Hiawatha (1913 film) Hiawatha (1913 film) Hiawatha is a 1913 American silent drama film directed by Edgar Lewis and based upon Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855). The film stars Jesse Cornplanter of the Seneca people and Soon-goot, a 17-year-old unknown actress. The movie is the first feature film to use a cast of American Indians. The story begins along the Lake Superior Michigan shoreline with the appearance of a mighty spirit that tells the Indians a peacekeeper will bring wisdom and unite the warring tribes. Hiawatha is born to Wenonah and after her death her mother Nokomis raises
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,