The Song of Hiawatha

Overview

Published

10 November 1855, by Ticknor and Fields in Boston (David Bogue issued the London edition the same year); begun in June 1854 and finished in the spring of 1855

Author

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), Harvard professor of modern languages until 1854 and the most widely read American poet of his century

Form

Narrative poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction; unrhymed trochaic tetrameter ('By the shores of Gitche Gumee'), heavy with repetition and parallelism

Metre's source

The Finnish Kalevala, which Longfellow knew chiefly through Anton Schiefner's German translation (1852)

Main sources

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Algic Researches (1839) and later writings, built on Ojibwe stories gathered with the help of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her family; also John Heckewelder, George Catlin and George Copway

Setting

The south shore of Lake Superior (Gitche Gumee), near the Pictured Rocks and the Taquamenaw river, in a timeless era before European contact

Hero

Hiawatha, son of the West Wind and grandson of Nokomis, a culture hero who teaches his people; the stories are those of the Ojibwe Manabozho, though the name belongs to a Haudenosaunee statesman

Reception

An immediate best-seller (by common report tens of thousands of copies within months), widely parodied, attacked in the press for its metre and charged with plagiarism from the Kalevala

Afterlife

Coleridge-Taylor's cantatas (Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, 1898), pageants, school recitation, Lewis Carroll's parody 'Hiawatha's Photographing', and a long Native and scholarly critique

This edition

The archive's text gives the twenty-two cantos; the Introduction ('Should you ask me, whence these stories?') is kept as a separate poem by Longfellow in the archive

Context

By 1854 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had resigned his Harvard chair to write full time. He was already the best-known poet in the United States, the author of Evangeline (1847), and a scholar who read a dozen languages. In June 1854 his journal records a plan for an Indian poem in a new metre, and by the following spring the work was done. Published on 10 November 1855, The Song of Hiawatha sold, by common report, in tens of thousands within months and became, with Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), one of the three long poems on which his popular fame rested (Calhoun 2004) (Arvin 1963).

The poem's material came above all from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie from 1822, whose Algic Researches (1839) printed Ojibwe tales in a polished literary English. Much of that material had been gathered and translated with the help of his wife, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay, 1800–1842), the daughter of an Irish fur trader and of Ozhaguscodaywayquay, daughter of the Ojibwe leader Waabojiig; her mother and siblings also served as tellers and interpreters. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft wrote poems and retold stories in her own right, and Robert Dale Parker's edition has made her work available as the first known writing by a Native American woman poet (Schoolcraft 1839) (Parker 2007) (Bremer 1987).

Schoolcraft's hero was Manabozho (Nanabozho), the Ojibwe trickster and transformer, a figure at once creator, buffoon and benefactor. Longfellow at first called his poem 'Manabozho', then changed the name to Hiawatha, believing on Schoolcraft's authority that the two were the same personage. They are not. Hiawatha (Hayenwatha) was remembered by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of New York as the statesman who, with the Peacemaker, founded the League of the Five Nations; Horatio Hale showed in 1883 that Schoolcraft had confused him with an Iroquois deity and then transported him to the Ojibwe (Hale 1883) (Wallace 1946) (Thompson 1922).

The metre came from Finland. Longfellow had met Finnish in Sweden in 1835 and knew the Kalevala, the epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot from folk songs, chiefly through Schiefner's German translation. The unrhymed trochaic tetrameter of the Kalevala, with its repetitions and its pairing of lines that restate one another, gave Longfellow a way of making an oral, incantatory narrative in English. It also invited instant parody, and in November 1855 the scholar Thomas Conrad Porter accused him in a Washington newspaper of taking whole episodes from the Finnish poem (Moyne 1963).

