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LAST year, High Country News published an online, of US history in about 10 minutes. At first glance, it looks like one of those airline maps that show flight paths: blue and red lines arc over the nation, linking east to west. But when the map is fully loaded, there are so many lines that they blur into a cocoon swaddling the skies over North America. This isn鈥檛 a map of connection after all, it is a chronicle of property theft, done in the name of education.

Anyone familiar with the university system in the US has heard of 鈥渓and grant鈥� colleges. My own alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, is a land grant institution, as is the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with more than 50 others. But this interactive map, created by a team including data journalist Tristan Ahtone and University of Cambridge historian Robert Lee, reveals the truth behind that phrase 鈥渓and grant鈥�.

You can zoom in to see a state, or even a neighbourhood in a city, and discover that those red and blue lines connect land grant schools to thousands of parcels of land that formerly belonged to Indigenous peoples. Each parcel was sold by US state governments in the 19th century to fund those land grant schools. It was a well-organised and well-documented heist. And now you can see it in shockingly granular detail.

During the civil war, President Abraham Lincoln signed the first of two Morrill Acts, which distributed roughly 45,000 square kilometres of federal land to the states 鈥� sometimes it was land within the state, and sometimes it was in distant western territories. The states, in turn, could sell that land to raise money for their burgeoning university systems. Except there was a catch. It was all Indigenous people鈥檚 land, procured with treaties that were coercive at best and downright fraudulent at worst. Many were what the US government euphemistically called 鈥渦nratified treaties鈥�. These purported to transfer the land from the control of Native American tribes or nations to the US 鈥� except tribal representatives had never signed them, and often had no idea they existed.

I didn鈥檛 know these treaties existed either until I started clicking on the interactive map. Working with a team of designers and data experts, the authors spent two years researching archival documents from centuries ago, linking these old records to present-day university land. Ahtone and Lee named their investigation and its subsequent map .

鈥淯niversities are considering giving parts of their land back to tribes, while others are offering tuition assistance鈥�

The map works partly because the interface is simple. You can zoom in on a parcel of land right next to your house and click to learn which nation or tribe owned it before the US government treatied it away. The strength of this project, though, comes from its foundation: a mountain of primary sources.

Like many colonial powers, the US government didn鈥檛 erase its history of land and resource dispossession. That history was just made really inaccessible. The treaty documents linked from the Land-Grab Universities map spent more than a century gathering dust in leather-bound volumes at remote offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and at the Smithsonian national museums. Once they were digitised, however, they became visible to people across the world and could be contextualised in a powerful new way, mapped to real places.

When I first looked at the map, I clicked on the lands that affected me the most: the parcels sold by California to fund the state university system. From there, I jumped into original documents, written in curly Victorian script, that recorded unratified treaties with tribes whose land was sold without their consent. Along with the tribes鈥� names 鈥� Pomo, Massutakaya, Sainell, Yukias and many more 鈥� I could see how much money the state raised from the sales. In most of California, the state paid nothing for the land and made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clicking around on this map wasn鈥檛 like paging through ancient history. It felt immediate, urgent and personal.

As Ahtone and Lee , their work has led many university communities to reassess their land ownership. Some are considering giving parts of their land back to tribes, while others are offering tuition assistance to Indigenous students as a form of reparation. As we move deeper into the 21st century, it is worth considering how the Land-Grab Universities map is just one example of what happens when we combine digitised versions of primary sources with flexible web interfaces. Call it a second-generation digital archive. It changes our access to history, and then it transforms our perspective on what we need to do about our past in the present.