Harvard Indian College

Origins In the 1640s, in the midst of a crisis connected to the English Civil War, the leaders of Harvard College began seeking financial support to educate and convert the local Native Americans. The university was committed to "the education of English and Indian youth" in the new Harvard Charter of 1650, which still governs the institution today. The establishment of the Indian College was based on this official pledge. This building, the Indian College, was completed in 1656. However, at the time of completion no Native American students attended the college, and the building was used to accommodate colonial English students instead. an Algonquian-speaking Nipmuc who converted to Christianity, did much of the translation and typesetting, The press issued 15 books in the Algonquian language and 85 in English. after the death of the press's steward, Samuel Green As mentioned, Native American students were promised free tuition, but that exact admission criteria and any differences between Native American and English applicants remain unclear. Native American students The Indian College building housed approximately four to five Native American students, and Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck became the first known Native American to graduate from Harvard. • John Wompas from the Nipmuc tribe, entered in 1666, but left the next year to become a mariner. He was already married before he admitted to Harvard and was in his late twenties. Closure Because of the diseases that many Native Americans contracted upon coming into close contact with the English community, the building was little used for its intended purpose. When Harvard Hall was completed in 1677, the English colonial students moved out of the Indian College and the building fell into disuse. In 1693 the Harvard authorities, intending to reuse the bricks to construct a new building, asked the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England for permission to tear down the Indian College building. The Society's condition for approval was that Native American students "should enjoy their Studies rent free in said [new] building." By 1698 the old building was torn down, but the bricks were re-used in constructing the original Stoughton Hall which existed until 1781, when Stoughton Hall was also torn down due to masonry issues, but half of its bricks were again retained for reuse by the college. Today, the location is marked by a plaque on Mathews Hall in Harvard Yard. ==Legacy==

Another member of the Nipmuc tribe, Benjamin Larnell, attended Harvard in the early 1700s, when the Indian College building no longer existed. John Leverett, president of Harvard between 1708 and 1724, described Larnell in his personal diary as "an Acute Grammarian, an Extraordinary Latin Poet, and a good Greek one". Judge Samuel Sewall wrote to a correspondent in London enclosing copies of Larnell's poems in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as evidence of the progress made in educating the Native Americans, but those poems have not survived. Larnell died of a fever in 1714, aged about 20. Larnell's Latin versification of Aesop's fable of the fox and the weasel, probably written when Larnell was a student at Boston Latin School, was re-discovered in 2012 by Thomas Keeline and Stuart M. McManus. As Drew Lopenzina and Lisa Brooks suggest, the Indian College offers us insights into how Indigenous Christians and scholars received or were subjected to colonial education, engaged in the literary production, and contributed to the multilingual start of American literary tradition. The Indian College promoted new forms of intercultural authority and intellectual exchange in addition to its function as a missionary institution. This work serves as a paradigm for applying concepts of affordance and practice to a multicultural colonial context. ==References==