Hiawatha was a Native American leader, remembered among the Haudenosaunee — the Iroquois nations — as a helper in bringing several peoples together as one group, first called the Five Nations (a sixth nation joined later). That is the historical Hiawatha, in the 1500s as many tellings place him. Most Americans, though, meet another Hiawatha: the hero of a long 1855 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, with famous lines about Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water, and Nokomis in her wigwam. Though actually, Longfellow borrowed the name and then built a different story, set by a Great Lake and mixed with legends that belong to other peoples. Schoolchildren used to chant the poem’s bouncing beat; the real peacemaker and the poem’s hero share a name more than a life.