8

Materializations of Puritan Ideology at Seventeenth-Century Harvard College

CHRISTINA J. HODGE, DIANA D. LOREN, AND PATRICIA CAPONE

Seventeenth-century Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an intercultural space where English and Native American lives intermingled and authority was shared. Through material experiences of co-residence and education, this unique, dynamic, and hybrid colonial community pushed against imperial distinctions between English and Native American. The archaeology of early Harvard reveals a textured process of colonialism specific to Puritan New England. The dynamics of these relations cannot be captured within a binary model of domination and resistance, colonizer and colonized. As a materializing practice, archaeology plays a focal role in the collaborative recovery and remembrance of seventeenth-century Native American and English students. In this chapter, we consider how Puritan ideologies materialized at early Harvard through the questioning of material hybridity in an institutional context in order to foster a critical perspective on colonial lives and their continuing legacies. Although Puritan beliefs were a driving force of English colonization, this project draws out the multiple, creative ways Native and English people extracted the empowering potential of these same ideologies, best represented by literacy, printing, and the Harvard Indian College.

Established in 1636, Harvard College opened in 1638 with one master and nine English students, all of whom lived in a house facing out to Braintree Street (now Massachusetts Avenue) just up the bank from the Charles River in Cambridge (CSM 1935; Morison 1935, 1936). Harvard struggled financially soon after its establishment and was revived by funds for Native American education at Harvard from the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (SPGNE). The 1650 Harvard Charter dedicated the institution to “the education of the English & Indian Youth of this Country in knowledge: and godlines[s].” Following the charter’s issue, in 1655, Harvard Indian College building, a two-story brick structure, was built.

With its completion, the Harvard campus then had four buildings: three wooden structures and the brick Indian College constructed to house Native American students. The wooden structures included the multipurpose Old College building, and two street-front domestic structures which had been used by the College for various purposes including for housing English-colonial students as well as for academic purposes. Native American students were educated to become Puritan ministers. A total of five Native American students resided at the Indian College building between 1661 and 1675 (the year of King Philip’s War), learning, eating, and worshipping alongside English-colonial peers. While there were no more than two Native students attending the college at one time, class sizes in the seventeenth century were often no more than ten students (Sibley 1881). Two of the nine graduating students (22 percent, a substantial minority) in the class of 1665 were Native: Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacoomes, both Wampanoag from Martha’s Vineyard. Of the five Native American students who attended Harvard, only Cheeshahteau-muck graduated. Joel Iacoomes completed degree requirements and was recognized as an exceptional scholar, but he tragically died in a shipwreck prior to commencement. Iacoomes was not considered a graduate of the college until 2011, when he was awarded a posthumous degree (A Degree Delivered 2011).

An important figure in the history of Native American education in New England and at Harvard especially was missionary John Eliot (also discussed in Cipolla, this volume; and Mrozowski, Gould, and Law Pezzarossi, this volume). Eliot, a member of the SPGNE, not only was instrumental in the establishment of the Harvard Indian College but also was responsible for translating and printing several religious works in the local Algonquian language. Literacy across languages and cultures was integral to Protestant religious expression and a key component of proselytizing. Harvard aimed to perfect Native American students’ English, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew skills toward edification and ministerial potential. To this end, bringing Native students to live at the college made sense because founders believed that an “advantage to Learning acrue’s by the multitude of persons cohabitating for Scholastical communication, whereby to actuate the minds of one another” (in Bunting 1985:16). Through co-residence with Native scholars, the institution similarly aimed to expose their English counterparts to Native American languages, improving their ability to serve the proselytizing goals of both Harvard and its benefactor, the SPGNE: “what you propound from the honorable corporation about six hopeful Indians to be trained up in the college under some fit Tutor that preserving their own language they may attain the knowledge of other tongues and disperse the Indian tongue in the College we fully approve as a hopeful way to further the work [of Native conversion]” (Connecticut Commissioners to Edward Winslow, SPGNE, September 24, 1653, in Littlefield, 1907:187). This stance led Eliot and the SPGNE to print the first Bible in British North America not in English but in the local Algonquian language family. The volume was produced at Harvard in 1663 at the first printing press in North America, which was for a time housed in the Indian College.

One of the more notable individuals involved with the Indian College and press was Nipmuc Indian James Printer, also known as Wowaus, whose home community was Hassanamesit in central Massachusetts. Printer earned his English surname for the skill he displayed as a printer’s “devil” (apprentice) at Harvard. There, he laid the type for the 1663 “Indian Bible” and many other works. For several subsequent decades, Eliot and other assistants translated more than twenty religious tracts into Algonquian; the Harvard press produced these and other religious and official English products.

