The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem, though based on native oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, represents not a work of transmission but an original work of American Romantic literature. Longfellow's sources for the legends and ethnography
Hiawatha Hiawatha Hiawatha (also known as Ayenwathaaa, Aiionwatha, or "Haiëñ'wa'tha" [ha.jẽʔ.waʔ.tha] in Onondaga) was a colonial American Indian leader and co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy. He was a leader of the Onondaga people or the Mohawk people or both. According to some accounts, he was born an Onondaga but adopted into the Mohawk. Hiawatha was a follower of the Great Peacemaker (Deganawida), a Huron prophet and spiritual leader who proposed the unification of the Iroquois peoples, who shared common ancestry and similar languages, but he suffered from a severe speech impediment which hindered him from spreading his proposal. Hiawatha was a