At first, students didn’t know what to make of the pile of cedar saplings and sheets of poplar bark piling up in Harvard Yard. They were even more perplexed when Mark Andrews, cultural resource manager for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), assisted by fellow Vineyarders Jonathan and Elizabeth Perry, began showing a group of volunteers how to sink the saplings deep into the Yard’s hallowed lawn. Few of Harvard’s undergrads had ever seen a wetu, the traditional housing of eastern woodland Indians, but now the domed, bark-clad dwelling sits completed in Harvard Yard.

An initiative of the student association, Native Americans at Harvard, the wetu commemorates the 360th anniversary of the Harvard Charter of 1650, which dedicated Harvard College “to the education of English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.” Hosting the opening ceremony on April 22, Tiffany Smalley, a Harvard junior and an Aquinnah Wampanoag, told the crowd that the wetu had been built to further the charter’s ideal of an exchange of knowledge between cultures.

She added that her time at Harvard had taught her a great deal about honoring her ancestors and the spaces that they had inhabited. One of those ancestors is Caleb Cheeshahteamuck, the first native American to graduate from Harvard, in 1665. Ms. Smalley pointed out that the wetu was built on the recently identified site of Harvard’s Indian College, a brick building that stood from 1655 to 1698 and was home to both Cheeshahteamuck and Joel Hiacoomes, both Vineyarders.

To be admitted to the college, the two youths had to have mastered Latin and be acquainted with Greek. During their studies, they were required to speak only Latin, to master Greek and Hebrew, study logic and rhetoric and debate with their fellow students, sons of the colony’s former governor, its leading clerics and military officers. It’s believed that Mr. Hiacoomes would have been valedictorian of his class had he not been killed following a shipwreck just before the 1665 commencement.

Last week’s ceremony, attended by about 100 students and faculty, was Ms. Smalley’s first public duty as president of Native Americans at Harvard College, a post to which she had been elected just one day earlier. She introduced Steven Abbot, director of Harvard University’s Native American Program, who encouraged those at the ceremony to reflect on the different style and use of the wetu, with its modest scale and sustainable, biodegradable materials, compared with the brick halls that towered all around it: “It’s a chance for us to think where we are going in this world, to reflect on other ways of thinking and to come up with a better system in the future, where we are all able to share traditional ideas and new concepts.”

Prof. William Fash, director of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, praised the “museum quality piece,” which was erected in just three days by volunteers working from 7:30 in the morning to 6 p.m. Professor Fash directs a course titled Archeology of Harvard Yard, which conducts a dig aimed at finding out more about the Indian College. Last fall, his students located a trench believed to be the foundations of one wall of the building. They also unearthed artifacts, such as pieces of moveable type from the college press on which the first bible ever produced in North America was printed in the Wampanoag language. “I hope this will allow students to reflect on the fact that this is the type of architecture that used to be here, and that there were people here thousands of years before there was ever a Harvard,” he said.

Geraldine Brooks is an author who lives in Vineyard Haven and contributes to the Gazette.