The colonial initiative to educate Native Americans at Harvard ended just after King Philip’s War (1675–1676), when its building was devoted to printing. By 1693, with the building in ruins, the press was removed from the Indian College (Bunting 1985:13). In 1695 the SPGNE declared, “Whereas the President & Fellows of ye College In Cambridge have Proposed & Desired that ye Bricks belonging to ye Indian College wch is gone to decay & become altogether Useless may be Removed & Used for an Additional Building to Harvard College” (CSM 1925:lxxxiv). In 1698 the Indian College’s empty and crumbling building was dismantled. Some of its bricks were used to build a new dormitory, itself torn down in 1781. The political abandonment of the Indian College mission, along with its unique vision for cooperative Native-white relations, was signaled by the dismantling of its physical structure. The Indian College and its students became a footnote in Harvard’s institutional histories as well as the larger histories of colonial New England.

The Harvard Yard Archaeology Project

As part of the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the 1655 Indian College building, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP), and Department of Anthropology began an ongoing partnership that includes Harvard students and faculty and other scholars, neighboring Native American communities, and state and local history representatives. We study seventeenth-century Harvard and the material lives of Native American and English students who lived there. Our work both within and beyond the Harvard Yard archaeology fieldwork course is collaborative, utilizing a community-based notion of heritage and the involvement of stakeholders—including students—in order to be successful. We view our work in Harvard Yard as a way to educate the public at Harvard and beyond on the importance of the university’s unique multicultural past and of the preservation of this past for a variety of stakeholders. We collaborate to promote new insights and add new voices to stories of colonial history and its present legacies. Throughout our work, we maintain and revisit inclusiveness as well as critique to provide space for diversity of culture and thought.

Relationships of collaborators with each other and the past are themselves the topics of scholarly and community research. For example, through conversations with Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and other Native representatives, project participants have learned that genealogy and family histories, community oral histories, and seventeenth-century written accounts are still actively intertwined with the continuation of tribal identities. There are a number of individuals and families who acknowledge direct ancestral relationships with seventeenth-century Native American students—primarily Cheeshahteaumuck and Iacoomes—who were born on Martha’s Vineyard. Some Nipmuc individuals similarly recall James Printer’s place in their lineage and role within community history; among them, Moses Printer figures in Mrozowski, Gould, and Law Pezzarossi (this volume).

There is a sense, based on robust documentary and material data, that Native Americans at colonial Harvard were exceptional individuals. At the same time, their experiences at the college were an example of the varied and diverse colonial entanglements and exchanges that took place throughout New England and the New World. Their experiences within a system of Native education support the conclusion that English authorities sought to “set the limits on Algonquian participation in English society” but complicate assertions that Eliot “insisted on” Native Americans’ physical distance from the English (Wyss 2003:17). The individual stories of Iacoomes and Cheeshahteaumuck also play an active role in present-day Native American communities, individual and familial identities, and the complicated issue of indigenous sovereignty. Their legacies extend into popular imagination as fictionalized by Geraldine Brooks in Caleb’s Crossing (2011) and by Susan Power in the short story “First Fruits” (2002).

Archaeological explorations of the physical and intellectual place of the Indian College building in Harvard’s history commenced in 2005 (Stubbs et al. 2010). Over the past several excavation seasons, the Harvard Yard Archaeology Project has actively sought to locate the Indian College building’s footprint and other material culture associated with seventeenth-century Harvard. Our first glimpse at the Indian College building occurred in the 2007 field season, when a seventeenth-century feature was encountered in a test unit. When we expanded this area in 2009, students revealed a seventeenth-century foundation trench, associated with the Indian College building by its location, architectural contents, date, and printing type. In September 2011 and again in 2014, the next cohorts of student excavators returned to the area to continue excavations, revealing more of this shallow north-south trench and adjacent land surfaces.

