“From the waterfall he named her, Minnehaha, Laughing Water”

The Song of Hiawatha, by Longfellow

Gabrielle, a playwright/director/actor/teaching artist from the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean, was doing a screenwriting workshop in Orvieto when she entered my gallery and shortly after asked if she could participate in one of my pictures. She told me of her rich mixed Caribbean heritage, I immediately thought of the figure of Minnehaha about whom I had been thinking for some time.

I remember learning extracts of Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha as a child and enjoying its mesmerising simplicity. Given that the poem is a hymn to love, and nature, to making peace through love twixt warring tribes, it seems a shame that it has fallen out of favour. When I mentioned Hiawatha’s wife Minnehaha as a possible subject for a picture to Gabrielle, she said she had never heard of her.

Minnehaha, charming though the name is, does not in fact mean Laughing Water, but water (minne) fall (haha) – she is a fictional character although there is a waterfall of that name in Minneapolis, Minnesota.