Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck

Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck was a Wampanoag scholar and the first Native American known to graduate from Harvard College. Educated at the seventeenth-century Indian College, his life reflects missionary schooling, colonial expansion and the devastating effects of disease and displacement on Indigenous communities.

In Geraldine Brooks’s Caleb’s Crossing, Caleb’s Crossing follows Bethia Mayfield, the daughter of a strict Puritan minister on Martha’s Vineyard, and Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, a Wampanoag boy whose education takes him into the English colonial world.