Writing Ojibwe: Politics and Poetics in Longfellow's Hiawatha

Abstract

True conquest is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing. -Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha entered American culture with national popularity few poems enjoyed in the nineteenth century, selling as many as 10,000 copies a month in Boston alone during the 1855 Christmas season.1 Longfellow gave America a romantic vision of itself, and America made him its first literary celebrity; in this way, Hiawatha's fame dramatizes the changing dynamics of public authorship in antebellum society. However, beneath the poem's rosy veneer Longfellow engages a series of problems that draw together poetics and American politics in strange and prescient ways.2 Hiawatha's popularity reflects the desire of American readers to rehearse a coherent narrative of U.S. history, even - and perhaps especially - when they acknowledge its inconsistencies or outright revisionary content. Although critics have examined Hiawatha for its engagement with race, the encounter experience, and public performance, only a few have directly addressed the relationship between Longfellow's poetry and the politics of national narratives in early America.3 Read in the context of its public reception, Longfellow's poem raises important questions about the role of the artist as an architect of historical knowledge. Clearly, readers understood Hiawatha to be a work of poetic imagination. However, the poem's prominence in American reading cultures, especially in elementary schools, traces the circulation of specific linguistic conventions and reading operations within reading communities. Some of these conventions are even rehearsed by illiterate populations, by people who knew Hiawatha only through oral recitation.4 The following essay argues that these linguistic conventions, whereas sometimes only read aesthetically, in fact speak to a wide field of political concerns about the influence of narrative in the age of print capitalism.5 The Song of Hiawatha's status as narrative poetry dramatizes the intimate tie between poetics - the linguistic conventions and reading operations at work in all writing - and the politics of producing historical narratives for public consumption.6 For example, late in the poem Hiawatha introduces written language to his Ojibwe tribe. In what follows, we will unpack this moment to explore how Western systems of writing mediate the intersecting political and ethical demands of historical narration. Chapter XIV, Picture- Writing, is a kind of synecdoche for the poem's articulation of Anglo-Indian relations. It marshals many of the poem's tropes into a single moment of ideological density. In Chapter XIV, careful readers are able to recognize how Hiawatha's figuration - as an orphan in search of familial and cultural stability - is allegorical for Longfellow's entire poetic project. In other words, the political implications of nineteenth century American authorship are exposed when writing enters the Ojibwe world. Hiawatha tells the story of an Ojibwe warrior's growth into manhood, his relationship with his ancestors, and his peaceful assimilation with white settlers in the mythic frontier of early America. For contemporary readers, however, the poem may be most notable because Longfellow appropriated poetic forms and nationalist themes from many other narrative traditions to render his history of the Native American encounter experience. In particular, Longfellow borrowed meter from the Finnish epic Kalevala, legends and linguistic structures from disparate Native American folklores, Biblical typology, pastoral elegies from Renaissance and eighteenth century British writers, and theories of writing rooted in Enlightenment epistemology. This essay contends that Longfellow's appropriation constitutes not forgery or plagiarism, but a conceptual revision of the poet's role as artist. Many critics identify Longfellow's poetics with an earlier model . …