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Scholars have spent years studying Harvard’s colonial-era land holdings in New England. Now, undergraduate research on the University’s ownership of Indigenous land in Maine is helping push the research forward.
Laura C. Cleves ’28 and Christian D. Topinio ’27 traced Harvard’s financial entanglements to a piece of land in southern Maine using archival documents and interviews with members of the Penobscot Nation.
The two found that an alumnus gifted the land to Harvard in 1678, though the University did not touch the land until a century later. Harvard sold the land in 1780, though members of the Penobscot and Abenaki peoples lived there at the time.
English settlers at the time, including the original donor of the land, assumed that tribal leaders had agreed to hand over exclusive rights to the land. The land was sold for $1,877 — the equivalent of $54,000 today — though tribal leaders disputed any such agreement.
Alan Niles, a lecturer in English who advised the research, said that sale of the land allowed Harvard to use Indigenous land as an instrument of financial gain.
History professor Philip J. Deloria, another adviser of the research, said many of Harvard’s land sales were tied to the Massachusetts government, which used land to fund the University.
“Harvard was set up to be a college, not a colonial institution,” Deloria said. “It was not meant to colonize and town-found.”
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“There’s an important ethical question there,” Topinio said. “If we or other researchers have found serious legacies of land expropriation and land theft from Indigenous nations that have been unaddressed, there is an ethical call to address that.”
Cleves and Topinio’s work was conducted as part of the inaugural Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacoombs Fellowship, a summer fellowship open to Harvard undergraduates interested in archival research on Indigenous history.
The summer work — conducted in partnership with the Harvard University Native American Program, the FAS Inequality in America Initiative, and the Build Learning through Inquiry in the Social Sciences program — is an extension of the Harvard and Native Lands course, where students produce original research on Harvard’s involvement with Indigenous land.
Deloria, one of the advisers, started the Harvard and Native Lands course in 2022 and will return to its teaching staff for the first time next spring. He said that the fellowship was an opportunity for students to dive deeper into their research than the academic semester normally allows.
The summer gave Cleves and Topinio the opportunity not only to examine Harvard’s archives, but also to travel to Maine and interview members of the Penobscot Nation, Deloria said.
“It was very, very valuable in terms of knowing what exactly community research looks like,” said Topinio. “What values do they hold of the land? How do they think through these issues of sovereignty? What does it mean to take that land as part of your home?”
Deloria — who also sits on the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery initiative’s advisory council — said that ongoing research on Harvard’s Indigenous land ownership could follow a similar trajectory to the Legacy of Slavery report.
The Legacy of Slavery report also began as an undergraduate research seminar and later became a task force culminating in the report’s release in 2022.
Deloria pointed to regular meetings between University Provost John F. Manning ’82 and tribal leaders as a starting point for the collaborative work he envisions for the field’s future.
“It's really, going forward, an opportunity for tribes and Harvard to produce knowledge together, in collaboration,” he said.
—Staff writer Sophie Gao can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.