To broach the complex cultural context of these finds, we draw inspiration from Bhabha’s (1994) discussion of mimicry as a form of colonial discourse that encourages colonial subjects to “mimic” the colonizer. He expounds that “the reforming, civilizing mission” has at its heart “the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite)”; he finds that “the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (123, 126, emphasis original). In colonial contexts, that authority was shored in part through imperial categories of personhood—understood as sociomaterially produced and inscribed difference or as supposedly fixed and ordered subjectivities—upon which colonial stability was assumed to depend (Stoler 2009). Seventeenth-century Harvard was centrally concerned with knowledge and godliness among an emergent category of “Christian Indians.” The college desired Native students to follow the behaviors of English students and eventually to become ministers within Christian Native communities. The laws of the college, structure of the curriculum, and layout of the physical space all reinforced homogenization within the collegiate community. Nevertheless, Bhabha persuasively argues that rather than a simple reproduction of colonizer, “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English” (1994:125, emphasis original).

For Bhabha, however, the result is a blurred copy, which he discusses in terms of mockery, failure, inauthenticity, and irony. This tone is captured by Mary Rowlandson, the wife of Puritan minister Joseph Rowlandson, in her 1682 firsthand narrative of captivity by Wampanoag and Narragansett during King Philip’s War. Written several years after her eleven-week imprisonment, Rowlandson’s account is replete with descriptions of Algonquian people she encountered. Rowlandson made little distinction between Praying Town Indians and other Native peoples in describing Native people as “savages” and their behavior as “cruel.” Even when wearing English clothes, she writes, they were decidedly non-Puritan:

My heart skipped within me, thinking they had been Englishmen at the first sight of them, for they were dressed in English apparel, with hats, white neckcloths, and sashes about their waists; and ribbons upon their shoulders; but when they came near, there was a vast difference between the lovely faces of Christians, and foul looks of those heathens, which much damped my spirit again. (Rowlandson 1828 [1682]:50)

The posture espoused in her narrative is present in others of the period, which also suggest the incomplete mapping of English culture on Native peoples (Breitwieser 1990; Vaughan and Clark 1986); they are never truly English in manner, speech, action, or dress. This discourse and materialization is, however, not present at Harvard.

Our interpretation of the archaeological record from seventeenth-century Harvard has been informed by current discussions of material hybridity in a variety of colonial contexts (for example, Dietler 2010; Hantman 2010; Voss and Casella 2012). Numerous archaeologists attending to the materiality of hybridity recognize, as do we, the limitations of Bhabha’s privileging of ideology, arguing that there are context-specific material nuances to manifestations of colonialism. Focusing on material practices enables archaeologists to frame the materiality of colonialism not as a choice between being European and being Native but as the conscious, creative, and complex entanglement of different forms of material culture to generate new practices and identities. Nor are archaeologists complacent with Bhabha’s language, especially given present-day political agendas of sovereignty and self-determination. Instead they prefer a corrective discourse of creativity, perseverance, adaptation, and continuity (Cipolla, this volume; Ferreira and Funari, this volume; Hodge 2005, 2013; Loren 2007, 2013; McBride 1990; Mrozowski, Gould, and Law Pezzarossi, this volume; Silliman 2009).

Most often these new ways of being are addressed at sites of known Native American occupation through the concurrence of Native materials or technologies within a partially or predominantly Euro-American assemblage. The material practices typically involved spirituality, dress and adornment, architecture and residence, memorialization, and foodways (Cipolla, this volume; Ferreira and Funari, this volume; Loren 2007, 2013; McBride 1990; Mrozowski, Gould, and Law Pezzarossi, this volume; Sil-liman 2009). In this colonial “mess,” recovered non-European materials or practices become powerfully emblematic of Native cultural persistence and innovation—and rightly so. Through documentary records, we understand colonial Harvard as a hybrid Native-European space during the years of the Indian College (Hodge 2013). Yet, in this institutional setting, there is no Native material culture to stand as an icon for hybridizing practices.

At this colonial institution, archaeological evidence indicates little difference in the material culture of daily life at the Indian College from the rest of the college, suggesting a homogeneity of practice and experience noted elsewhere (Cipolla, this volume; Hayes, this volume; Hodge 2013; Mrozowski, Gould, and Law Pezzarossi, this volume; Silliman 2009). Similar tableware, tobacco pipes, dress accoutrements, and other items are found without spatial distinction across the Old College and Indian College buildings. The primary distinction between the two buildings is architectural, with the evidence for the printing press at the Indian College also setting the building apart. Our investigations have revealed that the Indian College, built of brick, was more robust than any other early structure at the college, even though its sill-on-ground construction was similarly ill suited to the sandy subsoil and high water table of this marshy former cow yard. The material qualities of brick underlie seventeenth-century accounts, which describe the structure as “strong and substantial” and “plaine but strong and durable” (Bunting 1985:13). Embellished brick is part of the archaeological evidence, indicating that the Indian College space was physically a better-appointed space than the Old College; it marked a segregated space that conveyed a substantial commitment to Native American education beyond simple words within the charter. The location of the printing press in the Indian College building as well as the work of a number of the Native Americans at the college, including James Printer, indicates the influence of local Native American communities in this early dedication to literacy.

