Hiawatha and Minnehaha by Edmonia Lewis Hiawatha and Minnehaha by Edmonia Lewis Hiawatha and Minnehaha are 1868 sculptures by Edmonia Lewis. They are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on view in gallery 759. African-American, Haitian and Chippewa (Ojibwa) artist, Lewis, developed her neoclassical style of marble sculpture while working in Rome. Lewis was an admirer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poetry, and in 1869 Longfellow visited her studio where he posed for one of her portraits which was shortly afterward acquired by Harvard University. Often working in themes that intersected her identity, Lewis focused a series of marble sculptures based on Longfellow’s much-referenced
Alice Mary Longfellow in Ontario, Canada in recognition of her father's favorable representation of the tribe in "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855). She and her surviving siblings were made honorary members. She and her two sisters traveled to New Kensington and attended a pageant based on the book performed by members of the Garden River First Nation. Alice Longfellow was the last of the poet's children to remain in the family home; she did little to alter it, with the exception of modernizing bathrooms and installing an elevator. The Longfellow House Trust was created by the surviving children of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and