Old+Arrow+Maker

Date: modeled 1866, carved 1872
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1983/1983.95.179_1a.jpg?itok=A2s7qp5a width="281" height="360" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/old-arrow-maker-14629"]] || Title: **Old Arrow Maker**

Artist: **Edmonia Lewis** Born: Greenbush, New York 1844 Died: London, England 1907

Medium: carved marble Dimensions: 21 1/2 x 13 5/8 x 13 3/8 in. (54.5 x 34.5 x 34.0 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Joseph S. Sinclair

Accession: 1983.95.182 || Edmonia Lewis’s //Old Arrow Maker// illustrates an excerpt from the //Song of Hiawatha// by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in which the character Minnehaha plaits “mats of flags and rushes” while her father makes “arrow-heads of jasper.” They both look up to greet Hiawatha, whose presence is implied by the deer he brought as a token of marriage. Lewis often created sculptures of Native Americans, and possibly chose the character of Hiawatha because he was from the Ojibwa tribe, like her mother. The coming together of the Ojibwa and Dakota tribes may refer to Lewis’s hopes for reconciliation between the North and South after the Civil War. In the story, Hiawatha later marries Minnehaha with the wish that “. . . old feuds might be forgotten/ And old wounds be healed forever.”
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Edmonia Lewis Biography Edmonia Lewis - Wiki entry
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">Artist Biography <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">SAAM Collections Page
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