The poem belongs to a moment when white Americans were pressing Native nations westward and out of the way, while celebrating an imagined Indian past as a national inheritance. Longfellow's Ojibwe are noble, peaceable and doomed; his hero welcomes a Catholic missionary and sails into the sunset, leaving his people to the newcomers. Critics from Roy Harvey Pearce onward have read this ending as a classic instance of the myth of the 'vanishing Indian', and Native and non-Native scholars alike have asked whose voices the poem preserves and whose it silences (Pearce 1953) (Dippie 1982) (Maddox 1991).

Plot overview

The poem opens with the Great Spirit, Gitche Manito, calling the warring nations together at the Red Pipe-stone Quarry, giving them the peace-pipe and promising a prophet who will teach them. The second canto tells how Mudjekeewis killed the Great Bear and became the West Wind, father of the other winds. Nokomis, fallen from the moon, raises a daughter, Wenonah, who is seduced and abandoned by Mudjekeewis and dies after bearing Hiawatha. Brought up by Nokomis on the shore of Gitche Gumee, Hiawatha learns the speech of animals, makes his first kill, journeys west to fight his father, and fasts in the forest until, wrestling with the spirit Mondamin, he wins maize for his people.

With his friends, the musician Chibiabos and the strong man Kwasind, Hiawatha builds a birch canoe, clears the rivers, kills the great sturgeon Mishe-Nahma from inside its belly, and slays the magician Pearl-Feather, who had killed Nokomis's father. He then woos Minnehaha, daughter of an old Dakota arrow-maker, and brings her home; at the wedding feast Pau-Puk-Keewis dances, Chibiabos sings and the boaster Iagoo tells the story of Osseo, the Son of the Evening Star.

In the happy years that follow Minnehaha blesses the cornfields and Hiawatha invents picture-writing so that his people's memory will not perish. Then losses come. Evil spirits drown Chibiabos, who becomes ruler of the land of the dead; the mischief-maker Pau-Puk-Keewis wrecks Hiawatha's lodge and is hunted through a series of transformations until he dies and is turned into an eagle; the Little People kill Kwasind with pine-cones. Two ghosts visit Hiawatha's lodge to teach the people how to treat the dead.

A terrible winter brings Famine and Fever, and Minnehaha dies while Hiawatha searches the empty forest for food. In spring Iagoo returns with tales of a great winged canoe and bearded white-faced men; only Hiawatha believes him, having seen in a vision both the coming of the strangers and the scattering of his own nation. The last canto brings a Black-Robe priest by canoe. Hiawatha welcomes him, tells his people to listen to the strangers' words, and departs westward into the sunset, to the land of the Northwest Wind and the Islands of the Blessed.

Part by part

Characters

Hiawatha's family and friends

Hiawatha

Son of Mudjekeewis, the West Wind, and of Wenonah, raised by his grandmother Nokomis. He is a culture hero rather than a warrior: he wins maize, builds the first canoe, clears rivers, kills monsters, invents picture-writing and teaches his people peace. His adventures are drawn mostly from Ojibwe stories of Manabozho, purged of the trickster's comedy and appetite, while his name belongs to the Haudenosaunee founder of the League of the Iroquois. At the end he welcomes a Christian missionary and departs westward.

Nokomis

Hiawatha's grandmother, 'Daughter of the Moon', who fell to earth when a jealous rival cut her swing. She raises Hiawatha, teaches him the lore of the sky and the animals, warns him against marrying a stranger, and survives every loss in the poem. Her name, from the Ojibwe word for grandmother, became one of the poem's most familiar.

Wenonah

Daughter of Nokomis and mother of Hiawatha. Seduced and deserted by Mudjekeewis, she dies after his birth. Her wrong is the motive of Hiawatha's journey to fight his father.

Mudjekeewis

Hiawatha's father, who killed the Great Bear and became Kabeyun, the West Wind and ruler of the winds. Proud and faithless, he is confronted by his son and fights him for three days, then sends him home with a mission and the promise of the Northwest Wind at his death.

