ENG 302 Charter Oak State College The Birchbark House and Hiawatha Discussion

Assignments

Assignments

Preface

If you’re not sure how to go about the poetry reading for this lesson, check out the Purdue OWL link about poetry in course materials, left column.

Read

• Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House
  Audio available from: audible

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hiawatha at: http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/hiawatha.html#n…
  Hiawatha audio (https://librivox.org/the-song-of-hiawatha-by-henry-wadsworth-longfellow/)

Read at least “Longfellow’s Introduction” and “Hiawatha’s Childhood”. Please do not read another version–use this one.

Questions for the discussion board:

1. What surprised you about each of these works?

2. What do these two books have in common, and what are the big differences? Consider, please, the portrayal of Ojibwa Indians, the relationships among families, characterization, description of scenery.

3. Why does the poetry of Hiawatha sound and feel so odd to us? You might try comparing the sound of a Shakespeare poem to a line or so of Longfellow-why is this kind of poetry so strange, and so easy to parody?

4. These are the same native tribes, portrayed over a century apart—what values do these stories have in common? How are these portrayals of Indians different?

5. Locate the criteria for the following book awards, which Birchbark won. What did the judges see that won each award for this book?

6. The Birchbark House has been compared to Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder because both stories take place in Wisconsin, at about the same time in Wisconsin’s history. Read Little House (NOT Little House on the Prairie, though there’s some opportunity for comparison there, too) and talk about how the native child’s experience is different from the white settler’s child.

You must demonstrate through your answer that you’ve actually read Little House, not just read about it.

National Book Award –

http://www.nationalbook.org/nba_process.html#.UaX3…

National Cowboy Hall of Fame Western Heritage Award
(https://nationalcowboymuseum.org/event/western-heritage-awards/)

• The Western Heritage Awards honors individuals who have made significant contributions to Western heritage through creative works in literature, music, television and film that share the great stories of the American West.

Jane Addams Children’s Book Award –

http://www.janeaddamschildrensbookaward.org/