540 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1918. 



Master of Life; but this name in Onondaga (and in all other dia- 

 lects of this stock, which do not use the r-sound), becomes Dehaen- 

 hiawagi. This name, misspelled, appears in print as Ta-oun-ya- 

 wat-ha, Thannawege, Taonhiawagi, and Tahiawagi, etc.; but be- 

 tween these and the dubious attempts to record the native original 

 for the Anglicised Hiawatha — namely, Tahionwatha, Taoungwatha, 

 Ayonhwatha, Hayenwatha, Hayonwentha, etc. — there is no relation- 

 ship whatever. But Clark, misled, perhaps, by otosis and miscon- 

 ception and by a confused tradition, identifies in direct statement the 

 two names and the two persons. 



Schoolcraft, when gathering material for his Notes on the Iro- 

 quois, received a number of fragmentary mythic tales about the Iro- 

 quoian god, the Master of Life and also traditional stories about one 

 of the chief founders of the league. But as these had been con- 

 founded by Clark and made to relate to a single individual School- 

 craft undiscriminatingly adopted this intermixture, and added to the 

 mischief by transferring Hiawatha to the region of the Great Lakes, 

 and there identified him with Nanabozho, the Master of Life, or 

 God of Life, of the Chippewa and other Algonquian cognates. 



Now, the Mohawk Iroquoian Teharonhiawagon and the Chippewa 

 Algonquian Nanabozho are approximately identical mythic concep- 

 tions, but neither has in fact or fiction any feature predicable of 

 Hiawatha. Schoolcraft's The Hiawatha Legends, to which we owe 

 the charming poem of that name by Longfellow, were chiefly mythic 

 tales and fiction about Nanabozho, the Chippewa Master of Life, but 

 which contain nothing about Hiawatha, an Iroquoian chieftain of 

 the sixteenth century. 



Were Europeans of some day in the future shown a great narra- 

 tive of French epic adventure in which Prince Bismarck, the de- 

 spoiler of France, should appear as the central and leading Gallic 

 hero in the glory and triumph of France, the absurdity and error 

 would not be greater or more towering than in these blunders of 

 Clark and Schoolcraft concerning Hiawatha and the Master of Life 

 of Iroquoian and Algonquian mythic thought. 



In the establishment of this highly organized institution the 

 swart statesmen, Deganawida, Hiawatha, and their able colleagues, 

 and the equally astute stateswoman, Djigonsasen, a chief tainess of 

 the Neutral nation (or tribe) , then very powerful and warlike, united 

 their efforts in bringing to a successful issue, notwithstanding bitter 

 intratribal opposition, a peaceful revolution in the methods, in the 

 scope, in the forms, and in the purposes of government extant among 

 their respective peoples — a much needed reform which was at once 

 fundamental and far-reaching in its immediate effects and future 

 possibilities. 



