The Song of Hiawatha

The Song of Hiawatha is a work of fiction, but it has been influenced by myths and legends from Ojibwe works that Longfellow studied while writing. To create his new epic, Longfellow drew on three sources: Indigenous tales of the Ojibwe trickster-hero Manabozho; the Ojibwe chief George Copway, known also as Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh; and the work of ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft and his Ojibwe wife, Jane Schoolcraft. The Schoolcrafts are believed to have been Longfellow’s biggest influence.

Henry Schoolcraft worked as a liaison between the United States government and Indigenous tribes in Michigan. There he met and married Jane Johnston, later Schoolcraft, and also known as O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua, the mixed-race daughter of an Ojibwe mother and a white father. Jane, a poet who wrote in English and Ojibwe, taught her new husband the Ojibwe language and aspects of its mythology. The writings of the Schoolcrafts introduced Longfellow to the trickster spirit Manabozho, to whom he mistakenly renamed “Hiawatha” through an error in translation (though there was a real historical figure named Hiawatha—a Mohawk chief who co-founded the Iroquois Confederacy in the 16th century—Longfellow’s Hiawatha is based primarily on the Manabozho myth). Manabozho, for example, is the son of the West Wind and builds a canoe that he can command by thought. Longfellow also drew on his friendship with George Copway, an Ojibwe writer who published several works on Indigenous traditions and history.

Longfellow added his own stories and characters to the myths and traditions he used, primarily to recast Indigenous stories with Christian themes and biblical undertones. Despite harsh criticisms for its westernization of Ojibwe myths, this mixture of European and Indigenous elements made Hiawatha fashionable, offering seemingly authentic Native American legends through the filter of familiar western storytelling and without any uncomfortable implications that Europeans destroyed an important culture.