Acknowledgement: Native Presence and the Guilford College Landscape

One confirmed Native American student from earlier years was Eleanor Corneilson Rice '50 (mother of graduate and former Guilford Trustee Linda Rice Thorup). Her obituary is available at https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/timesunion-albany/name/eleanor-rice-obituary?pid=183707544. She is featured in the lower right corner of the page in the 1950 Guilford Quaker Yearbook and described as follows: "Elly, originally the shy little Indian maiden, has managed to become a very important cog in Guilford's functioning machinery. A leader in Women's Student Government and an active Thespian, she has engraved her mark deep in the minds of many of us."

The Carson Scholars Program sponsored Cherokee students at Guilford in the early 1990s. The students described their experiences in several campus publication features.
Guilford College Bulletin, Spring 1991 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-k8AMxnYdpM3e_Os-hr8jw40JJecaiDz/view?usp=sharing
The Guilfordian, December 11, 1992: https://newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/2015236774/1992-12-11/ed-1/seq-12/ 

At this time, no Native American students are identified in archives files or college documentation prior to Eleanor Corneilson's arrival in Fall 1946. Other mentions of Native Americans connected to earlier years of the institution focus on the fact that Jeremiah Hubbard was 1/4 Indian. A North Carolina Quaker leader and educator who helped to found New Garden Board School in the early 1830s, Hubbard relocated to Indiana prior to the 1837 opening. See https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/hubbard-jeremiah (by Guiford's own Algie Newlin who shows his age and context with his choice of language). Any mention of Hubbard usually notes his Cherokee heritage but that is most likely a conflation of North Carolina Native Americans with Cherokees by those lacking awareness of the Saponi peoples living in the area where Hubbard's mother grew up.

While Native Americans individuals are invisible in the first century of Guilford's history, there are stereotypical uses of language and examples of "dressing up as Indians" for entertainment purposes. For example, the 1916 Guilfordian describes a student event which featured non-Native students as "braves" and "squaws."

There are anecdotal sketches appearing in archives files and publications about the "last Indians" visiting the early Quaker settlement prior to the school's founding and noting how the "New Garden" was a well managed hunting ground prior to settler arrival in the mid-1700s.