This collection include souvenir photographs shot by producer Frank E. Moore of his 1906 outdoor stage production of "Hiawatha: The Indian Passion Play" based on Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. This production of Hiawatha was performed near the Cattaraugus Reservation, New York, and included Seneca [Cattaraugus] performers, possibly with Jesse Cornplanter in the role of Hiawatha.
Scope and Contents:
This collection includes 98 photographic prints from a souvenir book of a 1906 performance of "The Song of Hiawatha" produced by Frank E. Moore. The performance was held on the shore of Lake Chautauqua near the Cattaraugus Reservation. It is very likely that several of the performers photographed in this collection were also a part of the 1913 film production of Hiawatha, also produced by Frank E. Moore. This includes Jesse Cornplanter, in the role of Hiawatha, and his father Edward Cornplanter. The photographs show scenes from the theatrical production featuring characters such as Hiawatha, Minnehaha, Nokomis, and Pau-Puk-keewis. 18 copy negatives were later made from the photographic prints.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow first published the epic poem, Song of Hiawatha, in 1855. By 1900, the poem had been translated into 20 different European languages as well as back into the Ojibwe language at the turn of the century ushering in a "Hiawatha Revival" that captured American Imaginations. In 1901, Louis Oliver Armstrong, an amateur ethnologist and land agent for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, wrote a new libretto from the Longfellow poem in English and Ojibwe which was first prepared with Garden River Anishinaabeg community members as actors. His performances, or "Pageants," became regular events which led to additional versions and tours around the United States. Not long after Armstrong discontinued his show in 1905, Frank E. Moore created his own version. Originally from Middletown, Ohio, Moore gathered a large cast of Native performers from various tribal communities including many actors from the Seneca Nation on the Cattaraugus Reservation. Moore continued the tradition of large outdoor pageant performances of "Hiawatha" which were performed along a body of water and featured Native actors performing traditional dances and wearing "Native" costumes alongside narration of Longfellow's poem.
In 1913 Frank E. Moore produced the stage version of Hiawatha into a film, hiring Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca) to play Hiawatha. Jesse Cornplanter had previously accompanied his father, Edward Cornplanter, acting and singing in the Hiawatha pageant on tour through the United States and Europe. "Hiawatha" was shot in upstate New York and northern Michigan by Moore and was the first feature film to use an all-Native cast, with reportedly 150 actors from the Cattaraugus Reservation. A twenty-eight-minute cut is housed in the American Film Institute's collection in the Library of Congress.
Sources:
McNally, Michael D. "The Indian Passion Play: Contesting the Real Indian in "Song of Hiawatha" Pageants, 1901-1965," American Quarterly Vol. 58, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 105-136.
Evans, Katy Young. "The People's Pageant: The Stage as Native Space in Anishinaabe Dramatic Interpretations of "Hiawatha"," Melus Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer 2016), pp. 124-146.
Related Materials:
Library of Congress, Lot 8218, "Scenes from theatrical production of Hiawatha, Lake Chautauqua, New York."
Provenance:
Gift of Reginald P. Bolton, 1918.
Restrictions:
Access to NMAI Archives Center collections is by appointment only, Monday - Friday, 9:30 am - 4:30 pm. Please contact the archives to make an appointment (phone: 301-238-1400, email: nmaiarchives@si.edu).
Rights:
Permission to publish materials from the collection must be requested from National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center. Please submit a written request to nmaiphotos@si.edu. For personal or classroom use, users are invited to download, print, photocopy, and distribute the images that are available online without prior written permission, provided that the files are not modified in any way, the Smithsonian Institution copyright notice (where applicable) is included, and the source of the image is identified as the National Museum of the American Indian. For more information please see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use and NMAI Archive Center's Digital Image request website.
Identification of specific item; Date (if known); "Hiawatha: the Indian Passion Play" performance photographs, image #, NMAI.AC.162; National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center, Smithsonian Institution.
Tribes covered in the photographs are: Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Iowa, Iroquois, Mahican, Menomini, Ojibwa, Oto, Plains Cree, Potawatomi, Seminole, Seri, Shinnecock, Sioux, Winnebago, Zuni Pueblo. The majority of photographs (552) have Skinner listed as the photographer and presumably are photographs he took on his expeditions. However, 104 photos are of the Seminole in Florida. According to Dennis P. Carey's biography of Skinner (Unpublished? 1980) Julian Q. Dimock, a well-known photographer, accompanied him on his expedition to the Seminole in Florida; how many of the photos were taken by Dimock is unknown, but he is listed as the photographer for 23 of them. Skinner's other photographs are of the Seneca Iroquois in New York; the Zuni Pueblo and Hawikku site; several tribes in Wisconsin; the Chippewa in Minnesota; and miscellaneous shots taken in Canada, Costa Rica, Florida and New York. Two photographs of the Mahican were taken by Huron H. Smith (1923) and two of the Winnebago were taken by C.J. Van Schaick (c. 1870). The remaining photographs have no photographer listed but were in Skinner's collection of photographs and are of varying tribes with dates ranging from 1909 to 1923.
Arrangement note:
Collection arranged by item number.
Biographical/Historical note:
Alanson Buck Skinner was born in Buffalo, New York, on September 7, 1886. His parents moved to Staten Island, New York, when Alanson was still very young. There Alanson met W.T. Davis who taught him to find arrowheads and other traces of ancient Indian life. When he was older he consulted with Prof. F.W. Putnam and George H. Pepper at the American Museum of Natural History about his interest. In the summer of 1902 Skinner went on his first fieldwork expedition near Shinnecock Hills, Long Island, for the American Museum of Natural History with Arthur C. Parker and Mark R. Harrington. Two years later Skinner and Harrington went on another archeological expedition in western New York State for the Peabody Museum and while there he attended his first Native ceremony on the Cattaraugus reservation. After high school Skinner joined the staff of the AMNH as an assistant in anthropology. In 1908 he led an expedition to Hudson Bay to study the Cree Indians. In 1910 he went to Wisconsin where he met John V. Satterlee, part Menomini, and Judge Sabatis Perote, a full-blooded Menomini, who adopted him into the tribe under the Thunder clan name of Sekosa or "Little Weasel." He later went on expeditions to collect from the Seminoles in the Florida Everglades, and other tribes in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and other states. During these years he was also studying anthropology at Columbia under Boas, Farrand, Saville, and Bandelier, and at Harvard under Dixon, Tozzer, and Farrabee. In 1916 Skinner joined the Museum of the American Indian and remained there until 1920, when he took a position as curator of anthropology at the Public Museum of Milwaukee. He returned to the MAI in 1924 where he remained until his untimely death on August 17, 1925 in a car accident in North Dakota. He was a member of the American Anthropological Association, the Wisconsin Archeological Society, the Explorer's Club, a York Rite Mason and a Shriner. A more detailed biography by Dennis P. Carey (1980) can be found in the vertical file. A complete bibliography of Skinner's writings can be found in Indian Notes, Vol. II, No. 4 (October 1925).
Restrictions:
Access restricted. Researchers should contact the staff of the NMAI Archives for an appointment to access the collection.