Minnehaha

'Laughing Water', daughter of a Dakota arrow-maker, named after the waterfall near her home. She marries Hiawatha, bringing peace between their peoples, blesses the cornfields and dies in the famine (XX). Her courtship is largely Longfellow's invention, and she became the poem's most sentimentalised figure.

The Arrow-maker

Minnehaha's father, an old Dakota craftsman who remembers his warrior days. He lets his daughter choose for herself and laments her leaving; in her final delirium she sees him beckoning from his doorway.

Chibiabos

The musician, Hiawatha's dearest friend, whose singing charms birds and streams; he sings the love song at the wedding feast. Drowned under the ice of Gitche Gumee by evil spirits (XV), he becomes ruler of the land of the dead.

Kwasind

The very strong man, mocked as lazy until he shows his strength. He helps Hiawatha clear the rivers and fight; his only vulnerable point is the crown of his head, and the Little People kill him with pine-cones (XVIII).

Enemies and tricksters

Pau-Puk-Keewis

The handsome Yenadizze, or idler, called the Storm-Fool. He dances at the wedding feast, gambles away the young men's goods, wrecks Hiawatha's lodge and kills his birds. Hunted through a series of shape-changes, he is killed and turned into an eagle. He carries the trickster side of Manabozho that Longfellow kept away from his hero.

Megissogwon, the Pearl-Feather

The magician, lord of wealth and wampum, who sends fever from the marshes and killed Nokomis's father. Guarded by fiery serpents and black pitch-water, he is killed by Hiawatha with the woodpecker's help (IX).

Mishe-Nahma

The great sturgeon, King of Fishes, who swallows Hiawatha and his canoe and is killed from within (VIII).

Mishe-Mokwa

The Great Bear of the mountains, killed by Mudjekeewis, who takes his Belt of Wampum (II).

Kahgahgee

King of the Ravens, who leads the birds against the cornfields and is tied to the ridge-pole of Hiawatha's lodge as a warning (XIII).

The Puk-Wudjies

The Little People, pygmy spirits of the woods, who resent Kwasind's strength and kill him (XVIII).

Spirits and others

Gitche Manito

The Great Spirit and Master of Life, who gives the nations the peace-pipe and promises a prophet (I). Longfellow's single creator owes as much to Christian monotheism as to Ojibwe belief in many manitous.

Mondamin

The spirit of maize, a youth in green and yellow who wrestles with the fasting Hiawatha, is buried by him and rises as corn (V).

The Winds

Wabun, the East Wind, who turns his beloved into the Morning Star; Kabibonokka, the North Wind, defeated by Shingebis the diver; and Shawondasee, the South Wind, who loves a dandelion. With their father they make the world of canto II.

Iagoo

The old boaster and storyteller, who makes Hiawatha's first bow, tells the story of Osseo at the wedding (XII), and is mocked for his tale of the white men's ship until Hiawatha confirms it (XXI).

Osseo and Oweenee

The Son of the Evening Star and his faithful wife in Iagoo's tale; Osseo, old and ugly on earth, is restored to youth and taken with her to his father's lodge in the sky.

Famine and Fever

Bukadawin and Ahkosewin, who enter Hiawatha's lodge as silent guests and gaze at Minnehaha before her death (XX).

The ghosts

Two women from the land of the dead who visit Hiawatha's lodge to test his patience and teach the right way to mourn (XIX).

Peboan and Segwun

Winter and Spring, an old man and a youth who compete in boasts until the old man melts away (XXI).

The Black-Robe

The Catholic priest, the 'Prophet' and 'Pale-face', who arrives by canoe in XXII and tells the people of Christ and Mary. He recalls the French Jesuit missionaries of the Great Lakes.

Themes

Service and the culture hero

Hiawatha's heroism lies in what he gives. From the fast undertaken 'for profit of the people' to the canoe, the cleared rivers, the maize and the picture-writing, his deeds are gifts of civilisation, and even his victories over monsters end in shared wealth. Longfellow deliberately departs from the warrior heroes of classical epic, whose glory is personal, and from the trickster of Ojibwe story, whose gifts are often accidental. The result is a hero shaped by the ideals of nineteenth-century reform: useful, gentle and self-sacrificing.

