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.
–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. 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. 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 his physical and mental health or legal and financial problems. These arguments, however, overlook the fact that certain materials and objects, like 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. 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.” Yet Morrisseau’s interest extended beyond translating them in his own artwork: “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 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 worldviews pay attention to the vibrancy of matter as expressed through their art and visual culture. 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 several 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 object quality (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 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.

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 certain points and how those determined what materials he used to make art.

For example, Gerald McMaster in this volume discusses Morisseau’s 1972–73 Prison Series––drawings made while he was incarcerated for six months in Kenora, Ontario––and notes that Morrisseau used green paper towel as the only material available to an artist who “demanded a surface.” Morrisseau, McMaster writes, “has often worked with materials that are considered poor in quality; he has used anything available, including craft paper, the walls of homes he rented, and traditional birch bark.” McLuhan, as well as suggesting that birch bark cost Morrisseau nothing but effort, noted that he painted “in any medium available, including plywood, hide, and kraft paper, in crayon, oils, and probably anything at hand.” In some accounts, he would use porcupine quills as makeshift pens. Such notions recur throughout scholarly and critical writing about his work.

Birchbark as a medium is, accordingly, understood mainly as a material, one that––like many others he used––did not involve the costs of expensive art paper or canvas. Considering birchbark only as a “free” or cheap material, however, misses the environmental context of the material and the seasonal nature of its availability. In his youth, Morrisseau and his family frequently worked with the material to create baskets, containers, and collectibles to sell, such as birchbark cutouts and painted containers. Indeed, some of his first-ever painted images were done in Cochenour, in the Red Lake Area, in the late 1950s, on the insides of large birchbark baskets made by his mother-in-law Mrs. Patricia Kakegamic, as well as on sheets of birchbark and plywood panels. Jack Pollock describes that birchbark was so readily available to Morrisseau that at their first meeting, the artist’s table was “piled high with paper, bark and paints.” In letters to Selwyn Dewdney (1909–1979), Morrisseau describes gathering birchbark for art-making. In one, from November 1960, Morrisseau explains that the bark will not be ready to harvest until May or June, as opposed to plywood which is available immediately. The next spring he explains that it is “Hard to get the scrap bark as the sap starts to Run Leaving that Part on the tree itself instead of the Bark but will do whatever I can OK.”

The material called for a different approach from the artist. In the foreword to Morrisseau’s Legends of My People, the Great Ojibway (1965), Dewdney recounts the contrast in the care he took when using birchbark as opposed to plywood, whereas Morrisseau put it, “... when I have the plyboard [in front of me] I don’t Draw what I made in Advance. As I Said I Have a feeling I Should Paint what I am Supposed [intended] to do. So I Sit. And there my Hand moves and I made a Picture.” In contrast, Morrisseau preferred to make preparatory sketches on birchbark. His willingness to paint more freely on plywood speaks to the difference in availability and physical responsiveness between the two supports. Clearly, Morrisseau was not thinking solely in terms of financial cost when it came to using birchbark. Seasonal rhythms, time limitations, and processing all figured in, which suggests the limits of strictly historical materialist approaches to such a medium.

Morrisseau was conscious of the primitivist dynamic at play, and his deployment of birchbark and similar materials became part of his self-fashioning as an artist. For the statement to his first exhibition with Jack Pollock, which would be used as the introduction to his book Legends of My People, the Great Ojibway, Morrisseau wrote “I have grown up with many stories and legends of my people and I have made paintings of these legends on great sheets of birchbark, done these with tempered water color and some on plyboard.

Such material choices aligned with the ways that, as Carmen Robertson points out, Morrisseau himself performed a kind of character and “authenticity” as part of his Indigenous

In the 1974 film Paradox of Norval Morrisseau, for example, the first work by Morrisseau featured on screen is a painting on two sheets of conjoined birchbark featuring a jiisaakan (shaking tent) ceremony and horned Great Turtle. Even a decade after Pollock began encouraging Morrisseau to use more fine art materials, Morrisseau was not only continuing to create work on birchbark and other “Indian materials,” but was also centering them in his own self-fashioning.

Formalist arguments contend that if Morrisseau was focused on certain objects or materials, it was primarily because they served as sources of formal inspiration. Much ink has been spilt discussing Morrisseau’s source imagery, from the great pictographs of the Great Lake waterways that Morrisseau called “the Indians’ cathedrals” to imagery from mide-wiigwaas that he says he was shown by his grandfather.

