University of Minnesota fields comments on plan to return Cloquet Forestry Center lands to Fond du Lac band

By Ava Kian
The Circle – Native American News and Arts
March 5, 2024
Category: Forestry
Region: United States, US East

…Wayne Dupuis was one of several people who weighed in Tuesday at a listening session in Cloquet over the future of the land and the University of Minnesota’s Forestry Center, which the university plans to return to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The hearing drew nearly a hundred people who came from Duluth, the reservation and areas of Carlton County. The university’s decision emerged out of conversations with the tribe… The Cloquet Forestry Center is what critics refer to as a “land grab” institution, meaning that it sit on areas that previously belonged to some of the state’s tribes…The land was originally … part of the La Pointe Treaty of 1854. But federal law allowed the U.S. government to transfer “unallotted” Fond du Lac land to lumber companies for logging, with the understanding that it would go to the university afterward. In 1909, the Cloquet Forestry Center was established on 2,000 acres.

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