This conception is also what makes the ending possible. A hero defined by service can hand his people on to new teachers; a culture hero who prepares the way can step aside. The theme of service, admirable in itself, thus serves the poem's larger story of succession.

Peace between peoples

The poem opens with the burial of war-clubs and returns repeatedly to reconciliation: Hiawatha's marriage is meant to end the feud between Ojibwe and Dakota, his deeds are against monsters rather than men, and his last act is to welcome strangers 'as friends and brothers'. In an age of Indian wars and removals the poem imagines an Indian past without war between Natives and whites. Critics have seen in this a wishful erasure of conflict, since the peace the poem preaches culminates in the peaceful surrender of the land (Maddox 1991).

Memory, loss and preservation

Hiawatha fears that 'all things fade and perish', invents writing to fix tradition, and grieves for friends and wife. The poem's own existence answers the same fear: Longfellow presents himself, in the Introduction, as the recorder of songs he heard from others. Preservation, however, has a double edge. To preserve a culture in a book is to treat it as already passing, and the poem's elegiac mood belongs both to Hiawatha's sorrows and to the assumption that Native life is ending (Pearce 1953).

Nature as kin

In the poem the birch, the cedar and the squirrel answer when addressed; the birds are Hiawatha's chickens and the beasts his brothers; the winds are his father and uncles. This vision of nature as a family of persons is drawn partly from Ojibwe tradition and partly from Romantic poetry, and it gave the poem much of its long appeal to children and to readers in an industrialising world. It also made Native people into figures of nature rather than history.

Love and the domestic ideal

The courtship, the wedding and the death of Minnehaha are the poem's emotional centre for most readers, and they are its least Ojibwe parts. Nokomis's advice, the Arrow-maker's lament, and the image of bow and string present marriage on the model of the middle-class American home. The famine canto then turns this domestic happiness into tragedy. The Victorian sentiment of these scenes explains both the poem's popularity and the modernist reaction against it (Gioia 1993).

Succession and the coming of Christianity

From Gitche Manito's promise of a prophet to the arrival of the Black-Robe, the poem is built as a story of preparation and fulfilment. Hiawatha's world is noble, but its end is foretold, and the seasonal allegory of Winter giving way to Spring presents the change as natural. The poem's Christianity is gentle, but its message is plain: the missionary's 'words of wisdom' supersede the hero's. Whether one reads this as Longfellow's sincere hope for peaceful conversion or as an alibi for dispossession, it is the poem's governing design (Dippie 1982) (Berkhofer 1978).

Motifs

Repetition and parallelism

Lines restate one another ('By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water'), epithets return with every name ('Kwasind, the very strong man'), and whole formulas recur from canto to canto. Longfellow defended this parallelism as common to Finnish and to Native poetry; it gives the poem its incantatory music and made it irresistible to parody (Moyne 1963).

Naming and gloss

Native words are almost always followed by their English sense: 'Gitche Gumee, / ... the shining Big-Sea-Water', 'Minnehaha, Laughing Water'. The habit makes the poem a kind of glossary and keeps the reader inside English while suggesting another language behind it.

The silent guest

Strangers enter Hiawatha's lodge throughout the second half: the ghosts (XIX), Famine and Fever (XX), and finally the Black-Robe and his companions (XXII), whom Hiawatha leaves sleeping in his lodge. The repetition invites a darker reading of the last guests.

Westward

Hiawatha travels west to fight his father, sails west at the end, and sees the white nations march westward in his vision. West is the realm of the West Wind, of the sunset and of death, and also the direction of American expansion.

Origin stories

Many episodes end by explaining a present feature of the world: the woodpecker's red crest, the maize, the canoe, the eagle, the sound of Kwasind in winter storms. The device ties the poem to the explanatory tales of its sources.

