Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau: Art and the Colonial Narrative in the Canadian Media examines the complex identities assigned to Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau. Was he an uneducated artist plagued by alcoholism and homelessness? Was Morrisseau a shaman artist who tapped a deep spiritual force? Or was he simply one of Canada’s most significant artists?

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“Native artists had to know how to play the white man’s game, they had to be able to work the media and the market, or they weren’t going anywhere.”—Sarah Milroy, Globe and Mail, 7 February 2006

With the 2006 opening of Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, two of Canada’s leading newspapers, the Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen, characterized the Anishinaabe artist’s retrospective as a “taming of demons.”

While each paper acknowledged Morrisseau as a pivotal artist in Canadian art history, both stories attributed demons to Morrisseau, when in actuality it was the Canadian nation and its colonial arm of nationalism, the media, that were the primary source of the many demons attributed to Morrisseau. As the first Indigenous artist in Canada to break into the mainstream art world, Morrisseau had entered an exclusive and elitist club with an exhibition of his work at Toronto’s Pollock Gallery in September 1962. Yet while Morrisseau was feted and fawned upon, he struggled to be taken seriously as an artist. With the first media coverage of his art opening in Toronto, Morrisseau came under intense scrutiny by Canada’s media. The press found the seemingly exotic and authentic Morrisseau hard to resist: Indian first, artist second.

In a recent essay for the National Museum of the American Indian’s exhibition Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes, curator Gerald McMaster acknowledges that Norval Morrisseau’s “rise in the early 1960s gave significant voice to later generations of First Nations artists across the country.” McMaster describes how “Morrisseau quickly became an iconic, tragicomic artist—a role frequently reinforced by the art world—and, to his credit, he was often more than happy to oblige. At the same time, his character and strategies were quite different because, while he may have been characterized as a primitive, he was also extremely serious about the decrepit conditions in which most Aboriginal peoples lived.” Labelling him a “latter day neo-primitivist,” McMaster explains that Morrisseau can be defined by his “deep attachment to his traditional Anishinaabe heritage” and by his “elevated stature in an art world where difference is not just accepted but encouraged.”

McMaster’s analysis of Morrisseau is based on forty years of study and analysis, and he clearly identifies the artist’s deep understanding of Canadian colonial culture. I disagree with McMaster, however, when he says that the art world not only accepted difference but encouraged it. The media, and newspaper art critics in particular, did not, for the most part, approve of Morrisseau’s difference. While titillated by his exoticism, the press largely disparaged his difference, scorned his performative gestures, and often positioned his art as primitive. Much finger wagging followed the artist, who was mostly interested in painting his unique visual stories and pushing boundaries—boundaries that shifted because of the artist’s trailblazing efforts.

As Canada’s first Indigenous art star, Morrisseau served as a test case of sorts for the media to teach readers about artistic expressions of identity and difference. His racialized identity remained key to this lesson. The educative role of media in relation to race is a relatively understudied topic yet clearly, as described in the literature, the media does more than simply report the news. Political scientist Paul Kellstedt argues that although understandings of how the press has covered race are “largely ignored by scholars,” the press’s influence in matters of race is a form of “social learning.” Historian Carlos E. Cortes similarly contends that mass media powerfully and persuasively teaches children about diversity. The press, when covering Morrisseau, adopted disciplining racial discourses already promoted in Canadian newspaper coverage of Indigenous peoples. Because of the skewed media reporting, Morrisseau often came to stand in for all Indigenous peoples—a monolithic object, an Imaginary Indian. Many stories, then, revealed less about Morrisseau and more about Canadian society. And as Globe and Mail art critic Sarah Milroy astutely noted, Morrisseau quickly learned to play the game, working the media and the market, to make readings of the myth surrounding the artist more complex and nuanced.

This book is not simply about the role of the media in constructing a racialized identity for the artist. It also investigates Morrisseau’s own performative gestures in questioning and resisting the confining box of stereotypical tropes into which the press so easily plunked him. Often, media narratives and Morrisseau’s own commentary stood at odds. At times Morrisseau confronted the press, challenging reporters to cover his artistic achievements rather than focus on his personal life. Yet Morrisseau also manipulated his shaman persona, spoon-feeding the media a construction not so different from what they craved. 

The mythology surrounding Morrisseau is not easily unpacked. Fraught with identity politics, colonial misconceptions, racialized tropes, and Morrisseau’s own implicated ways of framing himself, intertwined signifiers cross-pollinate in complex ways. Meaning is always in process and as a result is unstable because readers bring multiple meanings to texts. My reading of the texts and images in this study is a product of my positioning as an Indigenous female, as an academic, and as someone who grew up in rural Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 1970s constituted, constrained, and enabled in a criss-crossing of discourses. Drawing on press coverage, Morrisseau’s engagement with media sources, and a variety of other sources, I have gathered together a narrative that considers not only the man and his art, but also Canada’s role in forging the story of Morrisseau.

Excerpted fom the book Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau, © 2016, by Carmen L. Robertson. Published by University of Manitoba Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Carmen L. Robertson is a Lakota/Scottish associate professor of art history at University of Regina. She also maintains an active curatorial practice. Robertson is the co-author of Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers.