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FREEDOMWAYS      FOURTH QUARTER 1969

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis,

Hiawatha, whose life is recounted in the poem, was an Indian folk hero and warrior who performed miracles for the tribes and helped them in many ways. The poem is based on Indian tales and stories. The Negro composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor wrote a very successful oratorio Hiawatha based on Longfellow's poem. Thurlow Lieurance's Indian love song "By the Waters of Minnetonka," Edward MacDowell's Indian Suite and Anton Dvorak's "From the New World" symphony with its Indian and Negro themes and feeling are often heard in live vocal and orchestral concerts and on recorded radio concerts. 

Stephen Vincent Benet's poem "American Names" shows his love for the sound of Indian and other names:

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat. 

Benet mentions Bleeding-Heart-Yard, Painted Post, Nantucket Light and Wounded Knee. But this poem also contains this vilely racist couplet:

And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse. 

New York Times art critic John Canaday takes the opposite view. He expresses his boredom as a child with The Song of Hiawatha's Gitche Gumee and his dislike for what he calls the unloveliest sounds ever invented - the Indian names of lakes and small towns of Rhode Island and Connecticut and the Chinook word "potlatch." This view was a part of his review of a major art show: a large group of carvings by Northwest Coast American Indians in the 1969 "Man and His World" exhibits at Montreal, Canada (New York Times, Aug. 10, 1969). Canaday praises the art of the Kwakiutls and other tribes highly. He also points to fine Indian art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent "Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas" exhibit, in the Paris Musee de l'Homme's then current Indian art show, in Seattle's 1962 Century 21 Exposition collection, in a 1968 Vancouver show and in New York's Museum of the American Indian

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-14 22:45:00