Who Were Harvard's First Indigenous Students?
The seventh 2025-2026 Indigenous Learning Forum will take place March 26, 2026 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.
Se ofrecerá interpretación en español/inglés / This talk will be given in English with Spanish translation
This event is open to all but registration is required.
More information about this talk and the presenters will be available soon.
Alan Niles is a Lecturer on English at Harvard University. He is a scholar of transatlantic and early American literature and culture, with a focus on New England colonialism. His research and teaching have explored Harvard’s historic ties to Indigenous communities and the establishment of a new colonial regime of property. His book project explores how moments of media-historical change prompt a return to and re-inscription of memory, focusing on transformations in archives and access to sources of the early American past.
Mack Scott is a historian, educator, and member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. His work focuses on the intersections of race and identity and employs agency as a lens through which to view and understand the voices, stories, and perspectives of traditionally marginalized peoples. He has published works illuminating the experiences of African American, Native American, and Latinx peoples. He is currently working on a project that traces the Narragansett nation from the pre-colonial to the modern era
Wanda Hopkins is a citizen of the Narragansett Indian Tribal Nation. She has served in Tribal Government and ministers at the Narragansett Indian Church. She is an Indigenous cultural arts education volunteer at Tomaquag Museum and is a member of their Native American Advisory Committee. Wanda has offered her voice a culture bearer at churches, schools, and civic organizations
Who Were Harvard's First Indigenous Students?
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, well before the official founding of the Harvard Indian College in 1656, and preceding the Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag students academic 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 academic 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.