Symbols

The peace-pipe

Made by Gitche Manito from the red stone of the quarry (I) and lit again by Nokomis for the Black-Robe's party (XXII), the pipe frames the poem as a story of peace. Its return at the end makes the arrival of Christianity a continuation of the peace that began the poem.

The birch canoe

Built from the gifts of the trees (VII), the canoe stands for Hiawatha's harmony with nature and his power to open ways for his people. A birch canoe also brings the priest, and the hero leaves in one.

Maize

Won from Mondamin by fasting and wrestling (V) and protected by Minnehaha (XIII), the corn is the hero's greatest gift and the foundation of a settled, agricultural life.

The sunset

The 'portals of the Sunset' are the home of Mudjekeewis and the destination of Hiawatha's last voyage. The sunset joins the poem's themes of death, the end of an age and the passage to the Islands of the Blessed.

Critical debates

Authenticity and appropriation

Longfellow insisted that he could give 'chapter and verse' for his legends, and his notes cite Schoolcraft throughout. The first systematic study of his debts, by Stith Thompson in 1922, granted the closeness of many details but showed that Longfellow had combined stories told of different figures, omitted the trickster cycle and invented the love story, producing a unity foreign to the sources; the Osborns later traced each borrowing in detail (Thompson 1922) (Osborn 1942).

Later scholarship has asked a sharper question: what does it mean for a Euro-American poet to take Native stories, already reshaped by an Indian agent, and present them as the heritage of the United States? Arnold Krupat and others have discussed the ethics of translating and editing Native oral literature, and Lucy Maddox placed the poem among the writings that made Native peoples symbolic while the government removed them from their lands (Krupat 1992) (Maddox 1991). Some Ojibwe communities, however, also adopted the poem: from around 1900 Ojibwe performers at Garden River and elsewhere staged Hiawatha pageants, a history that complicates any simple story of theft (Trachtenberg 2004).

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and the Ojibwe sources

The stories Longfellow read in Algic Researches came to Schoolcraft largely through his wife's family: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, her mother Ozhaguscodaywayquay and her siblings told, translated and wrote down many of them. Schoolcraft acknowledged their help only in general terms, and earlier criticism followed him in treating the tales as his (Schoolcraft 1839) (Bremer 1987).

Robert Dale Parker's edition of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft's writings (2007) has changed this picture. It shows her as a bilingual poet and storyteller whose versions of Ojibwe tales were sometimes reworked by her husband before publication. Readers now ask how much of the Ojibwe material in the poem passed through a Native woman's voice before it reached Longfellow, and what was lost when Schoolcraft polished it into the conventions of Romantic prose (Parker 2007).

Two Hiawathas

Longfellow's hero bears the name of a historical or legendary Haudenosaunee statesman, remembered in Iroquois tradition as the companion of the Peacemaker in founding the League of the Five Nations. Schoolcraft had identified this figure with Manabozho, and Longfellow followed him. Horatio Hale, working with Iroquois informants, argued in 1883 that Schoolcraft had confused the statesman with a deity and moved him to the wrong people, and Paul Wallace's retelling of the League tradition made the historical Hiawatha familiar to a wide public (Hale 1883) (Wallace 1946).

The confusion matters because it shows how the poem flattened distinct Native nations into one generic 'Indian' past. Haudenosaunee writers have long complained that a founder of a political confederacy, a lawgiver of peace, became known to most of the world as an Ojibwe hero of the woods. Ironically, Longfellow's hero is himself a peacemaker, so that the poem keeps something of the original Hiawatha's meaning while losing his history.

The metre and the Kalevala

The trochaic tetrameter was the most discussed feature of the poem in 1855. Reviewers mocked its monotony and parodists seized on it at once. In November 1855 Thomas Conrad Porter charged in the National Intelligencer that Longfellow had borrowed not only the Kalevala's metre but some of its most striking incidents. Longfellow dismissed the charge, and in the Athenaeum of December 1855 Ferdinand Freiligrath defended the metre while acknowledging its Finnish source.

