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
The Song of Hiawatha south shore of Lake Superior for a figure of their folklore, a trickster-transformer. But in his journal entry for June 28, 1854, he wrote, "Work at 'Manabozho;' or, as I think I shall call it, 'Hiawatha'—that being another name for the same personage." Longfellow, following Schoolcraft, was mistaken in thinking the names were synonyms. In Ojibwe lore the figure of Manabozho is legendary but the name Hiawatha is unknown. The name Hiawatha derives from the name of a historical figure associated with the League of the Iroquois, the Five Nations, then located in present-day New York and Pennsylvania. The popularity