The formalist line argues that Morrisseau used bark because he was emulating the forms of the Midewiwin wiigwaasabakoon but that the birchbark itself is secondary to the style and visual forms depicted on it. The underlying assumption here is that it was a natural step for Morrisseau to translate imagery he was inspired by from birchbark scrolls or rock surfaces into new forms, but it didn’t matter what he created them on, whether something similar or something new.

When it comes to formal influence from mide-wiigwaas, scholars have typically focused on formal motifs and stylistic structures. These birchbark scrolls, called “instruction scrolls” by Dewdney in his comprehensive study on the topic, are typically etched onto the inner sides of birchbark that is tightly coiled. The scrolls, closely guarded within the society and withheld from general view, preserve oral and ceremonial traditions of the Midewiwin. McLuhan notes that the Mide scroll is “an architectural blueprint of the ceremonial longhouse and a procedural outline parallelling the lodge's symbolic and actual construction,” and that the rectangular format is not only similar to the scale of the Midewiwin lodge that such scrolls often depict, but also translates well to rectangular formats of paper, canvas, or, in our case, reconfigured birchbark compositions. McLuhan, Dewdney, and others since them have noted that in addition to the Anishinaabe pantheon of other-than-human beings and ancestral figures, specific motifs in Morrisseau’s work derive from the scrolls. Dewdney, for example, traces the prototype of the split-circle or miigis shell motif to the mide-wiigwaas, noting it was an important part of Midewiwin medicine bag contents, while McLuhan notes the delineation of internal parts in an x-ray style, emanating lines, clusters of dots, and lines extending from and connecting figures through their mouths and hearts all recur in Mide scrolls.

Formalist analyses of Morrisseau’s art quickly seek to separate the birchbark scroll as object from the forms inscribed on it when Morrisseau translated them into a new mode. Morrisseau’s monumental ink drawing Coming Away (Legendary Scroll Motifs, 1977, for example, is often cited as the primary evidence of Morrisseau’s adoption of mide-wiigwaas source imagery. McLuhan calls this work a “missing link” of sorts—“an introduction to the forms and images that would be developed in Morrisseau's work over the next twenty years” and “an artist's reproduction of a scroll,” but in ink on paper. Phillips likewise notes that Coming Away is visual evidence that the Midewiwin scroll tradition provided the foundation for Morrisseau's graphic style with its “representations of oval and rectangular Midé lodges and manidoog in human and animal form [which] are closely related to scroll imagery.”

This line of analyses extends to later drawings, such as Shaman Teaching His Two Halves in a Dream State, 1983, which McLuhan calls a “monumental scroll.” It is, she says, a “breathtaking tribute to his roots in Ojibwa pictography.... The scroll is a spiritual voyage in which the artist is both instructor and student. The scroll cannot be read or decoded for information, although the images are recognizable from the Midewiwin Society scrolls...” She notes that Morrisseau said in a 1983 interview that “When the Midewiwin people wrote simple bird signs––all these signs––they did that for a reason. They began to invoke that dream-state.... This scroll is more or less for the environment of one person... to feel for a while that there is a separate reality.” When McLuhan (and, apparently, Morrisseau) refer to this drawing as a “scroll,” it is not meant in the literal sense as an object, but rather to evoke the mode of viewing a work that unfurls over time before one’s eyes, as well as the linear style of the scroll translated from birchbark to paper.

Birchbark – Support – Animate Matter

These analyses grow out of a modernist, Euro-American focus on surface that relegates Morrisseau’s artistic materials to little more than a support or vehicle for his imagery. They fail to account for the ways in which Morrisseau returned to certain materials, such as birchbark, repeatedly in his career, and how those materials exist in concert with the image. And they fail to consider the nature of wiigwaas as a potentially animate material that exists as part of a network of other-than-human beings, agencies, and forces. How do the Anishinaabe understand the nature of the materials that Morrisseau used, and how do such beliefs allow us to better consider how this material works with the images that populate its surface?

When birchbark is considered only as a medium, the visual pun referenced by McLuhan concludes at the limit of the support. But when we consider birchbark as wiigwaas, an essential tool and material at the centre of Anishinaabe lifeways, one that holds deep spiritual importance and serves as shelter, container, and vessel, it takes on a very different connotation than merely a pun, a formal reference, an available material, or an indicator of “Indianness.” The ancestral cultural meaning is instead materially layered into the work and calls out to other ways that birchbark serves Anishinaabe life ways and functions in transportive (in both the spiritual and physical sense) and animate ways.

