Minnehaha

Minnehaha

62.181.09

This small drawing shows a woman wearing a blue strap dress with red leggings. She is seated on a hillside in the traditional posture of Anishinaabe women. Worn without the sleeves, this side view accurately depicts how the dress would fall loose under the arms, a feature that accommodated breast feeding. Johnson collected this dress and it is now in the collection of the St. Louis County Historical Society.

Eastman Johnson

1856 - 57

Anishinaabe

Grand Portage, MN

Text from the exhibit, "Eastman Johnson: Paintings and Drawings of the Lake Superior Ojibwe," at the Tweed Museum of Art, 2006: The most finished of his Grand Portage pictures, this pastel takes its mood and title from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem, The Song of Hiawatha. The picture, like the poem, is a romantic compilation of nature, native lore, and imagination, with the figure of Minnehaha lost in thought in a forest glade. Her dress and the log seat she faces would have been common Ojibwe objects. Johnson collected such a dress at Grand Portage, in fact, using it and his studies of Ojibwe women as models for this work.

pastel on paper

Gift of Richard Teller Crane

STLCHS strap dress ensemble

strap dress

Johnston, Patricia Condon. 1983. Eastman Johnson’s Lake Superior Indians. Afton, MN: Johnston Pub.

Willmott, Cory. 2021. Decolonizing the Museum to Reclaim and Revitalize the Anishinaabe Strap Dress. Winterthur Portfolio 55(2/3): 121-85

Eastman Johnson: Paintings and Drawings of the Lake Superior Ojibwe

47.96147, -89.75949 (N 47°57′41″ W 89°45′34")

Low resolution images on this site are covered by Creative Commons 4.0. Requests for high resolution versions should be directed to the St. Louis County Historical Society.

drawing

13 x 11 inches

not available online