At least sixteen pieces of seventeenth-century printing type have been recovered from excavations in Harvard Yard. The fonts of some of these letters have been matched to surviving seventeenth-century products of Harvard’s early press, initially housed in the President’s House before being moved to the Indian College. During a 1979 excavation in the vicinity of the President’s House, a piece of print type bearing a double pica (22 points) italic “l” was unearthed (Graffam 1982; Stubbs 1992:571–572). This type piece was matched to the preface to The Indian Grammar (1666), written by John Eliot. A brevier (8 points) italic “o” excavated in 1980 was matched to the English chapter summaries in the 1685 edition of what came to be known as the “Eliot Bible.”

At Harvard, we do not find material or documentary residues of non-European practices. This situation undermines the usual role of archaeology in colonial settings: to complicate the interpretation of European material culture through recovering and discussing concurrent materializations of non-European practices. We are forced to rethink both Bhabha’s and archaeologists’ interpretations of hybridity and its legacies. What we do find at Harvard, however, is the materialization of a cultural intangible: language. The presence of Native students and the authoritative role of the Indian College press were sanctioned manifestations of Native language, specially privileged and yoked to the authorizing structures of Puritan colonialism (conversion, missionizing, literacy, testimony). Early Harvard concentrates the materialization of Puritan ideology. Its careful consideration offers new perspectives on the intangibles of colonial identity and authority and complicates the notions of personhood and authenticity that were part of the Puritan colonizing project.

These material finds are inspiring two primary avenues of inquiry among students, researchers, and stakeholders concerned with the experiences of seventeenth-century Native American and English students. Given the institutional and religious context of their lives, the printing type, in particular, has spurred consideration of, first, the power of the written word to combine higher education with religious conversion and, second, the ways Native American communities have actively used education for self-determination, in both the past and the present (Brooks 2008; Wyss 2003).

Education and Conversion

The ways Native American and English individuals were differentiated from each other formed a crucial component of colonizing discourses that legitimated European power. English New World colonizing strategies forwarded peaceful conversion (at least initially) as a means to establish a mercantile base for England. Through peaceful conversion in New England, Puritans sought to distance themselves from what was viewed as the cruelty of Spanish colonial efforts and the ineffectiveness of French rule (Lepore 1999:9–11). Moreover, Puritans fostered “social capitalism” in which economic development would result from industrious behavior, piety, and a proper education (Innes 1995:7–10).

The Puritan doctrine of predestination posited a world where one never truly knew if he was among the saints or the sinners. English authorities thus deduced religious adherence through observed states of body and soul, which were scrupulously attended to, both individually and communally (Loren 2014; Rivett 2011; St. George 1998). Spiritual status—ever precarious and aspirational—was recognized via embodied practice and shaped by material cultures of dress, comportment, and religious ritual. In this context, Native people were recognized as non-English and non-Puritan through a state of irreligion, among many other practical and material distinctions like those Mary Rowlandson depicted in her captors. Daniel Gookin (1970 [1792]:5), first superintendent of the Praying Indians in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, described Native people as “subjects upon which our faith, prayers, and best endeavours should be put forth, to reduce them from barbarism to civility; but especially to rescue them out of the bondage of Satan, and bring them to salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ.” This framework situated Native peoples as passive, godless subjects, but through the mechanism of conversion, it held within it the possibility for an empowering and disruptive Christian transformation. Although Christianity did not change the overall hierarchy of New England’s colonial society (Rivett 2011:17), Native Christianity offered a new kind of middle ground.

Literacy and religion were two fundamental axes along which categories of English and Native American were drawn. Therefore, the codependent logics of racial and religious difference were substantially transformed by Harvard’s Native American students. They had segregated living quarters at the Indian College, but their lives were otherwise structured identically to those of English students with whom they formed this collegiate community. Spiritual identities were mapped onto all Harvard students as they behaved more or less like devout Puritans. Native students’ daily practices inscribed shared, idealized Puritan ideologies through bodily movements to and from class and prayer, educational achievement through study and recitation, pious dress and respectful behavior, and multilingual literacy that matched and surpassed that of their English-colonial peers through their knowledge of Algonquian. Cheeshateaumuk, Iacoomes, and other Native scholars thus transgressed identities of race, destabilizing the colonial project through daily practices. Archaeological evidence of a broadly shared material culture of drinking, dining, and residence underscores this point (Hodge 2013:218–222).

