archaeological study, but it was not yet complete and he could not recall the name of the group.
The board wrote that “this proposed sale reminds us, the first Earth Keepers of this land, of our unalienable responsibility to the beautiful diversity of places and peoples (including plants, animals, land, air, and water) that define the thin biosphere of life our Mother, the Earth, wears,” the letter states. “Consistent with our responsibilities, we request the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers consult with the Haskell National Board of Regents during their permitting process.”
“… We no longer live in the paternalistic world of the 1950s and earlier Federal policy- and decision-making,” the letter states. “We will not stand silently by and let proposed economic development get a pass on the environmental damage the NBC project will inevitably produce.”
Representatives of Baker University did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment for this article.
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Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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