Hiawatha and Minnehaha Hiawatha and Minnehaha Hiawatha and Minnehaha is a sculpture by Jacob Fjelde that has stood in Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis since the early twentieth century. Now a popular fixture of the park, its placement there was originally controversial. In 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a book-length poem entitled "The Song of Hiawatha". Longfellow never visited Minnesota, but he set his poem among the Ojibwe and Dakota of the region. The poem's story line was based on traditional Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tales, as recorded, sometimes incorrectly, by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. "The Song of Hiawatha" was widely read and had significant cultural influence
The Song of Hiawatha trochees, everybody writes trochaics, talks trochaics, and think [sic] in trochees: ... The "New York Times" review of "The Song of Hiawatha" was scathing. The anonymous reviewer judged that the poem "is entitled to commendation" for "embalming pleasantly enough the monstrous traditions of an uninteresting, and, one may almost say, a justly exterminated race. As a poem, it deserves no place" because there "is no romance about the Indian." He complains that Hiawatha's deeds of magical strength pall by comparison to the feats of Hercules and to "Finn Mac Cool, that big stupid Celtic mammoth." The reviewer writes that "Grotesque,