With a peg-letter board serving as the office directory and a pendulum clock marking time like a metronome, the entryway to the presidential offices at Colorado State University feels like the set of a stage play about campus life in the 1960s. Even the massive elm trees shading the lawn beyond the building’s stone pillars testify to decades past. Yet I’m here to meet an administrator who’s expected to put CSU on a decidedly forward-looking path: In the newly created role of assistant vice president of Indigenous and Native American affairs, Patrese Atine is charged with improving the university’s rapport with a demographic that hasn’t, historically, enjoyed much consideration at this or other institutions of higher education across the United States.
CSU’s disconnect with Native Americans began with its creation, on land that had been seized from tribes. The Land-Grant College Act of 1862 awarded federal land—including more than 10 million acres of Native holdings—to U.S. states and territories so they could establish colleges of agriculture and industrial arts. Colorado used its share to create the Colorado Agricultural College (now Colorado State University) in 1870, six years after the Sand Creek Massacre, in which some 230 members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes that once occupied that land were slaughtered by the 1st Colorado Infantry Regiment of Volunteers and 3rd Regiment of Colorado Cavalry Volunteers—both commanded by Colonel John Chivington of the U.S. Army.
The university’s land acknowledgment statement, published in 2019, addresses the school’s use of parcels originally occupied by Indigenous tribes. The statement also recognizes CSU’s responsibility to offer an