Literacy was a crucial mechanism of Puritan faith and religious observances and therefore integral to imperial conversion efforts. Ministers advocated literacy among Native North Americans, as they did among their English congregations. The Harvard Indian College and press were created to further this mission. In the rooms of the Indian College and through the products of its press, encounters of English and Native American people were structured along lines of formal intellectual exchange and religious study. The Indian College conflated English and Native American literacies within its walls. Its press produced and distributed, in Algonquian Bibles and other works, a material opportunity for New England’s Native people to empower themselves, albeit within English-initiated values, through literacy and Puritan indoctrination. These social and material processes both entangled and destabilized identities of Native American, English, Christian, and non-Christian (Hodge 2013). The small, iconic bars of lead printing type recovered by archaeologists were part of this material engagement. Although the Indian College afforded a distinct space for the practical project of Native American conversion, it was never wholly within English control until the building was demolished.

Self-Determination through Education

Harvard became a place—for a time the only place—where a handful of brilliant young Native American men were invited to come, live, and learn. The two Native American scholars of the Class of 1665 were Cheeshahteaumuck and Iacoomes. Overseer Gookin knew Iacoomes personally and described him as pious, learned, grave, sober, diligent, and reverent: an ideal Puritan. Iacoomes was also the highest-ranked scholar in his class. Having an official place in the College allowed Iacoomes, Cheeshahteau-muck, and others to work against hierarchies of race in favor of a hierarchy of intellectual achievement and religious aptitude. Native American scholars would never be authentically English, remaining “mimic men” as articulated by Bhabha. But with their achievements, the boundary between English and Native American, savageness and civility slipped, if it ever clearly existed at all (Hodge 2013).

In a sense, these Native American students colonized Harvard. As Algonquian speakers and teachers, they joined James Printer in signaling that Native American people could direct the flow of resources within English communities and effect change within their own communities. They both enforced and undermined foundational logics of English colonialism. And they were present at Harvard because of the Indian College. Recent work by Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks (2008), among others, emphasizes the active role of colonial Native American communities in pursuing literacy and education. Native American traditions of oration and negotiation actively adopted and incorporated written modes of communication in petitioning land rights and other issues of sovereignty. Seventeenth-century indigenous written texts, however rare, demonstrate accomplishment, mastery, and active pursuit of the tools of literacy and education.

The setting of Harvard College exposes the hybridized political construction of knowledge of and through multicultural colonial subjects. Seventeenth-century Native American students were recognized as authoritative brokers of indigenous language and other knowledge, and they simultaneously became, at least to an extent, a mimetic embodiment of English Puritan ideals. Harvard’s Indian College facilitated these transformations by materializing Puritan aspirations as a physical location and as a center of knowledge production and distribution. One of the project’s contributions to the archaeology of colonialism is to draw out circumstances of hybridity even in the absence of non-European material practices. Given the charged role of literacy, in particular, we should address intangibles like language and education more broadly within frameworks of indigenous materiality. A fuller conceptualization of English and Native American colonial entanglements will result.

Reflection

The Harvard Yard Archaeology Project operates with the conviction that past colonial experiences, recovered on a micro scale, have influenced present structural relations between Euro-Americans and Native Americans, between sovereign tribes and the U.S. government, and in terms of the role of universities in civic life. Furthermore, our current institutional context has been shaped by the colonial contexts we study and, in turn, shapes the future (an important dimension in all the chapters in this volume). In 2010, Harvard Native American students involved in the archaeology project raised a wetu (an indigenous northeastern American shelter) at the Indian College site under the guidance of neighboring Wampanoag artists (figure 8.1). Through the wetu project, the students commemorated the 360th anniversary of Harvard’s charter, which had committed the college to education of “English and Indian youth.” Harvard Native American students, in the form of organized campus clubs and groups, associated themselves with the archaeology project. Their initial associations were formally encouraged through invitations to the project’s community events. Soon, informal contacts and information networks became active. Their formation was facilitated by HUNAP in the form of announcements and public events to make information about the field course and its public archaeology format available to students. HUNAP’s activation of campus energy around commemorating the Indian College and interrogating Harvard’s charter facilitated Native American student commitment to raising consciousness about the Indian College.

