Hiawatha and Minnehaha

Hiawatha and Minniehaha

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We know that Mary also performed extracts from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s long poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin earlier in the decade, Hiawatha was an instant bestseller, selling 30,000 copies in its first six months in print. While he has long since fallen out of poetic and critical fashion, Longfellow was the most beloved and successful American poet of the age, and he enjoyed fame and admiration in Britain, too, so when Mary read from his work she could bank on the appreciation of her audience: Hiawatha was a crowd-pleaser. However, Longfellow’s enthusiastic exploration of Native American mythology is fraught with problems: like Stowe, he presented archetypes which became stereotypes and, as the literary critic Dana Gioia has pointed out, there is also a sense that he Europeanised his subject matter. It’s a case of what we would now readily identify as cultural appropriation.

Approaching the poem for Mary in Let Her Witness It, we considered its voices. In the extract we selected, the famous and much adapted death of Minnehaha, Mary speaks mostly as the poem’s narrator, but she briefly takes on the voice of both the hero, Hiawatha, and his love, Minnehaha. Accounts of Mary’s performances tell us that during her Longfellow readings she wore a Native American headdress – a remarkable detail which brings considerably more complexity to our core questions about performance and identity. It also resonates with the controversy in recent years over the appropriation of Native American symbols in fashion and popular culture, particularly the war bonnet headdress. In Let Her Witness It, Mary never wears the headdress. Instead, it appears almost as a character in itself, another presence on screen with which she interacts