Harvard Indian College

The Indian College (1640s-1693) was an institution of higher education established in the 1640s with the mission of training Native American students at Harvard College, in the town of Cambridge, in colonial Massachusetts. The Indian College's building, located in Harvard Yard, was completed in 1656. It housed a printing press used to publish the first Christian Bible translated into a Native American language, the Eliot Indian Bible of 1663, which was also the first Bible in any language printed in British America.

The Indian College was supported financially by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, a Christian missionary charity based in London and whose president was the scientist Robert Boyle. Harvard promised to waive tuition as well as provide housing for American Indian Students. The Indian College attracted only a handful of Native American students and was closed in 1693. Following its closure, the building was demolished, and its bricks were repurposed for the construction of Stoughton Hall, a dormitory built in 1698 within Harvard Yard. Stoughton Hall stood for nearly a century before it too was demolished in 1781. Nonetheless, some Native American students continued to attend Harvard.

In 1997, the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) held a Harvard Yard at Matthews Hall ceremony where a plaque was dedicated to recognize the location of the historic Indian College. In addition to celebrating the significance of the Indian College within its historical past, more than 300 individuals attended the event to honor the legacy of the Indigenous students who attended. In 2009, remnants of the original Indian College were discovered during an archaeological dig in Harvard Yard and parts of the original printing press were recovered. At Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, an exhibit titled "Digging Veritas" now showcases the archaeology and history of the Indian College and student life in colonial Harvard.