Producer Frank E. Moore had previously staged the outdoor spectacle Hiawatha: The Indian Passion Play for nearly a decade before he launched his filmed version.
Newspapers reported that 150 "full-blooded" Seneca of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) from the Cattaraugus Reservation in upstate New York participated in the movie's production.
For the lead role of Hiawatha, Moore hired Seneca actor-turned-artist Jesse Cornplanter, who later collaborated as an illustrator with ethnographer/archaeologist Arthur C. Parker and  was the author of Legends of the Longhouse (1938).
Jesse Cornplanter was a descendant of the 18th-century Seneca war chief and diplomat Cornplanter
The Anglo-American musical theater conductor John Joseph Braham, Sr.
composed the musical score for Hiawatha.
 Braham would later compose the score for the 1913 Edward S. Curtis film, In the Land of the Head Hunters.

The movie's cinematographer Victor Milner suggested to Moore that Edgar Lewis, a former stage actor, should direct.
 Milner said that to achieve a superimposition of two images, he had to shoot the visioning of the famine of death on a separate negative and double print it.

Although other silent versions of Hiawatha existed before 1913, Moore's film was the first to use a cast of Native American actors.
In 1909, Carl Laemmle, who founded Independent Moving Pictures (later absorbed into Universal Studios) had released an earlier one-reel version of Hiawatha.
 Years later Laemmle acknowledged that his "white cast smeared with bronze paint" was a target for ridicule.
Laemmle's story ended with Hiawatha and Minnehaha happily embracing, but Moore's Hiawatha follows Longfellow's poem in which Minnehaha dies and Hiawatha welcomes the arrival of the missionary, who converts the Native Americans to the Christian faith.
 In 1910, Laemmle followed up his 1909 version of Hiawatha with the sequel, The Death of Minnehaha.
Producer Frank E. Moore had previously staged the outdoor spectacle Hiawatha: The Indian Passion Play for nearly a decade before he launched his filmed version. Newspapers reported that 150 "full-blooded" Seneca of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) from the Cattaraugus Reservation in upstate New York participated in the movie's production. For the lead role of Hiawatha, Moore hired Seneca actor-turned-artist Jesse Cornplanter, who later collaborated as an illustrator with ethnographer/archaeologist Arthur C. Parker and  was the author of Legends of the Longhouse (1938). Jesse Cornplanter was a descendant of the 18th-century Seneca war chief and diplomat Cornplanter
The Anglo-American musical theater conductor John Joseph Braham, Sr. composed the musical score for Hiawatha.  Braham would later compose the score for the 1913 Edward S. Curtis film, In the Land of the Head Hunters.
The movie's cinematographer Victor Milner suggested to Moore that Edgar Lewis, a former stage actor, should direct.  Milner said that to achieve a superimposition of two images, he had to shoot the visioning of the famine of death on a separate negative and double print it.
Although other silent versions of Hiawatha existed before 1913, Moore's film was the first to use a cast of Native American actors. In 1909, Carl Laemmle, who founded Independent Moving Pictures (later absorbed into Universal Studios) had released an earlier one-reel version of Hiawatha.  Years later Laemmle acknowledged that his "white cast smeared with bronze paint" was a target for ridicule. Laemmle's story ended with Hiawatha and Minnehaha happily embracing, but Moore's Hiawatha follows Longfellow's poem in which Minnehaha dies and Hiawatha welcomes the arrival of the missionary, who converts the Native Americans to the Christian faith.  In 1910, Laemmle followed up his 1909 version of Hiawatha with the sequel, The Death of Minnehaha.
Hiawatha (1913 film)