Anishinaabemowin grammar differentiates animate from inanimate nouns. Grammatically, wiigwaas or wiigwaasaatig, birch tree, is an animate noun. Its agency is signified in Anishinaabemowin by the honorific for the white or paper birch, Nimishoomis-wiigwaas, “My Grandfather Birch Tree.” By contrast, wiigwaas as birchbark, as well as most items made from birchbark, including canoes and baskets, are inanimate nouns. One exception is wiigwaasapakwaan, bark roof panels, which are grammatically animate according to one elder because “birch-bark roof wards off Thunderbird attacks,” suggesting that the birchbark dwelling depicted in Morrisseau’s Ancestors Performing the Ritual of the Shaking Tent has an animacy befitting its materiality and ritual status.

Maureen Matthews has further argued that what she calls “socially active artefacts,” or culturally and spiritual significant ceremonial items and materials, including those made with birchbark, are accorded grammatical animacy, although at times this may be obscured in everyday speech by inanimate grammatical constructions. Matthews recounts, for example, a story about birchbark scrolls told by the elder Omishoosh (Charlie George Owen), who notes about “birch bark which they rolled up [scrolls]” that “They would have been inscribed. They had placed them underground. When someone slept there [where they were buried], they would be haunted. They would hear from them [animate], someone speaking about something. That was the scroll that they heard.” That the animacy and status of wiigwaas shifts within the Anishinaabe world depending on its function points to how differently Morrisseau may have understood the material in his artistic practice, particularly given his frequently stated association of art and shamanism.

Alongside the animate nature of (some) birchbark is the understanding that the birch tree is a key representative of the Anishinaabe value of reciprocity. The late Cree and Métis scholar Mary Siisip Geniusz, an Oshkaabewis (ceremonial apprentice) and teaching assistant to the Anishinaabe medicine practitioner Keewaydinoquay Peschel, describes the values of reciprocity and respect in a creation story titled “The Birch Tree, the Maple Tree, and Naanabozho.” In the story, the titular culture hero, Naanabozho, asks the birch tree, wiigwaasi-mitig, about its purpose and creation: “The wiigwaasi-mitig finally said, ‘I was created to help the Anishinaabeg. They can take my bark to fashion makakoon, birch bark boxes, to hold their food or water or possessions. They can store things in my bark for later use.’”

Reciprocity, the act of gifting, is integral to the tree’s nature. Morrisseau himself wrote about the ways that his community acknowledged this generosity of material, writing “All the herbs in the forest are used by the Ojibway, as well as tree roots and barks. Small tobacco offerings were placed where a herb had been removed by some Indians who belonged to the medicine societies.” As previously noted, Morrisseau was keenly aware of the appropriate times of year, namely the spring when sap is flowing so as to minimize harm to the trees, and seasonal rhythms for such harvesting, ensuring that birchbark would be responsibly harvested in a renewable fashion.

Just as the birch tree’s acts of generosity define Anishinaabe understanding of its agency, the Morrisseau Storylines project has astutely identified gifting, or bagidinige, as an essential protocol and theme in Morrisseau’s work: “From his earliest days as an artist he gifted works on wiigwaas as a form of gratitude.” He frequently executed such works on birchbark as an appropriate medium. Two paintings of the Horned Medicine Snake on birchbark, for example, were gifted to the Winnipeg doctor Harry Medovy in gratitude for his treatment of Morrisseau’s daughter, Victoria, when she was ill. In a letter to Dr. Medovy dated September 2, 1961, Morrisseau thanks the doctor for helping his daughter and calls him “a great Medicine man among mine and your people.” Morrisseau explains the dual nature of the “medicine snake who appears in medicine dreams among the Ojibwa as good and at times Evil.” The Medicine Snake is an appropriate subject for this gift to a “great [Western] Medicine man,” but notably Morrisseau refers to the works as “schrolls [sic] of Ojibwa art” in the letter. The works, each consisting of two sheets of joined birchbark painted in black and red tempera, depict the Medicine Snake filled and surrounded by pictographic forms that retain much of the rectilinearity of mide-wiigwaas designs, and one appears to be signed, now illegibly, with a title similar to “The Ojibwa Medicine Society” that appears other early works featuring the Medicine Snake.

White - Pigment – Medicine

The white colouration of the Medicine Snake on the Weinstein scroll is significant for its spiritual connotations within Morrisseau’s aesthetic vocabulary. It is well documented that Morrisseau deployed colour symbolically, though not always consistently across his oeuvre. Colour was a point of contention in his early practice when he first moved into a diverse palette of acrylic paint and away from more the earthen and “natural” tones that some non-Indigenous mentors had at first encouraged. His push into bright electric acrylics in the latter half of his career––reacting against the greys of European modernist ​​masters like Georges Braque (1882–1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and channeling inspiration from his Eckankar spiritual beliefs––further expanded his chromatic vocabulary. Indeed, by the late 1970s, Morrisseau’s color symbolism and visual language was heavily inflected by these explorations into Eckankar, and he increasingly referenced the astral plane and what he called the House of Invention as his sources of inspiration. He said “We can learn how to heal people with colour. The House of Invention gave me colour​​.”

