Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930. By Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xxv plus 369 pp. $30.00).
Hiawatha gets the prize for most misinterpreted American Indian. 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 ...