The Song of Hiawatha from the poem. The most famous was the 1937 Silly Symphony "Little Hiawatha," whose hero is a small boy whose pants keep falling down. The 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon "Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt" features Bugs Bunny and a pint-sized version of Hiawatha in quest of rabbit stew. The 1944 MGM cartoon "Big Heel-watha," directed by Tex Avery, follows the overweight title character's effort to win the hand of the chief's daughter by catching Screwy Squirrel. The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that features Native American characters. The
The Song of Hiawatha "an accidental similarity in the Onondaga dialect between [their names]." The deity, he says, was variously known as Aronhiawagon, Tearonhiaonagon, Taonhiawagi, or Tahiawagi; the historical Iroquois leader, as Hiawatha, Tayonwatha or Thannawege. Schoolcraft "made confusion worse ... by transferring the hero to a distant region and identifying him with Manabozho, a fantastic divinity of the Ojibways. [Schoolcraft's book] has not in it a single fact or fiction relating either to Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois deity Aronhiawagon." In 1856, Schoolcraft published "The Myth of Hiawatha and Other Oral Legends Mythologic and Allegoric of the North American Indians," reprinting (with