Ernest Moyne's study of 1963 remains the fullest examination. Moyne showed that Longfellow knew the Kalevala through Schiefner's German version, that the metre and the parallelism are certainly Finnish, and that some structural features, such as the hero's departure in a boat at the end, have Finnish analogues; but he found the charge of wholesale plagiarism unfounded, since the episodes themselves come from Schoolcraft (Moyne 1963). The deeper critical question is whether a Finnish metre was an apt vehicle for Native stories. Longfellow argued that parallelism was common to both traditions; modern critics have seen in the choice the logic of a romantic, pan-primitive idea of 'folk' poetry (Irmscher 2006).

An epic for America

Longfellow called the work his 'Indian Edda', and many readers took it as the national epic that American critics had demanded since the Revolution: a poem on native materials, owing nothing to Homer or Virgil. Its success in Britain and Europe, where it was translated into many languages, seemed to confirm that America had found a voice of its own (Calhoun 2004).

Yet the epic is a strange one: its hero is not an ancestor of its readers, and its national meaning depends on the transfer of the land and its legends from one people to another. Philip Deloria has shown how white Americans repeatedly 'played Indian' to fashion a native identity for themselves, and Alan Trachtenberg reads the long afterlife of Hiawatha, in schools, pageants and advertising, as part of the making of Americans in an age of immigration (Deloria 1998) (Trachtenberg 2004). The poem's claim to be a national epic is thus inseparable from its politics.

The ending and the vanishing Indian

Hiawatha's welcome to the Black-Robe and his departure have been read in sharply different ways. For Longfellow's admirers the ending is a vision of peaceful transition and of a Christianity that fulfils rather than destroys; Longfellow himself was a liberal Unitarian, sympathetic to Native people, and his journal records sorrow at their treatment (Calhoun 2004).

For most modern critics the ending is the poem's ideology in its plainest form. Roy Harvey Pearce described Longfellow as the poet who fully realised the image of the noble savage for his age, a figure safely in the past whose disappearance could be mourned without guilt; Brian Dippie traced the broader myth of the 'vanishing American', in which Native decline was imagined as natural and inevitable rather than the result of policy (Pearce 1953) (Dippie 1982) (Berkhofer 1978). Hiawatha's vision in XXI, in which his nation is scattered by its own forgetfulness and quarrels, is a key text for this reading.

Popularity and modernist disdain

For half a century The Song of Hiawatha was among the most widely read poems in English; schoolchildren recited it and families read it aloud. The modernists made Longfellow the type of everything they rejected: sentiment, moral uplift, regular metre and easy music. By the mid-twentieth century he had almost vanished from serious criticism, and Newton Arvin's critical biography (1963) was a rare attempt at a balanced assessment (Arvin 1963).

Dana Gioia's essay of 1993 argued that Longfellow's fall was the result of modernist polemic rather than a just judgement, and that his narrative skill, metrical inventiveness and public role deserve fresh consideration. Christoph Irmscher's Longfellow Redux (2006) and Charles Calhoun's biography (2004) continued this revaluation, emphasising Longfellow's cosmopolitan learning and his place in a culture of reading (Gioia 1993) (Irmscher 2006) (Calhoun 2004). Hiawatha remains the test case: its technical virtuosity is now widely admitted, its ideology widely criticised.

Parody, music and the children's classic

No American poem was parodied more. Within weeks of publication newspapers printed trochaic burlesques, and Lewis Carroll's 'Hiawatha's Photographing' (1857, collected in Phantasmagoria, 1869) mocked both the metre and the Victorian family portrait, with a prefatory note on how easily the rhythm can be imitated (Carroll 1869). The parodies themselves testify to how widely the poem was known.

