Marie Lockerd, an English major, worked on the topic of Native Americans in northern Michigan.
The Hemingway family attended the #1 tourist attraction in the Petoskey area, the Hiawatha Play, a a production based on Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. The Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad sponsored the performances to draw tourists to northern Michigan. On a lakefront setting, Ojibways from Canada played the parts in a pageant which featured smoke signals, canoeing, diving, singing, fishing and feasting. The action took place on a peninsula jutting into Round Lake (aka Lake Ya-Way-Ga-Mug); the audience "occupied rustic seats on the mainland." The Grand Rapids Press noted that some tourists described the production with the enthusiasm accorded the "Passion" Play of Oberammergau: "indeed, the more radical have called the production the Passion Play of the Indian."
Image from 1912 program of the "Hiawatha play"
To see a 35-page, 1912 souvenir booklet which cost 25¢, click on the program cover to the left. A Flash gallery will come up, with thumbnails and scrollbar on the bottom. Flash 6 or later is required.
For an interesting article on the Hiawatha Play, see Michael D. McNally, "The Indian Passion Play: Contesting the Real Indian in Song of Hiawatha Pageants, 1901–1965," American Quarterly 58.1 (2006) 105-136.
Hemingway and Hiawatha
by Marie Lockerd
Hemingway and Native Americans in Michigan
The Native Americans of northern Michigan greatly influenced the writing of Ernest Hemingway, especially in his famous Nick Adams stories.
The Ojibway tribe has been present in northern Michigan for over 12, 000 years.
By the beginning of the 20th century, when Hemingway was passing the summers of his youth on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan, the Native Americans of the area, namely of the Ojibway tribe, had been pushed to small reservations and were living in poverty. The Dawes Act of 1887 divided the reservations into personal allotments of land, but the Ojibway, who were inexperienced with agriculture, quickly lost this land to debt or thievery. By the time of Hemingway’s childhood, the Ojibway in his area were living mainly in communal areas and working for the lumber industry, stripping birch bark that was valuable for tanning hide.
In Hemingway’s “Indian Camp,” Nick Adams describes the living situation of the Native Americans of northern Michigan, saying, “They went into the woods and followed a trail that led to the logging road that ran back into the hills. It was much lighter on the logging road as the timber was cut away on both sides….They came around a bend and a dog came out barking. Ahead were the lights of the shanties where the Indian bark peelers lived.” This passage illuminates the poverty of the reservation, living in “shanties” with wild dogs, as well as their seclusion from the town, “back in the hills,” and their financial dependence on the logging industry after being stripped of their land and livelihood by American and European settlers.
Attitudes toward Native Americans at the beginning of the 20th century are somewhat ambiguous, including Hemingway’s own opinions. On March 12, 1891, The Chicago Daily Tribune printed an article that reported on the case of a Michigan senator by the name of Fridlender who was being sued by a Native American woman for bigamy. Fridlender married the woman in Petoskey in 1849, and she bore him two sons, but he later deserted her and remarried. Having located his whereabouts years later, the first wife, identified by the article as the daughter of Chief Petoskey, hired attorneys in an attempt to secure financial restitution from Fridlender. This instance illuminates the dual nature of attitudes toward Native Americans at the time. Racism is obvious in Fridlender’s disposal of his first wife, but the fact that the Native American woman is able to procure legal counsel and sue a white male senator speaks to slowly shifting attitudes in the larger community.
The Hiawatha Plays
Young Hemingway witnessed a reenactment of Longfellow’s Hiawatha poem, that he and his family viewed at Round Lake, just a short distance from their summer home on Walloon Lake. Hemingway later wrote an unpublished play based on this performance entitled “No Worse Than a Bad Cold,” which was also influenced by the Native Americans he knew in northern Michigan.
Longfellow’s Hiawatha is often criticized for its romanticization of Native American culture; having created the tale for a white audience, it is far from being a true-to-life portrayal of Native American, custom, myth, or language.
The trickster character associated with Hiawatha, Manabazoo, is a common figure in Algonquin and Chippewa (often associated with the Ojibway) folk-tales, and was taken by Longfellow from a study of the Chippewas of Lake Superior made by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in 1822.
Longfellow himself wrote a diary entry while creating Hiawatha which stated that the narrative was “purely in the realm of fancy.” Schoolcraft, whose Algic Researches serves as the basis of Hiawatha, wrote a letter to Longfellow after the poem’s appearance in which he states his view that a literary portrayal of the Native American subject should be that of the “full, free, wild Indian – the independent rover of the forests and prairies, who loves the chase, loves liberty, and hates labor and the white man, under the impression that the latter symbolizes the advent of his curse and downfall.”
The popularity of Hiawatha reenactments during Hemingway’s youth speaks to lingering misconceptions about Native Americans at the time. The Ojibway of the area were not even cast in such performances but rather a group of actors sponsored by the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railway company were hired from Canada to entertain the summer vacationers of northern Michigan.
Bibliography
Blackwood, Beatrice. "Tales of the Chippewa Indians." Folklore, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec. 31, 1929), pp. 315-344.
Chicago Daily Tribune (1872- 1963) [Chicago, III.] 12 March, 1891, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849-1986). ProQuest. Grand Valley State University Libraries, Allendale Michigan. 9 June 2009. http://www.proquest.com/
Davis, Rose M. "How Indian is Hiawatha?." 1957. Midwest Folklore, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1957), pp. 5-25.
2003. Central Michigan University. 13 May 2009 <http://clarke.cmich.edu/hemingway_tab/writing_about_michgan/writing_about_michigan_home.html>.
1998. Native Languages of the Americas. 12 May 2009 <http://www.native-languages.org/chippewa.htm>.