Kiki M. Barnes

This dissertation employs Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha” as a framework to examine the settler-colonial imagination of the North American Great Lakes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More than a Euro-American literary phenomenon, the poem shaped regional place names, supported extractive capitalism, and transformed Indigenous lifeways. Through four case studies spanning fine arts, visual culture, and performance in the century following the poem’s publication, this project demonstrates how “Hiawatha” established a precedent of mythological thinking at the expense of the Great Lakes and its Indigenous cultures, particularly the Anishinaabeg and Sioux, whose communities continue to inhabit the region and contend with the poem’s legacy.