Minnehaha is from the Dakota Mníȟaȟa — mní (water) + haȟa (waterfall, laughing) — waterfall or laughing water. A modern American baby name in the broader Indigenous American heritage aesthetic. Minnehaha is the foundational heroine + Dakota wife of the foundational Ojibwe warrior Hiawatha in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's foundational epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) — widely considered one of the foundational works of 19th-century American Romantic literature + the foundational pan-Indigenous epic in English literature. The poem's foundational meter (trochaic tetrameter) was modeled on the foundational Finnish Kalevala. The foundational Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis, Minnesota is named for the heroine (also a foundational subject of the 1899 Hiawatha Pageant Play). Foundational subject of the foundational *Antonín Dvořák Symphony No. 9 From the New World*** (1893, Largo movement).
Featured throughout Indigenous American heritage.
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Minnehaha reduces to four.