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 most influential book of 1855. Lydia Sigourney was inspired by the book to write a similar epic poem on Pocahontas, though she never completed it. English writer George Eliot called "The Song of Hiawatha", along with Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", the "two most indigenous and masterly productions in American literature". Longfellow's poem was taken as the first American epic to be composed of North American materials and free of European literary models. Earlier attempts to write a national epic, such as "The Columbiad" of Richard Snowden (1753–1825), ‘a poem on the American war’ published in 1795, or Joel Barlow's