Hiawatha / Hereafter: Re-appropriating Longfellow’s Epic in Northern Ontario

This article focuses on appropriation and re-appropriation in selected uses of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha in Northern Ontario from the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, using a framework drawn from Indigenous theory on colonialism and decolonization and research on the cultural politics of race and nature. Issues of colonial resource extraction and appropriation have marked the text from its inception, as Hiawatha was based mostly on Anishinaabe narratives that were collected by Indian Agent and “ethnographer” Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in the process of his work towards the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes region in the nineteenth century. In the years since its publication, Hiawatha has been a hugely influential piece of literature, north as well as south of the border. As I show, the text has signified in very different ways for settler and Indigenous communities in Northern Ontario. In the early twentieth century, Canadian Pacific Railway Colonization Officer L.O. Armstrong used the text to attract settlers and tourists to the forests of Northern Ontario through promotional pamphlets and outdoor performances of the work; to the Indigenous communities involved in the performances, however, the play held very different meanings. Today, versions of Longfellow’s text form the subject of historical and cultural transmission projects in Batchewana and Garden River First Nations. Poet Liz Howard has also worked with Longfellow’s text in producing a critique of settler resource extraction and colonial assimilation in the context of Northern Ontario. In tracing these very different uses of Hiawatha, this article builds on the work of Indigenous writers and scholars who explore colonialism as an ongoing process characterized by interconnected forms of theft and theorize methods of literary and cultural analysis to halt and reverse such processes in the context of work towards decolonization. I also draw on studies of the cultural politics of race and nature, which demonstrate how settler ideas about race and indigenousness have long been central to the construction of iconic Canadian wilderness spaces.