Who Were Harvard’s First Indigenous Students?

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKERS: Alan Niles (Harvard University), Wanda Hopkins (Narragansett), & Mack Scott III (Narragansett)

New information from the documentary record confirms Narragansett oral tradition concerning the beginnings of English colonial missionary-educational work in the seventeenth century. A previously untranscribed note by Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop describes four Narragansett and Niantic children at Harvard in 1646, at least one of whom received some formal education. These children were at Harvard well before the official founding of the Harvard Indian College in 1656, and preceded the Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag students scholarship previously knew to have studied at Harvard. This presentation is a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort to tell these students’ story. Together, we will describe how the memory of this history has been passed down in Narragansett oral tradition; how scholarship has overlooked and now recovered this information in the documentary record; and how recentering these children’s story may cast fresh light on political and diplomatic tensions in the period leading up to King Philip’s War.