Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation A Study in Anthropology. A Paper Read at the Cincinnati Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement … the Title of ‘A Lawgiver of the Stone Age

Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation: A Study in Anthropology is an 1881 paper by Horatio Hale (1817-1896), the American philologist who served on the United States Exploring Expedition and devoted his later career to the study of the Six Nations of the Iroquois. The paper reconstructs the historical figure of Hiawatha and the founding of the Iroquois League by Hiawatha and Deganawida, drawing on the oral traditions of the Onondaga, Mohawk, and Seneca and on the Condolence ritual texts that Hale was then editing. Hale argues against the romantic literary Hiawatha of Longfellow and presents the original Iroquois statesman behind the name. The paper was one of the founding texts of professional anthropological work on the Iroquois and prefigured Hale’s later edition of the Iroquois Book of Rites. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.