The Song of Hiawatha

Okay.

Well, Pukwudgies I've heard of because Longfellow, of course, included them in the Song of Hiawatha, and therefore I had to read about them, and I'm imagining there's connections between them and the Celtic Puca or Pook.

I mean, it seems pretty likely, doesn't it?

Yeah.

He was changed into a beaver.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Song of Hiawatha End of section 17 This recording is in the public domain.

Section 18 of Birds and Nature, Volume 9, No. 4, April 1901.

Recorded for LibriVox.org by Tavarish.

One of the things that I do think is challenging for 21st century audiences is to understand the process of how a marble sculpture is made.

And to wrap our heads around the fact that some of Lewis's most important and today most valuable objects exist in multiples, how can this be that the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts acquired a major sculpture by Lewis, Hiawatha's Marriage, setting the auction price at $1.6 million several years ago, and yet there are seven other examples of that work? So we really, first of all, we realized that we needed to help visitors to grasp how Lewis made her work, which is a way of acknowledging her place within a larger artistic community.

sculptors did not work in isolation.

This was, I think, even in Lewis's own time, a false assumption that the public had, particularly when it came to women sculptors.

The fourth theme that you all raise is Lewis's address of Native Americans in her work, which for me is more complicated than the literature often reflects.

So, for example, one particularly well-known group of work is Lewis's Six Marble Sculptures Featuring Native People.

based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's notoriously infamously appropriative Song of Hiawatha.

And of course, Longfellow based Hiawatha on early ethnographic work by U.S. Indian agent Henry Rose Schoolcraft, John Heckwelder's late 18th century account of a visit to the Wabash, and various other accounts kind of from the native inland sea region, but filtered through white authors.

The little stalk holding the anther is forked in the birches, but is distinct to the base in the alders.

References Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow, Hiawatha's Sailing, Picture Writing, The Birch Tree, Lowell, An Indian Summer Reverie, Lowell End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of Ten Common Trees This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Jennifer Dallman Ten Common Trees By Susan Stokes The White Oak What is a tree? Is it only a wooden trunk with wooden branches, a bark, and leaves? There is something more.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was forty-eight when he wrote The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, his first great work.

Longfellow wrote Hiawatha when he was forty-eight, and much of his best work followed.

Whittier wrote Snowbound and Maud Mueller at fifty-nine, and continued writing until he was seventy-nine.

Tennyson was still writing at eighty-three.

Most of the Indian stories here given were gathered by Schoolcraft, the distinguished student of the American Indian and collector of their legends.

It was from Schoolcraft that Longfellow derived his material for Hiawatha, and that poem may fitly be used as a sequel to these tales as the children grow older.

Monabazho, who appears in the frontispiece of this volume, was the Algonquin Hiawatha.

Of many of the tales from India, an explanation may again be found in a current belief.

The teaching of the Buddha included the doctrine of transmigration of souls, and both the frequency of animal stories and the constant teaching of kindness to animals are due to this belief, a belief which becomes very vivid when one realizes that according to it, one's dog may have the soul of one's father.

The white pelican, as it calmly floats on the surface of the water some distance from the shore, has been mistaken for the sail of a boat as the moist white feathers glisten in the sunshine.

Longfellow has beautifully woven this fact into The Song of Hiawatha.

O'er the water floating, flying, Something in the hazy distance, Something in the mists of morning, Loomed and lifted from the water, Now seemed floating, now seemed flying, Coming nearer, nearer, nearer.

Was it Shingebis the diver? Or the pelican, the Shada? Or the heron, the Sha-sha-ga? Or the white goose, Waw-be-wawa, With the water dripping, flashing From its glossy neck and feathers? It was neither goose nor diver, Neither pelican nor heron, O'er the water floating, flying, Through the shining mist of morning, But a birch canoe with paddles Rising, sinking on the water.