Hiawatha was a follower of The Great Peacemaker, a Prophet and shaman who was credited as the founder of the Iroquois confederacy, (referred to as Haudenosaunee by the people). If The Great Peacemaker was the man of ideas, Hiawatha was the politician who actually put the plan into practice. Hiawatha was a skilled and charismatic Orator, and was instrumental in persuading the Iroquois peoples, the Senecas, Onondagas, Oneidas, Cayugas, and Mohawks, a group of Native Americans who shared a common language, to accept The Great Peacemaker's vision and band together to become the Five Nations of the Iroquois confederacy. (Later, in 1721, the Tuscarora nation joined the Iroquois confederacy, and they became the Six Nations).
Hiawatha is also the name of the hero of Longfellow's famous poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Longfellow said that he based his poem on Schoolcraft's Algic Researches and History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. Schoolcraft in turn seems to have based his "Hiawatha" primarily on the Algonquian Trickster-figure Nanabozho. There is none, or only faint resemblance between Longfellow's hero and the life-stories of Hiawatha and The Great Peacemaker; see Longfellow's Hiawatha vs. the historical Iroquois Hiawatha.
The poem is also recited (in part) in Mike Oldfield's work Incantations.