Earlier in his career, Morrisseau thought about colour in an Anishinaabe framework, including the medicinal qualities of certain coloured substances and their cosmological connotations. Morrisseau writes in Legends of My People that “The Ojibway also had a bluish-coloured onaman sand that was used as a sacred charm against conjuring. There was, too, a white-coloured sand that cured headaches when a small amount was placed on a heated stone, also a white liquid to cure pains. All these can still be obtained in the Lake Nipigon area, although none are used at this time.” In various of his accounts, whiteness in particular defines powerful spirits and other-than-human beings like ​​Mishibizhiw: “This huge cat is believed by the Ojibway to be white in colour [emphasis mine], ​​with horns, and very powerful. It is believed to live in the water but why a cat lives in the water, or where it lived, is not known... the true water god, the white one in colour, always brought good luck to all who respected him.” Throughout Morrisseau’s work, significant and dangerous beings, from sacred animals to wiindigo to shamans in transformation, are depicted with white to connote their spiritual power.

In terms of its meaning and use, white is the most consistent colour across Morrisseau’s career. As Sinclair and Pollock describe in The Art of Norval Morrisseau, white, and waabishkaa or whiteness (“it is white”), including “albino animals or persons, white faces, white hair – always denote spirituality.” This consistency, I argue, is linked to Anishinaabe worldviews.

George Hamell has discussed how, in a Northeastern Woodlands worldview, the physical qualities of material such as shell, crystal, and copper, namely their reflectivity, brightness, shininess, and whiteness, are associated with metaphysical, lifegiving powers and properties (medicines). These include health, knowledge, foresight, and insight (reflectivity), which are likewise associated with warmth- and light-emitting entities such as fire, the sun, the stars, and other celestial bodies. Whiteness, he writes, “connotes the cognitive aspect of Life.” Hamell relates this worldview to the metaphorical significance of glass trade beads, onto which such Indigenous values were mapped, and we might likewise relate it the how such values in an Anishinaabe understanding are mapped onto two-dimensional works.

White is used throughout Morrisseau’s oeuvre to connote medicines, legendary figures, and sacred and spiritual beings in a way that is grounded in such Anishinaabe metaphysical associations with the colour’s physical or material properties. It is particularly prevalent in early images executed on birchbark and plywood—including Medicine Snake forms, as in the Weinstein scroll. Morrisseau’s use of white on birchbark is particularly meaningful because the metaphysical or medicinal aspects of whiteness are not unrelated to similar properties in the birch tree and are reflected in the physical properties of white pigments, including its shininess and reflectivity.

As in the works previously discussed, early images of powerful beings like the Great Horned Medicine Snake typically depict them in white. The frequency with which such images are created on birchbark suggests that wiigwaas is an appropriate and essential material on which to depict figures at the centre of Anishinaabe lifeways, and he makes this connection directly in certain paintings on birchbark, which he inscribes with the phrase “Ojibwa Medicine Society.” These works typically depict the Great Horned Medicine Snake with a white body and horns, often with a medicine bundle worn around its lower head and circles of power filling the background. This sacred snake is said by Morrisseau to have given his people “the sacred knowledge of several hundred kinds of medicine” and serves as the “emblem for medicine in the Ojibway tribe.” Another early work on birchbark, inscribed with the similar title Thunderbird Ojibwa Medicine Society, c.1958, extends the use of white to a Thunderbird.

And if whiteness or shininess functions as power or medicine, it is appropriate that Nimishoomis-wiigwaas itself provides medicinal value to the Anishinaabe as one of its many gifts. The whiteness of the paper birch is not insignificant in the Anishinaabe worldview, and birchbark is deployed in numerous medicinal ways: bark cones are components of medicine kits and used for inhalation; birch twig tips are used to treat stomach cramps and indigestion; birch oil salves are used to treat rheumatism, and birch tea is used to treat diarrhea, kidney stones, and worms. Birchbark is thus a doubly appropriate medium for depictions of medicine figures, themes, and stories.

