Writing Ojibwe: Politics and Poetics in Longfellow's Hiawatha

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. Often against his intended purpose, Longfellow installs within Hiawatha's romantic revisionism certain contradictions that underscore the rhetorical biases of all historical accounts. [...]Hiawatha offers a finely wrought example of how writing, in Richard Deming's words, "remains in perpetual conversation with itself as well as with its reader.