I live in Minneapolis, where Longfellow lived (or anyway legend has it) for a time. There are a lot of places and things here also named after names in Longfellow’s poem: Hiawatha is the name given to a small lake, a street, and a commuter train line; Minnehaha is the name given to a waterfall, a creek, the city park that surrounds them, a street, and a shopping mall; Nokomis is the name given to a small lake and a school; and so on. There are also a street and a park named for Longfellow.

At the top of Minnehaha Falls, on a small island in the creek, is a bronze statue depicting Hiawatha carrying Minnehaha in his arms. On the base of the statue are a couple of lines quoted from Longfellow’s poem. The whole thing reduced to “local color” for tourists. (From what I’ve been able to piece together from the shredder of imperialist history, I gather that Dakota people lived here prior to the forced migration west of Ojibwe and other people from the Great Lakes region. Currently Minneapolis and St. Paul together are said to have the largest urban population of Native American people in the United States — Dakota, Ojibwe, and whoever else.)

In your post on Longfellow, one of the works you quote from mentions the early 19th century writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. You may be interested in checking out a webpage giving bio info about Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe wife, whose English name was Jane Johnston Schoolcraft:

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/schoolcraft_jane_johnston.html

According to the site at the above link (hosted at the U. of Minnesota), Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was apparently one of the earliest Native American writers to write literary works in English. Her mother was a renowned storyteller, and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft set out to put in writing, in English, many of the traditional stories she had heard from her mother. Her husband, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, took (or stole) heavily from his wife’s writings, though largely neglected to credit her. She was borne in the region of what is now Sault Ste. Marie.

That business about H. R. Schoolcraft claiming to have “discovered” the source of the Mississippi is (unfortunately) just too typical. I read somewhere a number of years ago — a small booklet I found somewhere, purporting to give Native place names of varioius places in Minnesota, though it didn’t give any info about the sources — that local Native people actually didn’t consider Lake Itasca to be the source of the Mississippi. The regarded the much larger Leech Lake (in the same region of the state) to be he source of the Mississippi, and considered the river that runs from Itasca to Leech Lake to be a separate river.

Interesting to consider. I’ve never been there, though on the map the river does go into Leech Lake on the west or southwest side, and emerges (or another river does) on the east side of the lake. Makes as much sense to consider them two separate rivers as to consider them the same one. (On the map, roughly three quarters of Leech Lake appears to be legally in sovereign Native territory, though I don’t know the formal legal status offhand.)

You may already be aware of it, but just in case not, a general online resource you may find useful is the Native Literature Directory website:

http://www.indians.org/Resource/natlit/natlit.html

Hope I haven’t been too long-winded. I like what you’re doing here. I’ll come back and look some more. Thanks.