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.

Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck was born in Martha's Vineyard. Cheeshahteaumuck entered Harvard’s Indian College in 1661 and graduated in 1665, the first Native American known to receive a Harvard degree; he died of tuberculosis less than a year later, leaving a Latin letter among the few surviving traces of his education.

In Geraldine Brooks’ 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.