I thought Longfellow just made it up.
On a related note, today is the 40th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking.
*The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
*
The spelling gichi-gami tends to predominate today, but essentially, yes.
According to the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, gichigami is indeed what they call it.
Longfellow researched his work pretty carefully, taking the mythology mostly from conversations with Indians and from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s book Algic Researches. The book has a weird title, but it is a good compendium of the culture of the Ojibwe/Chippewa. Schoolcraft’s wife, Jane Johnston, was born of a Scottish father and an Ojibwe mother, and is certainly responsible for Schoolcraft getting so much of the information. Some claim she’s virtually the author.
In any event, Longfdellow still screwed around with things. The hero of the Ojibwe tales was Manibozho. even though that name fits the meter of the poem, Longfellow changed it to Hiawatha, which he thought was another namne for the trickster hero. He got this notion from Schoolcraft, who evidently didn’t vet the notion with his wife, because it’s wrong – “Hiawatha” was the name of an Iroquois leader, not even in the same culture group. Longfellow used the meter of the Finnish epic Kalevala, not from any Native American work result has been that people accept the odd poetic style of Hiawatha as if it’s typical of American poetry, which it most definitely is not. A lot of assumptions about Native American folkways seem to come from either Song of Hiawatha or from James Fenimore Cooper’s works.
I find myself ambivalent about these works. On the one hand, they glorify the original inhabitants of Americas – Longfellow took a lot of flak over basing his “American Epic” on American legends, and deserves credit for using them in that way – but on the other, they are the source of many stereotypes about the Indians, and in a subtler way, Longfellow’s choices of names, poetic meter, and which tales he told (plus the pro-European ending of the poem) make it a thing that is definitely not a Native American work. It’s kind of like the frustration I get reading Aristotle.
If you haven’t read the poem, I suggest doing so. It’s well done, and worthwhile. It doesn’t begin “By the shores of Gitchee-goomee” – that part comes well into the work (although apparently it starts an excerpt from it that made its way into a lot of grade-school anthologies and readers, so it’s what people know). And if you can get yourself out of the mindset that makes that Kalevala rhythm seem so forced and mechanical, you can actually like the poem.
Was there also a figure in the Native mythology (or maybe even real life?) named Shingebiss? I just noticed that name in Hiawatha a few years ago – IIRC, Longfellow described him as a mighty hunter.
When I was a child, I had a children’s story about a North American duck named Shingebiss, who was confronted by multiple depredations by the malicious North Wind and won every time.
(ETA – Help jog my memory here. Did Longfellow also describe the hunter Shingebiss as having some kind of confrontation with the North Wind? I think the children’s story was inspired by that.)
I heard the Huron Carol (which mentions “Gitchi Manitou”) before ever hearing Hiawatha/Edmund Fitzgerald, so “Gitchee Gumee” sounded like a plausible name to me.
Shingebis, the anthropomorphic duck who outlasts the North Wind, is described in Canto II.
Yes, the last canto, which begins “By the shore of Gitche-gumee”, is often anthologized or published independently. I was well into adulthood before I learned that it was but a tiny portion of the entire poem.
And the word “Michigan” has a similar etiology.
Something I posted in the Trivia thread a while back:
Lake Superior was named after the French lac supérieur, meaning “upper lake.” It is the only great lake not named after a Native American word or phrase, though Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Gordon Lightfoot had insured that the Ojibwa name Gitche Gumme (meaning"be a great sea") is remembered.
The other Great Lake names derivations are from Native American words:
Lake Erie is from Erie tribe, a shortened form of the Iroquoian word erielhonan (long tail)
Lake Huronnamed was named by French explorers for inhabitants in the area, Wyandot or “Hurons”
Lake Michigan is from the Ojibwa word mishigami (great water or large lake)
Lake Ontario: Wyandot (Huron) word ontarío (lake of shining waters)