Masculine Mis/apprehensions: Race, Place, and Gender at Harvard’s Colonial Indian College

Summary

This paper considers intersecting identities of gender, race, religion, age, and status in early America, centering on the colonial Harvard Indian College—a highly charged masculine setting in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. Institutional structures and the material culture of daily life constrained masculinity for Native American and English members of the early Harvard community while establishing education as a trope of patriarchal power. Young men adopted intensely religious lives under constant scrutiny, participating in unequal relations of intellectual and cultural exchange. Anglo-American misapprehensions of, and apprehensions about, indigenous genders complicated these relations. In this context, discourses of association, surveillance, and desire prove especially pertinent. Encounters were racialized, gendered, and contested. These tensions must be incorporated into our understandings of colonial New England.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Masculine Materiality and Intersectionality   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 705