Little Hiawatha Little Hiawatha Little Hiawatha (also called Hiawatha) is a 1937 animated cartoon produced by Walt Disney, inspired by the poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The animated short appears on the Gold Collection DVD of "" and the 2012 Blu-ray of Walt Disney's "Pocahontas". It is the last Silly Symphony to be released by United Artists. Over opening narration, a Native American boy named Little Hiawatha is seen paddling his canoe down a river — at one point backwards — on his way to hunt game. Upon reaching land, he steps out and immediately falls down a
The Song of Hiawatha the Indians dance". African-American melodies also appeared in the symphony, thanks to his student Harry Burleigh, who used to sing him songs from the plantations which Dvořák noted down. The fact that Burleigh’s grandmother was part Indian has been suggested to explain why Dvořák came to equate or confuse Indian with African American music in his pronouncements to the press. Among later orchestral treatments of the Hiawatha theme by American composers there was Louis Coerne's 4-part symphonic suite, each section of which was prefaced by a quotation from the poem. This had a Munich premiere in 1893 and a Boston