An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 9 | AMERICAN INDIAN MUSIC AND ITS COLLECTORS 209

an Ojibwa chief. By 1845 Schoolcraft’s contact with Indians led to a combina-

tion memoir and ethnographic study, Onéonta, or Characteristics of the Red Race

of America, which included an item called “Death Song,” collected from Ojibwa

sources. The song is a vivid statement in eighteen lines: the words of a warrior

lying wounded after a battle, gazing at the sky, where he sees “warlike birds”

who perhaps, Schoolcraft writes, represent his fellow warriors as they enter the

territory of their foes, the Dacotahs or Sioux. The text concludes: “Full happy—I /

To lie on the battlefi eld / Over the enemy’s line.” The neatly constructed poem,

however, turns out to be a compilation. Knowing that readers found images

of Indian stoicism poetic, Schoolcraft combined several sung moments into

one song: evidence that his wish to document Ojibwa life vied with his urge to

arrange it for public consumption.

In 1847 George Copway, an Ojibwa born in Ontario whose parents were con-

verted to Methodism by missionaries and who himself became a preacher in

Illinois, published a memoir that included the fi ve-line “George Copway’s Dream

Song”:

It is I who travel in the winds,

It is I who whisper in the breeze,

I shake the trees,

I shake the earth,

I trouble the waters on every land.

Copway said he received this song at age twelve from the god of the winds him-

self, who appeared in a dream and explained to him the song and its power. The

notion of songs as personal possessions has not been rare among Indian peoples;

nor is the belief that songs are carriers of prophecy.

Whites’ views of Indians entered a new phase after 1855, which saw the

publication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, based on

Henry Schoolcraft’s researches. Selling thirty thousand copies during its fi rst six

months in print, Hiawatha became the most popular long poem ever written by

an American. At a time when white settlement had largely wiped out traditional

Indian ways of life east of the Mississippi, the poem introduced dramatic, ele-

vated images of that life as it had existed earlier. Longfellow ascribed to Indians

virtues admired by Victorian-era Americans, including manliness, courage, and

integrity. Having prepared the way for white settlers, indigenous peoples had

fulfi lled their destiny and would now disappear, the poem implies, lingering

only in memories built around myth.

Recent opinion has judged Longfellow’s images of Hiawatha and his people

to be no truer than the older stereotype of Indians as savages. Nevertheless, the

poem’s popularity and staying power make it the central source for understand-

ing how Americans in the eastern half of the continent viewed Indians from the

mid-nineteenth century on.

AMERICAN INDIAN ETHNOGRAPHY AFTER 1865

The latter 1800s witnessed two new attitudes among white Americans. One,

connected to show business and popular entertainment, trivialized indigenous

cultures. The other was a scientifi c interest in American Indian life, rooted in

idealistic curiosity and requiring trained workers and institutional funding.

K George Copway (1818–1869),

author of The Life, History, and

Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh

(George Copway): A Young

Indian Chief of the Ojebwa Nation

(Albany, 1847).

Henry Rowe

Schoolcraft

George Copway

The Song of

Hiawatha

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