Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans 1880-1930.Shades of Noun 1. shades of - something that reminds you of someone or something; "aren't there shades of 1948 here?" reminder - an experience that causes you to remember something Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930. By Alan Trachtenberg Alan Trachtenberg is Neil Gray, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. (New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Hill and Wang, 2004. xxv plus 369 pp. $30.00). Hiawatha gets the prize for most misinterpreted American Indian American Indian or Native American or Amerindian or indigenous American Any member of the various aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, with the exception of the Eskimos (Inuit) and the Aleuts. . An Iroquoian culture hero, he converted to the cause of Deganawida, another culture hero who had taken on as his mission no less than the cessation of feuding among Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, and others. But Deganawida had a speech impediment and so Hiawatha, as his mouthpiece, went from tribe to tribe persuading the chiefs to stop the bloodshed and join a great council at Onondaga--from which the great League of the Iroquois was born. That was the Iroquoian Hiawatha--the real Hiawatha, if you will--until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came along and published The Song of Hiawatha in 1855. An instant hit (50,000 copies in the first six months) and best-seller for years, this Hiawatha was a mash. Longfellow modeled his poem on the Finnish epic Kavelala, conflated the Iroquoian Hiawatha with an Algonquian culture hero named Nanabozho, and from that point on Hiawatha was never the same. Alan Trachtenberg plies plies 1 v. Third person singular present tense of ply1. n. Plural of ply1. , as he puts it, the "light and shade cast" [xi] by Long-fellow's Hiawatha. A scholar of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century America, Trachtenberg draws on his vast knowledge of cultural history to investigate changing understandings of Indians as they intersect with race, ethnicity, nationalism, and immigration immigration, entrance of a person (an alien) into a new country for the purpose of establishing permanent residence. Motives for immigration, like those for migration generally, are often economic, although religious or political factors may be very important. . He is especially interested in how representations of Indians changed from savage (which they never exclusively were, however) to ancestor and first American First American may refer to:
Trachtenberg ranges widely in an introduction and six chapters through various appropriations of Longfellow's Hiawatha and the increasing interest in inventing, playing and dreaming Indian. He plies ground well trod by others, from Robert Berkhofer, Roy Harvey Pearce and Ray Billington, to Philip Deloria, Shari Huhndorf, and Susan Scheckel, among others. But his particular concern is with nationalism, which, indeed, was a concern not just for Longfellow but Henry Rowe Schoolcraft from whom Longfellow took his ideas about Algonquian culture heros before converting the principal one to the more euphonic eu·pho·ny n. pl. eu·pho·nies Agreeable sound, especially in the phonetic quality of words. [French euphonie, from Late Latin euph Hiawatha (merely contemplate the alternative, a Song of Nanabozho). Longfellow reduced Hiawatha to simple, childlike, infantile poetics (one needless to say that bore no resemblance to American Indian verse). Trachtenberg asks, "Is it possible to take The Song of Hiawatha seriously today?" (58) The answer is, Of course, because it was taken with different degrees of seriousness when it was published, and it spawned a virtual Hiawatha industry, not least in stage performances. At the turn of the century there occurred a Hiawatha (Longfellow's Hiawatha, that is) revival in illustrations, songs, sculpture, on stage, and so on in which native people themselves participated. Trachtenberg makes sense of all this thought and action about Hiawatha in a context of fin-de-siecle immigration, ethnicity, and racism; of the search for American type and a national consciousness. Anxieties about Yiddish (on the part of Henry James) leads Trachtenberg to the translation into Yiddish of Longfellow's Hiawatha and the attempt to make Yiddish a national language. Edward Curtis's staged romantic images of vanishing Indians "exuded a Hiawathan aura" (180). And Joseph Dixon
Joseph Dixon (1799-1869) was an inventor, entrepreneur and the founder of what became the Dixon Ticonderoga Company, a well-known manufacturer of pencils in the United , who labored for Rodman and his son John Wanamaker, the department-store kings with friends in the oval office and eyes for self-aggrandizement, helped change the trope trope n. 1. A figure of speech using words in nonliteral ways, such as a metaphor. 2. A word or phrase interpolated as an embellishment in the sung parts of certain medieval liturgies. from vanishing Indian (Curtis) to first and real American (Indian) as Wanamaker's store became America's store America's Store was a US shopping television network. It was the spin-off channel to the Home Shopping Network (HSN). On April 3, 2007, America's Store ceased broadcasting permanently. , the nation's warehouse and stage. Here also at the heart of merchant kingdom, Hiawatha, coupled to God and nation, was staged. In none of this can be seen action lacking self-interest or an act in the least noble or neutral, on the part of non-Indians, according to Trachtenberg. His history is a history of "crisis;" specifically, "of morale, of masculinity, of modernity" (244). How else can one possibly imagine these various players and their intentions? Shepard Krech III Brown University |
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