Discordant Notes: Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, Community, Race, and Performance Politics

On the Mountains of the Prairie, On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry, Gitche Manito, the mighty, He the Master of Life, descending, On the red crags of the quarry Stood erect, and called the nations, Called the tribes of men together. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha In the 1957 film Desk Set, Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) heads the research department of a media corporation. In charge of locating obscure bits of information, Watson's powers of recall astound the "methods engineer" (Spencer Tracy) who has invented a computer system to maximize efficiency in the department. Throughout the film, Watson answers telephone calls and provides the answers to callers' queries from memory. Upon answering the phone on one of these occasions, Watson begins reciting the most famous lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha: "Forth upon the Gitche Gumee, / On the shining Big-Sea-Water" (52). Watson's ready recall of these lines suggests the ways that oral recitations of poetry function as part of the American collective memory. Watson's role as archivist and her immersion in the female community composed of the researchers is opposed to the emphasis on efficiency and technology represented by Tracy's character and the male managers who hire him. The triumph of the human sources of memory (the computer cannot retrieve the correct information as quickly as the women can) and community (the women are not fired, and thus separated from one another, after all, but are intended to use the computer as a sort of research assistant) suggests the maintenance of the values implicit in Watson's recitation of the most popular poem of the nineteenth century. This article examines the social and racial politics of performances of Longfellow's famous poem, especially as they are crystalized in a performance tradition that continues through the present. On nine summer evenings of every year for the last half century, residents of Pipestone, Minnesota, have performed the Song of Hiawatha Pageant to large audiences. In an outdoor amphitheater, costumed white townspeople silently enact the scenes of the poem, the meters of which have been previously taped and are broadcast over loudspeakers to the listening audience. In its form, then, the Hiawatha Pageant can be considered a two-hour poetry reading accompanied by a visual pantomime. Just as Hepburn's character's recitation of The Song of Hiawatha crystalizes the conflicts between human and computer, memory and technology, and female and male that are explored in the film, the oral performance that is part of the Hiawatha Pageant distills a number of contests in American culture-most importantly for this article, the relationship between poetic performances and notions of community. With the emerging field of performance studies offering an interdisciplinary rubric for examining a variety of cultural and social rituals, performances such as the one taking place annually in Pipestone offer new opportunities for cultural analysis. As Elin Diamond has emphasized, "To study performance is not to study completed forms" -such as the text of Longfellow's poem itself-but to "become aware of performance itself as a contested space, where meanings and desires are generated, occluded, and of course multiply interpreted" (4). My intention in this article, then, is not to provide a new reading of the text of the poem but to consider how its various performances, continuing through the present, are constellated within longstanding concerns about the nature of community in American society. This article takes up three related "contested space[s]," to use Diamond's phrase, relevant to the Hiawatha Pageant: oral performances in the nineteenth century establishing the notion of civic poetry; the history of the Hiawatha Pageant embedded in race relations and Cold War concerns about community; and current areas of conflict surrounding the performance, demonstrating the continued importance of these issues in American culture. …