hiawatha -- 7/15/24

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Today's selection-- from An Infinity of Nations by Michael Witgen. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, about vanishing Indians and the fantasy of a wild and unpeopled continent:

“From the brow of Hiawatha 

Gone was every trace of sorrow, 

As the fog from off the water,

As the mist from off the meadow. 

With a smile of joy and triumph, 

With a look of exultation, 

As of one who in a vision, 

Sees what is to be, but is not 

Stood and waited Hiawatha

“Hiawatha, the protagonist of The Song of Hiawatha, woke up from a dream. He had seen the future, and it was a new world—a world without Indians. He stood at the threshold of his wigwam on the shore of ‘Gitche Gurnee,’ or more accurately Gichigamiing (Lake Superior), and waited. He felt joy, relief, even exultation. He could see the object of his dream moving across the lake toward his village, but he could not yet make it out. At last he saw the flash of paddles, and spied a birch bark canoe. ‘And within it came a people / from the distant land of Wabun.’ From waaban, or dawn, from the land of dawn, ‘Came the Black-Robe Chief, the Prophet,/ He the Priest of Prayer, the pale-face,/ With his guides and companions.’ Hiawatha stood on the beach, his hand held aloft in a gesture of welcome, waiting until he heard the crunch of the canoe sliding onto the pebbles of the beach. There would be no place for Indians, no place for simple children of the forest in this new world. The future belonged to the people from the land of dawn, ‘the land of light and Morning!’

“Hiawatha saw this future even before he heard the words of the BlackRobe chief, the prophet. He did not turn away from his destiny. He embraced it. The world he had known and ruled over was about to change. He did not resist this change, because it meant progress, and it was inevitable. The people from ‘the land of light and morning’ were a people of progress. There was still hope for his own people left behind to face the coming of a new day. They could heed the wisdom and learn the ways of the Black-Robe and his companions, or they would share a darker version of his destiny. Another character in the poem, Iagoo, a bit of a trickster figure, also dreamt of the future. He too saw the ‘shining land of wabun.’ A marvelous place, ‘All the land was full of people, / Restless, toiling, struggling, striving, / Speaking many tongues, yet feeling/ But one heart in their bosoms.’ And he saw a dark future for Native people, if they fell upon savage ways, ‘Weakened, Warring with each other; / Saw the remnants of our people, / Sweeping westward, wild and woful.’ A true Indian, noble and proud, Hiawatha would not succumb to this fate, but then neither would he give up the ways of the forest. Instead Hiawatha would share the fate of the setting sun. He would fade away, a blaze of red on the horizon of America's past, a reminder of the noble race of men who solemnly bequeathed their continent to the new peoples of North America.

“This was the American fantasy at the midpoint of the nineteenth century.The two faces of savagery—brutality and nobility—explained the disappearance of the Native peoples of North America, and the triumphant rise of the United States. The brutal savages who haunted the backcountry during the French and Indian War, and during the Revolution, sowed the seeds of their own demise. To the Europeans, these Indians were mean, low people, who would turn on themselves like vicious dogs, because that was their nature. These savages could only destroy themselves. They would find no place in the industrious, teeming, and dynamic America that called on its many peoples to abandon their old ways, and embrace one another in their new life together. They were people from a darker time in North America's history. Fortunately, with the arrival of Europeans in North America a new day had dawned.

Hiawatha, an 1868 marble statue by Edmonia Lewis now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“The real point of The Song of Hiawatha, however, was to give expression to the other face of Indian savagery, the noble savage. This Indian forefather was all that was good and beautiful about America, and Hiawatha was the noble savage personified. He turns over possession of his lands to the new Native peoples of North America, the people of the future, the citizens of the United States. In this version of the fantasy the land itself shares a destiny with the American people. The United States of America, a new form of civilization, can be called into existence only when its people are able to transform the land, to improve it, by making it into farms and cities, and converting the wealth of nature into property. This is the true legacy of The Song of Hiawatha, read by generation after generation of schoolchildren. The poem gave concrete expression to an understanding about the meaning of America so familiar it was almost invisible.

“The Song of Hiawatha made Longfellow a famous man. To be fair, in some circles, it also made him an object of ridicule. Even though many literary critics found this poem to be nothing more than romantic trifle, it was wildly popular. What are we to make of this success? Longfellow's poem clearly resonated with the American public. The most likely explanation for its popularity is that the epic poem articulated a story about the fate of Indian peoples that easily tracked onto what most Americans thought they knew about their history. Ruthless savage or noble savage, Indians were literally fading away in the face of American progress and civilization. Their fate, their history, would be an act of disappearance not unlike the disappearing act performed by Hiawatha at the end of the poem. In this sense, The Song of Hiawatha provided Americans with an ideological justification for the dispossession of the Native peoples of North America.

“If the peoples of the United States regarded themselves as the newest, most dynamic form of civilization, many also harbored doubt that a country so new could match the artistic and intellectual greatness of the Old World. Thomas Jefferson had published a vigorous defense of all things American in his Notes on the State of Virginia, including the power and beauty of the continent's Native orators. In a similar fashion, Longfellow hoped to draw from the oral traditions of Native peoples to create a distinctly American vernacular, a Native folk tradition. He constructed the template of his epic poem from the publications of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, amateur ethnographer as well as Indian agent at Sault Sainte Marie, the village in the upper peninsula of Michigan Territory that his wife's people called Bow-e-ting. The poet and Indian agent corresponded with one another, and Schoolcraft advocated the idea that incorporating Native legends and oral tradition could provide something unique to American literature.

“Longfellow shared this belief in the idea of using Native storytelling to create a uniquely American folk tradition. In this manner, Americans would inherit the storied landscape of North America, and make it their own. The literary critic Christoph Irmscher describes Longfellow's adaptation of Schoolcraft as ‘a carefully contrived performance,' and ‘an elaborate play on the notions of authorship and authenticity.' Longfellow, Irmscher argues convincingly, had so completely internalized the idea of Noble savagery that he became convinced that these stories were not products of Native culture, but were the literary artifacts of the landscape itself. The Song of Hiawatha was the story of the American wilderness. Longfellow was not alone in conflating Native storytelling and culture with the natural world, and a sort of universal primitive humanity. Schoolcraft echoed these same sentiments in his publications. In a book titled Oneota; or, The Characteristics of the Red Race, he wrote, ‘The poetry of the Indians is the poetry of naked thought:' And he suggested that "tales occupy the place of books with the red race. They make a kind of oral literature, which is resorted to, on winter evenings, for the amusement of the lodge.’ Stories like Hiawatha simply reflected the ‘naked thought’ of natural man, and in this sense were universally accessible, and universally available for production and consumption.”