Gitche Gumee transformed

"Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest,
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations,
As of thunder in the mountains?
I should answer, I should tell you,
From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,
From the mountains, moors, and fen lands
Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
Feeds among th reeds and rushes.
I repeat them as I heard them,
From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer.’
...
"Stay and read this rude inscription,
Read this Song of Hiawatha."

160 pages later Indian Hiawatha , "By the shore of Gitche Gumee,/ By the shining big sea water," went to the ‘land of the thereafter.’ 500 years later we are singing a song to a BigObama, homeland warrior of Saul Olinsky, chief engineer of transformation, agent of change in America. America, by the way has not had these institutions in our past: caudillismo, 19th and 20th century authoritarian rule in Latin America, dharma, the caste system of India, encomienda and the haciendas (estate system) in Spanish America, apartheid, racial segregation in South Africa, glasnost (openness) in the Soviet Union, the shogunate and Meijji period of ‘enlightment’ in Japan. But it’s time to mourn our present condition and pray to The Great Spirit, Hiawatha’s Creator.