Norval Morrisseau: In the Shaman's Shadow

Norval Morrisseau was a painter from the Anishanabe/Ojibway nation, who lived in Canada from 1932 to 2007. His work was discovered and began to be marketed when he was in his late twenties. This marketing was aimed at exaggerating his ‘Indianness,’ removing all modern influences on his work, and keeping his style that of a mythic ‘primitive.’ He conspired with this marketing strategy and willingly enhanced it. By all accounts he was well-versed in his ancestral legends and stories, and a man of great charisma and power of personality, exceptionally quick to respond to and integrate mental constructions of what others thought about, or “should” think about his art and his being Indian.

(In this article I use the term "Indian" because it is the term most North American tribes prefer to use for themselves, rather than "Native American" which is felt to be imposed from the outside in.)


Since his recent death, many things have been written about Norval Morrisseau. He is referred to over and over again as a “shaman” and a “shaman artist.” He is credited as being the father of “medicine” art. On some art gallery websites, he is listed as being a “Grand Master Shaman,” a made-up title which appears to have nothing to do with the Midewiwin tradition to which he was related. I can find nothing to suggest that Norval Morrisseau was either a shaman, or, indeed, a shamanic artist (one who works consciously with The Spirits to create art). But first, a bit about his background and the development of his career.

Oldest of seven brothers, he was born in Ontario in 1932, and raised by his grandparents. His grandmother Vernique was a devout catholic and his grandfather, Moses (Potan) Nanakonagos was a djessakid, a shaking-tent shaman. Norval was hospitalized when he was 19 for tuberculosis, at the same time acquiring a new name “Copper Thunderbird” during a healing ceremony. By the time his talent began to be recognized in the early 1960’s, Morrisseau had already developed his painting style in isolation, and was newly married to Harriet Kakegamic. He fathered six children before breaking with his wife. In 1962, he met Jack Pollock, a painting teacher from Toronto, who organized the first exhibition of his work, and continued to represent him. Norval Morrisseau battled life long with alcoholism and was in jail during the 1970’s. In 1972 he experienced a devastating house fire in which he was badly burned. By the early 1980’s, he was taken seriously by collectors and his works were increasingly amassed by the Canadian government to represent indigenous art. At the end of his life his health continued to deteriorate, he developed Parkinson’s disease, and Norval Morrisseau died at the age of 75 in 2007.

In the late 1950s his early paintings were initially noticed by a local state trooper, Bob Sheppard, who wrote to Selwyn Dewdney, the director of the Royal Museum of Ontario: “he has done plenty of reading since leaving school, and he himself studies and collects Indian lore.” The resulting relationship with Dewdney would prove seminal in formatting Morrisseau’s entire career.

Dewdney was personally interested in local petroglyphs, and he encouraged Morrisseau to copy them. He suggested that Norval paint on birchbark (which quickly proved unwieldy) to make it look more like ancestral style, and he was exceptionally controlling of Morrisseau’s use of materials — meticulous in limiting his early palette to earth tones. Morrisseau signed his canvases using Cree pictographs, which his wife taught him. All of this was done to enhance the ‘Indianness’ of the work, and Morrisseau collaborated, although he, for his part, corrected Dewdney on matters of Ojibway folklore.

In fact, Morrisseau’s style cannot necessarily be seen as being a “typical” Ojibway style, instead, he “relied solely on his inner vision” to create layered motifs of Great Lakes animals and people, morphing into and out of each other, eaters being eaten by their prey and unrelated/related creatures inhabiting each others’ bodies. In a letter from Dewdney to Joseph Weinstein, an art collector and early influence: “one of the most amazing things about him being the way he invents an Ojibway way of visualizing things, without the existence of any pictorial tradition to which he has had any access. He has a real passion for his people’s past, and a sense of mission in passing it on in pictorial form.”

This mission was something that Dewdney repeatedly articulated to Morrisseau during the early years: “your work is to show to non-Indians the richness and variety of Ojibway beliefs and legends through your paintings.” And, “...you are not only an artist, but a representative of your people.” Morrisseau felt this responsibility deeply, entering his career with the pressure of legacy from the outset. Most of what he had to say about his own art reaffirmed this identity as spokesman for “his people.” He said, "I want my work to be cornerstone for Indian art, to provide something that will last." It is this burden of having to carry all of one’s relations, race, and history forward, (not to mention representing the art of indigenous Canada) while avoiding any mistakes that would embarrass the elders, ancestors, agents, or politicians that proved increasingly difficult for Morrisseau.

Barry Ace writes in Norval Morrisseau: Artist as Shaman:

“As the art buying public, dealers and art institutions engaged in what can only
be described as a Morrisseau “feeding frenzy” the complexity involved in
reinventing, controlling and sheltering Morrisseau’s public and private spaces
from the outside world became a hugely convoluted and contradictory process for all involved, including Morrisseau himself. The personal impact of this monstrosity of illusion was so enormous, that few are immune from its negative impacts, and perhaps most tragically of all, the toll it took on the physical and emotional state of Norval Morrisseau.”

Morrisseau’s images are visually arresting, fluid, mythic. Visually, his is a highly attractive style, owing more to two-dimensional graphic arts than to painting (in contrast to established, western figural painting), placing it firmly in the realm of pop art/illustration. The first time I saw a Morrisseau poster, I almost felt nourished by it, it was so generous, so full of beauty, rhythm, congruence, and movement. His work does embody the truth which has become Indian-cliche: We are all One.

As his career developed, Morrisseau stepped away from some of the initial boundaries set by himself and Dewdney. First, his palette widened and modernized to include hyper-bright pinks, oranges, and purples. Second, he incorporated his Christian upbringing, including more images of people, of Christ, and church influences. Third, he became involved with the German new age movement Eckankar, which served to enhance the “spiritual” language with which Morrisseau spoke about his own work: "I transmit astral plane harmonies through my brushes into the physical plane. These otherworld colours are reflected in the alphabet of nature, a grammar in which the symbols are plants, animals, birds, fishes, earth and sky. I am merely a channel for the spirit to utilize, and it is needed by a spirit-starved society."

(This statement can be broken down into an amalgamation of new age terms, noble-Indian talk, shamanic terms, awkward art history-speak, plus the requisite negative judgement on white society tacked on at the end. His own discussion of his work seems cultivated and packaged for his clients. At the end of such a statement one feels pulled to acquire this language, this grammar, these colors, this nature, in order to quiet the shame of being part of a “spirit-starved” society.)

As a curator of Canada’s Indian art center, Barry Ace met Norval Morrisseau in 1995. His article, Norval Morrisseau: Artist as Shaman provides one refreshing drink of truth-telling among many high-blown biographies available on the Internet (although the title itself reinforces the central dishonesty about the artist). Ace describes Morriseau initiating a talk about the medicine of a grizzly bear walking stick he had brought with him.

“I was simultaneously astonished and taken aback, because, Norval, without any prompting from me, immediately launched into a diatribe on sacred healing practices. I have always found this notion of other Aboringinal people needing to validate their “indianness,” especially to another Aboriginal somewhat difficult to deal with. I quickly came to the conclusion that this was the...real public Norval Morrisseau. I remember thinking to myself how important performance and self-validation has become in contemporary Aboriginal communities, and I understood this was largely based on a desire for authenticity.”

(to be continued...)