“the song of hiawatha”
First, let me just say I am not Ojibwe or from any of the aboriginal cultures of the Americas; I am not a self-proclaimed “expert” on anything; and will not try to spin anyone’s history to fit my own personal ideas. The idea of this post all began when I decided to try to learn the Ojibwe language, Anishinaabemowin, and soon started to turn to anything I could find that might help me pronounce the words I was studying correctly. However, even though I am curious and enjoy learning I am sure to make many mistakes as I go along, trying to learn about the Anishinaabeg world. I apologize for that but it is not done out of wickedness or laziness, rather out of pure ignorance on my part.
Growing up in Michigan, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha, a book-length epic about the notorious, semi-divine Ojibwe chief, the peacemaker himself, was and is spoken about with admiration, almost reverence, by many. It was, in 1855, an extremely popular poem with the kind of people who knew nothing about aboriginal groups they were busy committing genocide upon; and I would go so far to say it seems to still be popular in this day and age with the very same people. Hiawatha has certainly left his mark on us;1 but what I am curious about isn’t whether The Song of Hiawatha is a good or bad poem,2 I am curious just how Anishinaabeg is this? how realistic is it to the actual Ojibwe world? Sure, it is apparent non-aboriginal critics and readers love Longfellow’s poem; they tend to take the stories and events at face value (which is sort of predictable) and are always surprised to find most of the action in the poem was taken (some say plagiarized) from the Finnish epic poem, Kalevala, but they love it all the same. Still, just because Anglos like it does this poem speak on any level to actual Ojibwe readers? or is it simply seen as a curious icon from a colonizing culture that has never really bothered to understand the people they were attempting to destroy besides using their names on street signs and mascots of sports teams?
Sadly, however, it is harder than I thought to find any Anishinaabeg critics of Longfellow. I would go so far as to say there hasn't been very much analysis of the poem at all by anyone in the last fifteen years or so (or at least I haven't found much; Gale, 2003, and Irmscher, 2006, being exceptions). The one critic whose analysis I did find of value, Rosemary Lyons, isn’t aboriginal herself (as far as I can tell) but does have many interesting insights on the subject. She takes the poet to task and says how Longfellow probably didn't do very good homework when researching the myths he used:
From Native Americans, silence surrounds Longfellow’s myth of the Ojibwa … Longfellow learned of Hiawatha from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s 1839 work, Algic Researches. Gerald Vizenor states the Schoolcraft, “named the Anishinaabeg the Ojibwa; he reasoned that the root meaning of the word Ojibway described the peculiar sound of the Anishinaabeg voice” … Later Vizenor reports, Schoolcraft
claimed that he discovered the source of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca, an arrogant assertion since he asked tribal people to direct him to the source of the river. Schoolcraft married a tribal woman and wrote several books about tribal culture. Henry Wadworth Longfellow, the poet and romancer, was impressed with his work and copied his errors: Longfellow confused the trickster Naanabozho with the Iroquois Hiawatha and placed his romantic narrative on the shores of Lake Superior.
Vizenor further notes the remoteness of authenticity in cultural and political histories of the Anishinaabeg “written in a colonial language by those who invented the Indian, renamed the tribes, allotted the land, divided ancestries by geometric degrees of blood, and characterized identities on federal reservations” (27).
In other words, Longfellow took his accounts second- or third-hand from texts that weren’t all that accurate to begin with and then passed them off to a badly informed audience as the real thing.
And yet as the years go by the figure of Hiawatha keeps appearing in popular culture (though why it has become a popular girls’ name of late is a little odd); and it is because of this popular image of "The Indian" I chose the image at the top. It comes from an Ojibwe genealogical webpage and I used it because, personally, I feel it is far more authentic than what most artists choose; for example, it actually features Ojibwes in turn of the century clothing in an Ojibwe village. For some bizarre reason most artists fail to do this. Hiawatha is usually shown as a very pale male (we can't have anyone too dark as a hero so we'll make him Northern Italian, shall we?) either nude (with prudish branches covering him every time he walks) or in full ceremonial dress throughout the poem (even on rainy days); or he is a joke, a child-like yet brainless stereotype, such as in the Disney film and comic of the same name. Sometimes, because someone told the artist Hiawatha is actually an Iroquois folk hero, and even though the poem is supposedly set in an all-Ojibwe setting, they portray him as a traditional Iroquoian … who just happens to be hanging out with Ojibwe I guess. To me that is sort of like portraying a modern day German-American in lederhosen because, hey, he originally came from Germany; it’s missing the point.
