The Song of Hiawatha
He also had frequent encounters with Black Hawk and other Sauk people on Boston Common, and he drew from Algic Researches (1839) and other writings by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnographer and United States Indian agent, and from Heckewelder's Narratives.
"[2] Longfellow had originally planned on following Schoolcraft in calling his hero Manabozho, the name in use at the time among the Ojibwe of the south shore of Lake Superior for a figure of their folklore who was a trickster and transformer.
[6] Longfellow chose to set The Song of Hiawatha at the Pictured Rocks, one of the locations along the south shore of Lake Superior favored by narrators of the Manabozho stories.
In the ensuing chapters, Hiawatha has childhood adventures, falls in love with Minnehaha, slays the evil magician Pearl-Feather, invents written language, discovers corn and other episodes.
Having endorsed the conversion of the Ojibwe people to the Roman Catholic Church, Hiawatha, similarly to Väinämöinen at the end of the Kalevala, launches his canoe westward toward the sunset and departs forever.
[8] The folklorist Stith Thompson, although crediting Schoolcraft's research with being a "landmark," was quite critical of him: "Unfortunately, the scientific value of his work is marred by the manner in which he has reshaped the stories to fit his own literary taste.
[10] Resemblances between the original stories, as "reshaped by Schoolcraft," and the episodes in the poem are but superficial, and Longfellow omits important details essential to Ojibwe narrative construction, characterization, and theme.
"[11] Also, "in exercising the function of selecting incidents to make an artistic production, Longfellow ... omitted all that aspect of the Manabozho saga which considers the culture hero as a trickster,"[12] this despite the fact that Schoolcraft had already diligently avoided what he himself called "vulgarisms.
He saw how the mass of Indian legends which Schoolcraft was collecting depicted noble savages out of time, and offered, if treated right, a kind of primitive example of that very progress which had done them in.
In his notes to the poem, Longfellow cites Schoolcraft: a tradition prevalent among the North American Indians, of a personage of miraculous birth, who was sent among them to clear their rivers, forests, and fishing-grounds, and to teach them the arts of peace.
[18] The Song of Hiawatha was written in trochaic tetrameter, the same meter as Kalevala, the Finnish epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot from fragments of folk poetry.
[21] Schoolcraft had written a romantic poem, Alhalla, or the Lord of Talladega (1843) in trochaic tetrameter, about which he commented in his preface: The meter is thought to be not ill adapted to the Indian mode of enunciation.
This at least may be affirmed, that it imparts a movement to the narrative, which, at the same time that it obviates languor, favors that repetitious rhythm, or pseudo-parallelism, which so strongly marks their highly compound lexicography.
In August 1855, The New York Times carried an item on "Longfellow's New Poem", quoting an article from another periodical which said that it "is very original, and has the simplicity and charm of a Saga ... it is the very antipodes of Alfred Lord Tennyson's Maud, which is ... morbid, irreligious, and painful."
He complains that Hiawatha's deeds of magical strength pale by comparison to the feats of Hercules and to "Finn Mac Cool, that big stupid Celtic mammoth."
[31] English writer George Eliot called The Song of Hiawatha, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 book The Scarlet Letter, the "two most indigenous and masterly productions in American literature".
[36] It was followed by Robert Stoepel's Hiawatha: An Indian Symphony, a work in 14 movements that combined narration, solo arias, descriptive choruses and programmatic orchestral interludes.
[43] Among later orchestral treatments of the Hiawatha theme by American composers there was Louis Coerne's four-part symphonic suite, each section of which was prefaced by a quotation from the poem.
They include the English musician Stanley Wilson's "Hiawatha, 12 Scenes" (1928) for first-grade solo piano, based on Longfellow's lines, and Soon Hee Newbold's rhythmic composition for strings in Dorian mode (2003), which is frequently performed by youth orchestras.
[60] Lewis's Hiawatha works remain notable not just because of her talented execution, but because of the rare insight within the pieces that comes from the artist being of Native American descent.
[66] Other examples include Thomas Moran's Fiercely the Red Sun Descending, Burned His Way along the Heavens (1875), held by the North Carolina Museum of Art,[67] and the panoramic waterfalls of Hiawatha and Minnehaha on their Honeymoon (1885) by Jerome Thompson (1814 – 1886).
[72] The monumental quality survives into the 20th century in Frances Foy's Hiawatha returning with Minnehaha (1937), a mural sponsored during the Depression for the Gibson City Post Office, Illinois.
In 1901 and 1902, Charles and Katharine Bowden took still and moving images of the play that the Anishinaabe descendants of Schoolcraft's informant, Chief Shingwauk, staged in Debarats, Ontario, on a regular schedule from June through August starting in 1900.
This was Pocahontas: or the Gentle Savage, a comic extravaganza which included extracts from an imaginary Viking poem, "burlesquing the recent parodies, good, bad, and indifferent, on The Song of Hiawatha."
The Times quoted: Whence this song of Pocahontas, With its flavor of tobacco, And the stincweed [sic] Old Mundungus, With the ocho of the Breakdown, With its smack of Bourbonwhiskey, With the twangle of the Banjo, Of the Banjo—the Goatskinner, And the Fiddle—the Catgutto...
[82] At Wallack's Theatre in New York a parody titled Hiawatha; or, Ardent Spirits and Laughing Water, by Charles Melton Walcot, premiered on 26 December 1856.
[83] In England, Lewis Carroll published Hiawatha's Photographing (1857), which he introduced by noting (in the same rhythm as the Longfellow poem), "In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy.
It begins: On de shurrs from Geetchy Goony, Stoot a tipee witt a weegwom Frontage feefty fitt it mashered Hopen fireplaze--izzy payments Another parody was "Hakawatha" (1989), by British computer scientist Mike Shields, writing under the pen name F. X. Reid, about a frustrated computer programmer:[86][87] First, he sat and faced the console / Faced the glowing, humming console Typed his login at the keyboard / Typed his password (fourteen letters) Waited till the system answered / Waited long and cursed its slowness The poem was also parodied in three cartoon shorts, all of which featured inept protagonists who are beset by comic calamities while hunting.
[89] The 1944 MGM cartoon Big Heel-watha, directed by Tex Avery, follows the overweight title character's effort to win the hand of the chief's daughter by catching Screwy Squirrel.
In his comic book adventure 'Land of the Pygmy Indians,' American artist Carl Barks introduces a tribe of pint-sized Indigenous people north of Lake Superior who react to Uncle Scrooge McDuck's intrusion: "Flee, Peeweegahs, to the forest!
