Hiawatha (1952 film) Hiawatha (1952 film) Hiawatha is a 1952 American film based on the 1855 epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, centering on Native Americans in pre-Columbian times. Directed by Kurt Neumann, with stars Vincent Edwards and Yvette Dugay, it became the final feature produced by the low-budget Monogram Pictures, a mainstay of Hollywood's Poverty Row. Hiawatha, a member of the Ojibway tribe, is on a peace mission to the Dakotah tribe. He meets and falls in love with Minnehaha. The romance is obstructed by a threatened war between the two tribes, instigated by a hot-headed Ojibway tribe
The Song of Hiawatha "The arrow-maker and his daughter", later called "The Wooing of Hiawatha", was modelled in 1866 and carved in 1872. By that time she had achieved success with individual heads of Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Carved in Rome, these are now held by the Newark Museum in New Jersey. In 1872 Lewis carved "The Marriage of Hiawatha" in marble, a work purchased in 2010 by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Other 19th-century sculptors inspired by the epic were Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose marble statue of the seated Hiawatha (1874) is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Jacob Fjelde, who created a