Furthermore, HUNAP’s engagement with the topic extended beyond campus through a 2005 symposium with invited participation by Native American neighbors. Present-day Native American tribes whose seven-teenth-century predecessors had sent their students to the Indian College, families whose ancestors were connected to the Indian College, or Native American scholars who had considered related topics gathered to discuss the Indian College and its legacies. This symposium is just one example of the ways in which the archaeological field project fostered a community of interest and, while under way, became a formal and informal gathering place for project updates and conversation for students and other interested parties.

Figure 8.1. Commemorative wetu at the location of the Harvard Indian College built in 1655. The wetu was installed by members of the undergraduate student organization Native Americans at Harvard College (NAHC) in 2010. Courtesy of President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM# 2014.0.11 (digital file #99110007).

The wetu project was largely student-driven with support and guidance from various campus entities, including HUNAP and the Peabody Museum–Harvard Yard Archaeology Project. Growing from the emerging community of interest, students made contact and sought advice beyond campus with regard to cultural, architectural, and artistic aspects of the proposed wetu installation. They clearly articulated the goal to develop their vision of it in a culturally and technically appropriate manner and to raise awareness of these facets of the project. The students became apprentices, especially to the Wampanoag artists who welcomed student involvement in the building process. The students led the commemoration and memory making, from crafting the saplings that formed the internal support of the wetu to creating an installation ceremony and public programming that was culturally appropriate as well as meaningful to their vision.

The wetu project was overt in its awareness-raising goal by referencing the archaeologically confirmed location of the Indian College as a symbol of the university’s commitment to Native American students and indigenous studies revised for the twenty-first century. Intangible heritage was made tangible through a structure envisioned by students and permitted by university administration. Students made a successful case and were permitted to construct the wetu in a campus area where structures are not usually allowed. By formally articulating the goals and the program in meetings with university administration, with HUNAP and Peabody Museum–Harvard Yard Archaeology Project representatives also at the table, students not only gained the necessary permission but also expanded the circle of stakeholders as the administrators became parties to activating Harvard’s history. University deans, their staff members, and operations specialists came together to guide the students in a workable plan that would maintain the vision as well as address concerns such as safety code requirements and intra-university policies regarding public space and gathering. At the wetu, the Harvard Native American student community engaged the public and Harvard communities in dialogue about the past as well as contemporary indigenous issues; as a result they engaged in collective memory making. Similarly, individual identity and memory making unfolded as they utilized the wetu as something like a temporary student center.

Recovered printing type also links past and present, inciting memory and deep personal connections among individuals. In speaking with students and the public in the context of the excavation and the exhibit development process, Bruce Curliss, a Nipmuc Nation member and vital Harvard neighbor today, invoked the legacy of his ancestor James Printer as a respected, authoritative Native American individual working and living among different colonial communities. These engagements widened the circumference of stakeholders in a shared past and generated attention to updating the university’s commitment to indigeneity and diversity in twenty-first-century education and democratic institutions.

One of the challenges of this volume has been to articulate the long-term consequences of colonialism in both New and Old World contexts. At Harvard we work with collaborators to overcome an absence in the present-day cultural landscape. There is no physical Indian College to manifest these histories and forward contemporary conversations and engagements, and the desire for (and efficacy of) such a tangible location is manifested by the wetu project. In contrast, the monumental masonry of Hadrian’s Wall discussed by Hingley (this volume) is a lodestone for stakeholder and community engagement. Hadrian’s Wall is a symbol for inspiring public dialogue around notions of outsiders and insiders. It offers a different view of community and colonial legacies and reminds us to revisit and embrace inclusiveness as part of colonialism’s legacies. Harvard’s colonial past and problematic aspects of indigenous education in this setting further conversations about today’s relevance of colonial legacies and generated ideas about justice for indigenous cultures.

Harvard’s archaeological narrative clarifies the unique inflection of Puritan colonialism, which privileged literacy and anxiously evaluated bodies and souls. It also contributes to comparative colonialism on a broad scale. Closer to home, it aims to decolonize Harvard’s story of itself. Archaeology provides critical opportunities to remember, critique, and edit Harvard’s established narrative. The archaeology project’s focus on the seventeenth century foregrounds the underrepresented story of Native American education at Harvard and provides a platform for reflecting on the shape and aims of today’s educational community as well as its relationships to Native American neighbors. We challenge historical and contemporary conceptions of seventeenth-century Cambridge and Boston by highlighting Harvard’s first indigenous scholars and the legacy of indigenous literacy in colonial and contemporary New England.

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