Hiawatha Performances and the Garden River First Nation
Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters NHS, 105 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA
Admission: Free
In August of 1900, several members of the Longfellow family travelled to Desbarats, Ontario, where they had been invited to attend the first performance of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Hiawatha put on by members of the Garden River First Nation. These productions, which spread throughout Indigenous communities across Western Ontario and Northern Michigan in the years that followed, featured largely Native actors and were performed in the Anishinaabe language. Analyzing these Hiawatha performances offers a window to explore how Native people reappropriated Western representations to insist on the survival of their own peoples and traditions. This event will feature two talks about the August 1900 performance based on research done in the collections held by the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters’ National Historic Site. The first, by Professor Karl Hele, will describe the context and circumstances of the performance. The second, by Professor Alan Corbiere, will look at the use of the Anishinaabe language in the performances and in the material created for the Longfellow family. Alan Corbiere , Bne wedoodemid (Ruffed Grouse clan), is an Anishinaabe from M'Chigeeng First…