Its musical afterlife was equally vast. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (1898), on canto XI, followed by The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha's Departure, became one of the most performed choral works in Britain for half a century; its composer, the son of a Sierra Leonean doctor and an English mother, was celebrated on tours of the United States by African American audiences (Self 1995). Retold in prose and illustrated for children, the poem became a nursery classic, a status that both preserved it and confirmed modernist suspicions of it (Trachtenberg 2004).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does Longfellow open with Gitche Manito's promise of a prophet rather than with Hiawatha's birth?

   Compare canto I with the arrival of the Black-Robe in XXII; think about prophecy and fulfilment, and about the peace-pipe at both ends of the poem.

2. How does Hiawatha differ from the heroes of classical epic such as Akhilleus or Odysseus?

   Look at the purpose of his fast (V), the nature of his deeds (VII–IX) and the absence of war against other men.

3. What did Longfellow change in turning Manabozho into Hiawatha, and why?

   Consider the trickster traits given to Pau-Puk-Keewis, the invented courtship, and Stith Thompson's argument about unity.

4. How does the trochaic metre shape the poem's effects? Is it suited to the story it tells?

   Read aloud a passage of repetition, such as the famine (XX); then consider the Kalevala, Longfellow's defence of parallelism and the parodies.

5. What role do women play in the poem?

   Think about Nokomis, Wenonah, Minnehaha, Oweenee and the ghosts, and about the simile of bow and string (X).

6. Why is picture-writing (XIV) important to the poem's meaning?

   Hiawatha fears that traditions perish; ask how the poem itself claims to preserve them, and what that implies about the culture it preserves.

7. How do the cantos of loss (XV–XX) prepare for the ending?

   Trace the deaths of Chibiabos, Kwasind and Minnehaha, the ghosts' lesson about the dead, and the motif of silent guests.

8. Is the ending a vision of peaceful reconciliation or an endorsement of dispossession?

   Weigh Hiawatha's two visions in XXI, his charge to his people in XXII, and the arguments of Pearce and Dippie about the 'vanishing Indian'.

9. What is lost when the Haudenosaunee Hiawatha and the Ojibwe Manabozho are merged?

   Consider Horatio Hale's correction, the League of the Five Nations, and the poem's tendency to present a single generic 'Indian' past.

10. Why was The Song of Hiawatha so popular in the nineteenth century and so scorned in the twentieth?

    Think about domestic sentiment, recitation and music, the national-epic question, and Dana Gioia's account of the modernist reaction.

Further reading

• Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.
• Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978.
• Bremer, Richard G. Indian Agent and Wilderness Scholar: The Life of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Mount Pleasant, MI: Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, 1987.
• Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
• Carroll, Lewis. Phantasmagoria and Other Poems. London: Macmillan, 1869.
• Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
• Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.
• Gioia, Dana. 'Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism.' In The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier, 64–96. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
• Hale, Horatio. The Iroquois Book of Rites. Philadelphia: D. G. Brinton, 1883.
• Irmscher, Christoph. Longfellow Redux. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
• Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
• Maddox, Lucy. Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Moyne, Ernest J. Hiawatha and Kalevala: A Study of the Relationship between Longfellow's 'Indian Edda' and the Finnish Epic. FF Communications 192. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1963.
• Osborn, Chase S., and Stellanova Osborn. Schoolcraft—Longfellow—Hiawatha. Lancaster, PA: Jaques Cattell Press, 1942.
• Parker, Robert Dale, ed. The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
• Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953.
• Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe. Algic Researches, Comprising Inquiries Respecting the Mental Characteristics of the North American Indians. First Series: Indian Tales and Legends. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1839.
• Self, Geoffrey. The Hiawatha Man: The Life and Work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.
• Thompson, Stith. 'The Indian Legend of Hiawatha.' PMLA 37, no. 1 (1922): 128–140.
• Trachtenberg, Alan. Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
• Wallace, Paul A. W. The White Roots of Peace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1946.