Talk:Hiawatha
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I created a separate page for Song of Hiawatha and moved the link to poem's text there. Hiawatha was not simply a fictional character but was an important political figure in the history of North America and should be treated as such, not simply as the subject of Longfellow's poem (or as the Disney cartoon version of him as a little Indian boy), which is really a collection of Iroquiois myths more than anything else. -- Decumanus 04:13, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Time frame
Regarding this: Hiawatha (also known as Ayenwatha or Ha-yo-went'-ha) who lived around 1550,
Not sure what the source of that is. No one has really pinned down a date on the founding of the Confederacy, much less whether or not Hiawatha was an actual person (I think it's very probable that he was, but we just don't know about any dates). In any case I've never seen 1550 given as a possible date for the Confederacy's founding; usually it is speculated either as 1450, 1150, or "thousands of years ago" usually based on the legend that a solar eclipse took place that year. So hopefully this can either be sourced, or removed.
[edit] Iroquois Hiawatha is or is not Longfellow's Hiawatha?
Well, I'm not sure what to do. The original article stated
- Hiawatha was the hero of the poem Hiawatha, published in 1855 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow's poem confounds the life stories of Hiawatha and Deganawidah.
However, http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_015000_hiawatha.htm states flatly that "Hiawatha's name was appropriated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha. However, Longfellow's poem, set in the Great Lakes area, has almost nothing to do with the historic figure of Hiawatha."
And the external link in the article, De-Ka-Nah-Wi-Da and Hiawatha says "The Hiawatha in this story is the historic person of the late fourteenth century. He should not be confused with the character in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, The Song of Hiawatha."
Longfellow's poem is based on the legends of the Ojibway Indians, as collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
The article on The Song of Hiawatha said flatly that Longfellow's poem is about the Iroquois leader. I originally changed it to indicate that this is NOT true. Then I noticed that this page says it IS true.
So, I've resorted to weasel-wording. In The Song of Hiawatha I'm using the wording
- Note: For his hero, Longfellow borrowed the name of the fourteenth-century Iroquois chief Hiawatha who founded the Iroquois League, but there is virtually no other connection between them.
And here, I've toned down the sentence that previously said
- Hiawatha was the hero of the poem Song of Hiawatha, published in 1855 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow's poem confounds the life stories of Hiawatha and Deganawidah, and also draws on tales of the Algonquian trickster-figure Manabozho. The poem is also recited (in part) in Mike Oldfield's work Incantations.
to
- Longfellow borrowed the name of the historical Hiawatha for the hero of his poem The Song of Hiawatha. There is little resemblance, although some see in Longfellow's poem some reference to the life stories of Hiawatha and Deganawidah, and to the Algonquian trickster-figure Manabozho. The poem is also recited (in part) in Mike Oldfield's work Incantations.
Anyone who has good evidence one way or the other.... help! Dpbsmith 01:17, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
P. S. Looks like there's some good stuff bearing on this at Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation By Horatio Hale, but I don't have time to digest it right now. Dpbsmith 01:21, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
P. P. S. OK, assuming that Horatio Hale (1817-1896) knew his business, there's practically no connection between the two. I've summarized what I've found out in the section Longfellow's Hiawatha vs. the historical Iroquois Hiawatha, linked to it from Hiawatha, and made the paragraph here say that there is "none or only faint" resemblance. Dpbsmith 00:43, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)
P. P. P. S. Hmmmph. Britannica says "Hiawatha: (Ojibwa: ?He Makes Rivers?), a legendary chief (c. 1450) of the Onondaga tribe of NorthAmerican Indians, to whom Indian tradition attributes the formation of what became known as the Iroquois Confederacy. In his miraculous character, Hiawatha was the incarnation of human progress and civilization. He taught agriculture, navigation, medicine, and the arts, conquering by his magic all the powers of nature that war against man. The story of Hiawatha is told in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (1855), a long poem, written in the metre of the Finnish Kalevala, that enjoyed wide popularity." So Britannica clearly identifies the two Hiawathas. So does the Columbia Encyclopedia: "h´wä´th) (KEY) , fl. c.1550, legendary chief of the Onondaga of North America. He is credited with founding the Iroquois Confederacy. He is the hero of the well-known poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." Back to square one. I'm totally confused now. Was Horatio Hale out to lunch? I'm leaving both articles as is and will continue to pick away at this. Dpbsmith 12:25, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)
P. P. P. P. S. Well, Longfellow himself cites Schoolcraft as a source for "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. He was known among different tribes by the several names of Michabou, Chiabo, Manabozo, Tarenyawagon, and Hiawatha." Longfellow's notes makes no reference to the Iroquois or the Iroquois League or to any historical personage. So I'm going to continue to hold my belief that the poem is about a mythical persona, and that the only connection with the historical Hiawatha is that Schoolcraft mistakenly confused the names. Dpbsmith 12:49, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- I don't think anyone is going to mind your edits. You're obviously doing a very thorough job. I realize your covering bases here, as I would on any topic involving Native Americans, since you never know what raw nerve you might hit. I wrote the original article on Hiawatha in a very cursory manner because at the time he wasn't even identified with a real person. In fact, the article was entirely about the Longfellow poem (with the wrong title), which I separated out into a separate article. But it was a very quick job. I've since learned a lot more about Schoolcraft, almost by accident, while writing articles and making about the headwaters of the Mississippi. Schoolcraft was, in my opinion, an amazing person. I doubt he took liberties with what he found, as he spoke Ojibwa after marrying a half-Ojibwa woman.
- Right... Dpbsmith 00:21, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)
He wrote a lot of a material on the Native Americans of the Great Lakes. It's more likely (purely a guess) that in the centuries between the political leader and Schoolcraft's research that a tall-tale mythology had propogated throughout the Great Lakes about the real Hiawatha, who certainly had made a name for himself.
- And the Horatio Hale essay has a little bit of an edge to it... Dpbsmith 00:21, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Having read some Native American myths, I can state that most of the ones I've read seem like long dream-like accretions of barely-connected substories, often with very little overarching plot, that probably got added and mutated over time with the oral tradition. The same kind of myth-expansion happened in the west, for example, about Alexander the Great, who was later supposedly fathered by the serpent god, etc. Likewise the myths of the foundation of Rome. It seems natural that such a thing would have happened with a well-known figure among the Native Americans as well. There's also that name confusion too, which is hard to pin down (All of this is just my two-cents uninformed speculation). In any case, I think it's a very interesting topic. I'm glad someone is expanding the article. I ran into the topic while reading about the Iroquois Confederation while doing research about New Netherland. -- Decumanus | Talk 13:29, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- I didn't intend to do anything about Hiawatha. Actually this all started because I noticed there were articles about three towns named Nokomis, but no article about Nokomis. So I tried to write a stub about Nokomis, and one thing led to another...
- My own speculation is the same as your--that any confusion in Schoolcraft's work was probably present in his original sources. After all, how many people in the United States have at least some confusion between the historical George Washington and Mason Locke Weems' mythological character of the same name? I think that, having found that Longfellow's notes identify his Hiawatha with Manabozo, Tarenyawagon & co, and make no reference whatsoever to the Iroquois leader, that I'll leave things as they are—saying that there is little or no connection. But I have to admit that it threw me to find that both the Britannica and the Columbia Encyclopedia flatly state that Longfellow's Hiawatha is the Iroquois leader. Dpbsmith 00:21, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)
