Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway of America" and was largely a photographed stage play with Longfellow's words spoken in a natural surrounding. Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway is a 1903 dramatic short film shot in Canada directed by the American pioneering cinematographer and director Joe Rosenthal, based on the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem, "The Song of Hiawatha", made in Desbarats, Ontario, with a cast of Ojibway First Nations people. According to the "Canadian Journal of Film Studies", it was the first dramatic narrative film to be shot in Canada. At 15 minutes, "Hiawatha" was considerably longer than
The Song of Hiawatha house, was also epic. The monumental quality survives into the 20th century in Frances Foy's "Hiawatha returning with Minnehaha" (1937), a mural sponsored during the Depression for the Gibson City Post Office, Illinois. Parodies of the "Song of Hiawatha" emerged immediately on its publication. "The New York Times" even reviewed one such parody four days before reviewing Longfellow's original poem. This was "Pocahontas: or the Gentle Savage", a comic extravaganza which included extracts from an imaginary Viking poem, "burlesquing the recent parodies, good, bad, and indifferent, on "The Song of Hiawatha."" The "Times" quoted: In 1856 there appeared a 94-page