Song of Hiawatha Violence Quotes

Hiawatha decides to kill his father when he finds out how Mudjekeewis abandoned his mother and left her to die. It's a classic case of son versus father, but it ends in a draw because Mudjekeewis turns out to be immortal… bummer.

Hiawatha kills the beautiful young demigod named Mondamin. But don't worry. This is exactly what Mondamin wanted to happen because it's the only way to improve the corn harvest (er, for some reason). Here, Longfellow is drawing on the idea that nature demands certain violent sacrifices from humanity in return for all its gifts (like food).

How this for an image that's both violent and beautiful at the same time? Longfellow does some of his best work when he talks about seagulls eating dead flesh and waves washing through the corpse's rib-bones.

To be fair, Pau-Puk-Keewis has been running around the countryside destroying nearly everything he can get his hands on. That's why Hiawatha and his gang track down the dude and kill him. In fact, they kill him four times because PPK has the ability to jump out of his body at the last second and put his soul into any living thing that's nearby.

Finally, Hiawatha is able to kill Pau-Puk-Keewis as revenge for all the trouble PPK has been causing. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that the gods of thunder and lightning kill him after Hiawatha has requested their help.

Those pesky Puk-Wudjies decide one day that they're sick of getting out of the way every time the giant Kwasind goes marching through the forest. They feel like the only way to be safe is to kill the dude, so they wait in ambush and kill the guy using their secret weapons—which turn out to be, um, pinecones for some reason. Oh well, they're effective enough and they manage to kill Kwasind.