| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930. By Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xxv plus 369 pp. $30.00).
Hiawatha gets the prize for most misinterpreted American Indian. An Iroquoian culture hero, he converted to the cause of Deganawida, another culture hero who had taken on as his mission no less than the cessation of feuding among Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, and others. But Deganawida had a speech impediment and so Hiawatha, as his mouthpiece, went from tribe to tribe persuading the chiefs to stop the bloodshed and join a great council at Onondaga—from which the great League of the Iroquois was born.	1
That was the Iroquoian Hiawatha—the real Hiawatha, if you will—until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came along and published The Song of Hiawatha in 1855. An instant hit (50,000 copies in the first six months) and best-seller for years, this Hiawatha was a mash. Longfellow modeled his poem on the Finnish epic Kavelala, conflated the Iroquoian Hiawatha with an Algonquian culture hero named Nanabozho, and from that point on Hiawatha was never the same.	. . .

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