Customer Reviews

Hiawatha: Messenger of Peace

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We just found this book at our local library, and being as I had now and then heard that the Longfellow story was inaccurate, but that there was a real Hiawatha, I checked it out right away. It's a short book, under 50 pages, and filled with illustrations, so it is a fast read. There are no pronunciation keys for the Indian names, but aside from the long name of the Creator, I was able to make what I felt was a decent attempt when I read the book aloud to my kids. The illustrations are terrific... ranging from a photograph of Longfellow, to period paintings of Native American activities, to detailed drawings of longhouses and at least one photograph of an artefact, to paintings by living artists. And of course illustrations make the text more interesting to adults as well as children.

The real Hiawatha was an Iroquois man (from the region that is now New York State). The Iroquois lived in longhouses, and they called themselves the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouses. We are not sure when he lived, somewhere before the time of Columbus anyway. When Hiawatha was young, the Iroquois were split into five nations, and there was always fighting, as each time someone was killed it would be necessary to kill someone in retaliation, and of course that never ends. Hiawatha, along with a Huron (a man from another people related to the Haudenosaunee) named Degandawida, worked to bring the Iroquois together into one people, stop the retaliatory killings, and create a set of laws and a nation which were, to many historians, the model used by the American Founding Fathers to create our Constitution and government.

Of course, I tell it poorly, and I don't have any pictures in my review, but I couldn't let this wonderful book sit on amazon with no reviews!