The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft spent years as a United States Indian agent in the Great Lakes country, collecting tales told in Ojibwe and other Algonquian lodges, and this 1856 volume gathers them: Manabozho the shape-shifting culture hero, the Celestial Sisters who descend from the sky in a basket, Ojeeg the Summer-Maker, and dozens more legends of transformation, hunger, revenge, and creation. It reworks his earlier Algic Researches (1839) and carries a dedication to Longfellow, whose Song of Hiawatha had appeared the year before and drew its material largely from Schoolcraft’s pages. The book matters twice over. It preserves oral narratives that might otherwise have gone unrecorded, and it preserves the famous mistake at the heart of American literature’s Indian epic: Schoolcraft fused the Iroquois statesman Hiawatha with the Ojibwe trickster Manabozho, two figures who never belonged together.