Should we really be surprised about any of this? As Lyons points out, Longfellow, like all of us, was a product of his own culture and not exempted from his own biases:
… Despite his enthusiasm for Ojibwa lore, however, he did not choose to suppress his sense of cultural superiority, which shows so plainly in the introduction (87-98) to the Song of Hiawatha
Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple,
Who have faith in God and Nature,
Who believe that in all ages
Every human heart is human,
That in even savage bosoms
There are longings, yearnings, strivings
For the good they comprehend not,
That the feeble hands and helpless,
Groping blindly in the darkness,
Touch God's right hand in that darkness
And are lifted up and strengthened;-
Listen to this simple story … (29)
Ah, "savage bosoms," indeed! It is curious that The Song of Hiawatha has not suffered the same fate as another book that brought to 1850s East Coast consciousness (in this case) the evils of slavery and the first attempt by a white person to humanize African-Americans, that is, of course, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Of course we don't remember any literary merits of the book; the term “Uncle Tom” (meaning a person who acts in a subservient manner toward white authority) has in recent times, overshadowed any historical impact Stowe’s abolitionism tale might have had.
I say it is curious because, although many academic critics have praised Hiawatha as enlightening a population hell-bent on driving Native Americans off the face of the earth forever, the character Hiawatha in the end of the poem becomes such a stooge and sycophant for colonial interests that the poem becomes ludicrous; how could anyone seriously accept the colossally and problematical idea that Native Americans would ever see the colonizing priests, in Longfellow’s words, the “Black-Robe chief, the Prophet, He the Priest of Prayer, the Pale-face, With his guides and his companions” (22.55-7), as a divine force sent to lift the Anishinaabeg Nation to greater heights? This, when the same “prophets” were spreading disease and alcoholism among the tribes, selling off tribal lands, forcing aboriginal children into missionary schools where capital punishment was used as a way of trying to irradiating “the Native” in them? Lyons ends her assessment of the poem as follows:
Hiawatha dreams that whites will come in big ships with guns and that the land will be more populated, “our nation scattered, All forgetful of my counsels, weakened, warring with each other” (21.223-5). Hiawatha sees “the remnants of our people sweeping westward, wild and woeful … Like the withered leaves in autumn” (21.226-9). Although Hiawatha welcomes the white people with generosity with the words, “All our doors stand open for you” (22.73), he bids farewell to his grandmother that same evening and departs to “the portals of the Sunset” (22.175).
So, the mythical peacemaker vanishes in his magic canoe as whites arrive to alter his earth. Departing, Hiawatha makes clear the way of the colonizer. Moreover, he does it by choice, not obligation. He goes willingly and with grace. This seems easy though not true (29-30).
I should say so. If a 1940s German, let us say, wrote a poem in which a mystical European Jew told his people to welcome in the far wiser and kinder Nazis and then, once his people were under their iron thumb, conveniently disappears so the poet did not have to deal with the rest of history (in the same way Longfellow choses to end his poem right when the small pox blankets were being handed out), eyebrows would be raised. The same should go here with; I would go so far to say that Hiawatha is more of an Uncle Tom in the end than Uncle Tom ever was.
***
Works Cited
Gale, Robert L. A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. (2003)
Irmscher, Christoph. Longfellow redux. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (2006)
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Song of Hiawatha: the epic adventures of an Indian Hero. New York: Platt & Munk. (1963)
Lyons, Rosemary. A comparison of the works of Antonine Maillet of the Acadian tradition of New Brunswick, Canada and Louise Erdrich of the Ojibwe of North America with the poems of Longfellow. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press. (2002)
- I say this because we have, after all, many, many things bearing his name; the Hiawatha National Forest in the Upper Peninsula. Canada has just released yet another film version of the poem with a review that goes as follows: "the story of Hiawatha's (Litefoot) feats and tragedies is told to fur trader Jean Bertrand (Michael Rooker), French priest Father Marcel (David Strathairn), and Indian interpreter O'Kagh (Graham Greene) by his grandmother Nokomis (Sheila Tousey) and tribal elder Iagoo (Gordon Tootoosis)." What a fur trader and Graham Greene are doing in this movie is beyond me, but there you go. [back]
- We live in an age where the general theory of poetry is that “good” and “bad” are value judgments and poetry somehow rises above value judgments. This is bunk, of course, but it might explain why middle-class Americans keep cranking out drab, lifeless work no one ever reads, quotes from, or pays attention to. But I digress. [back]