When I was young, I always wanted to make a scroll … but they wouldn't let me. They told me first I had to be a Shaman.1
–Norval Morrisseau

Much has been written about Morrisseau’s journey from using more “naïve” or “primitive” materials, such as kraft paper and hide, to purportedly fine art ones, such as acrylic on canvas, in his forays into the commercial art world as he tried to find a balance between Anishinaabe traditions and styles and the advice and expectations of mentors and advisers, patrons and critics.2

But Morrisseau’s use of certain materials over time has never been rigorously mapped or analyzed. Nor, until recently, has the nature of his chosen artistic materials been the subject of significant study.3 Instead, discussions most often crop up in arguments about the shift in his work from “craft” to “fine art,” his formal relationship to modernity (and modernism), or even his physical and mental health or legal and financial problems. These arguments, however, overlook the fact that particular materials and objects, like particular visual motifs, recur throughout Morrisseau’s career in ways that cannot be explained solely in those terms.

One such object is the wiigwaasabak (plural: wiigwaasabakoon), or birchbark scroll, something which Morrisseau repeatedly made in the first decade of his career and to which he returned in the mature period of the mid-1980s. Morrisseau was inspired by mide-wiigwaas, the sacred scrolls of the Midewiwin Society. These rolled sheets of birchbark are engraved with pictographic designs that function as mnemonic devices for Midewiwin lodge ceremonies, diagramming the oral histories, the migration stories, and visionary dreams of the Anishinaabe.4 These linear etchings feature pictographic figures, symbols, and diagrams, with the figures connected by linear structures within a horizontal and rectangular format.

As has been well recounted, Morrisseau found inspiration in these pictographic designs. "My grandfather showed me how to do interpretations of the shaman beliefs on birchbark,” he wrote in 1979. “So all my painting and drawing is really a continuation of the shaman’s scrolls."5 Yet Morrisseau’s interest extended beyond translating them in his own art work: “I always wanted to make a scroll.” This desire resulted in his return to the wiigwaasabak format several times in the 1980s.

Morrisseau’s choices about his objects and materials were intentional and rich with meaning.

To understand this, we need to take a materialist reading of Morrisseau's early work. By materialist, I refer to a broad methodological approach that emphasizes the importance of the material aspects of art, particularly the physical substances used to create it, and their impact on artistic meaning and expression. This includes analyses of how works of art produce their meanings in relation to the economic conditions of their creation and reception, as well as what has been called “new materialism,” or an attention to the agency and active nature of artistic material. As Janet Berlo and Jessica Horton have argued, Indigenous philosophies and world views pay attention to the vibrancy of matter as expressed through their art and visual culture.6

Material reality determines social and cultural life, and material conditions determine the production of artistic forms, but an expansive materialist view must consider also the nature and character of materials with which Morrisseau worked and the way they intersected with socio-economic, cultural, and personal meanings.

Morrisseau’s birchbark scrolls offer a case study through which to examine these intersecting meanings. This study is necessary to answer the question of why he returned to the wiigwaasabak decades into his career, after having seemingly abandoned many of the materials that defined his early years in favor of fine art media. To show how material simultaneously functions beyond and gives meaning to visual imagery as more than a ground or medium, this essay looks at the scrolls’ material and cultural elements: support and animate matter (birchbark); pigments and medicine (white paint), and volume and objectness (containers).

These elements recur throughout Morrisseau’s work, and past scholars have concluded that this was driven entirely by historical materialist, primitivist, and formalist concerns. I argue, however, that in the wiigwaasabak these elements come together in ways and for reasons that are quite different, instead reflecting consistency with Anishinaabe spirituality. This requires a close look at Morrisseau as both a maker both of images and of objects with material specificity.

Historical Materialism, Primitivism, Formalism

Previous scholars have focused on Morrisseau’s use of materials along three lines: historical materialism, primitivism, and formalism. In 1984, Elizabeth McLuhan first identified these arguments as they pertained to Morrisseau’s use of birchbark (interjections mine):

Morrisseau's use of bark for painting has several explanations. As [James] Stevens points out, Morrisseau was a craftsman who worked in the medium. Bark was an “acceptably Indian” medium for public sale [primitivist]. The Midewiwin scrolls were made of bark [formalist]. And, most importantly of all, bark cost nothing but the effort to gather and prepare it [historical materialist]. Ironically this early work on bark, painted in a hodgepodge mixture of watercolours, oils, and inks, is more derivative of Western painting conventions than his later work.7

The historical materialist view is materialist in the Marxist sense: art as a cultural form reflects the economic conditions of its production. Approaches to Morrisseau’s art frequently pay close attention to the socio-economic conditions of his life at particular points and how those determined what materials he used to make art.