Edmonia Lewis was born near Albany, New York, to an African American father and a mother of Mississauga Ojibwe and Haitian descent.
Edmonia Lewis was born on July 4, 1845, near Albany in the Greenbush area (present-day Rensselaer), New York. Her father was of African American and Haitian descent, while her mother was of Mississauga Ojibwe heritage, making Lewis one of the earliest professional artists in the United States to claim both African American and Native American ancestry.
Orphaned by around age nine, Lewis and her older brother Samuel were raised for a time among their mother's Ojibwe relatives near Niagara Falls, where she was known by the name Wildfire. This dual heritage would later become central to both her personal identity and her artistic subject matter, as she frequently depicted Native American and African American figures in her Neoclassical sculptures.
Some sources, including Britannica and the National Park Service, cite her birth year as circa 1844 rather than 1845, and precise records from this era are scarce given the marginalized status of mixed-race and Indigenous families in antebellum New York. Despite this documentary uncertainty, July 4th is consistently cited as her birth date across multiple biographical compilations, and its symbolism—an American Independence Day birth for a woman who would break so many racial and gender barriers—has often been noted by historians and biographers as a poignant, if perhaps apocryphal, detail of her extraordinary life story.
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