On the Weinstein birchbark scroll, the white coloration of the Medicine Snake emerges from the darker brown background as if swimming through water. The contrast renders the depth of surface treatment ambiguous––even with some wear showing the lighter brown of the bark through the brown wash, the white coloration of the snake both advances forward and gives the impression that it is a lighter etched surface exposing yet another layer of the bark. Indeed, birchbark can greatly differ in colour, depending on the time of year and how deeply it is cut when harvested. The white outer layer, or periderm, of the paper birch has a yellower and smoother interior surface which served as Morrisseau’s typical working surface. After preparing and drying, this softer interior periderm can be incised with designs or scraped to reveal a lighter surface, like an etching. The next layer of the tree is a darker brown cork skin which protects its vascular system. To maintain the health of the tree this is typically not used but can be inadvertently peeled off in harvesting. The coloration of birchbark reflects a physical depth, which in the Weinstein birchbark scroll, Morrisseau manipulated to simultaneously suggest the Medicine Snake is a scraped design revealing a lighter layer of bark while also being a painted upper surface.

Morrisseau often emulated the aesthetic of scraped birchbark with gouache or tempera, evoking the whiteness and shininess of scraped bark that also appears in mide-wiigwaas. In some cases, he made scrolls and other works on birchbark that are scraped or hammered in close imitation of the incised bark designs of the Midewiwin. Etched or painted in single tones, these works also often feature handles, presumably for rolling. Morrisseau achieved the whiteness of the images with paint but also by incising and hammering, revealing brighter bark beneath.

Morrisseau undoubtedly took inspiration from historic examples of birchbark decoration and design, including medicine scrolls. Additionally, Selwyn Dewdney suggested to Morrisseau in a 1960 letter that he try scraping bark, and then staining some of the areas. In a scroll from the following year, Thunderbird with Ancestral Motifs, c.1961, Morrisseau applies this advice when he depicts a toothed and horned thunderbird and other animals in white gouache on two sheets of birchbark stitched together with spruce root and with attached dowel handles.

Some, but not all, of the designs are etched into the bark before being painted over with the gouache. This suggests that Morrisseau uses the paint to enhance the whiteness of incised and scraped bark designs. The two sheets of birchbark, with a thunderbird on one side and fish and diving water bird on the other, show between the sky and water worlds. Hamell notes that white and shiny medicines or “other world” substances are associated with underwater grandfathers or spirits and are thought to be gifted by such beings at the meeting points of water and land, such as the shoreline. The two sides of the scroll thus conform to the duality of Anishinaabe cosmological opposition seen throughout historic Anishinaabe material culture while giving image in white pigment on birchbark to the meeting place, the spruce root seam, ​​​​of oppositional worlds.

Whiteness, then, is suggestive of metaphysical as well as material content in Morrisseau’s oeuvre. Whiteness deployed on, or derived from, his birchbark works evokes Anishinaabe values of power and ​​medicine that are likewise associated with birchbark itself. In later works, when Morrisseau shifted primarily to acrylic paints, often applied straight from the tube using both brush and finger, the glossier nature of acrylic polymers was a natural extension of such values.

Object – Volume – Cultural Container

In Morrisseau’s early life, birchbark was first and foremost a pliable, multi-purpose material, useful for creating baskets and bowls, canoes, and even homes and lodges. Among Morrisseau’s earliest uses of birchbark as an artistic material were paintings done on birchbark baskets, made by family members. One such basket was made by his mother-in-law, Patricia Kakegamic, in 1963 at Sandy Lake First Nation. Morrisseau’s design features a simple but evocative split circle in red, yellow, and black, rays extending outward and up the sloped sides of the basket like the sun.

Morrisseau painted on and created numerous functional objects, most of them birchbark. Yet there is a lack of attention to the nature of the object within Morrisseau’s oeuvre—that is, the way in which such works take up volume and space in the world. When considered for its physical nature, the container, with its physical capacity to hold, was central to Morrisseau’s work. From baskets and bowls to scrolls, these objects hold space and lifegiving attributes an––not least in the case of scrolls––could also hold the intangibles of knowledge and tradition.

The list of possible sale items that Morrisseau sent to Selwyn Dewdney in 1962, including “bark baskets,” “cedar drums,” “scraped bark art,” and “very thinned bark cut out's [sic] and color paper to show through cutouts,” in addition to aforementioned “scrools [sic] of bark-cloth” and “2 feet bark scroll,” show the range of objects Morrisseau considered making and in many cases executed. But what is noteworthy is how birchbark is used as a material not only economic sustenance, in the case of craft items, but also to create vessels for subsistence and cultural continuity. Morrisseau dynamically engaged with birchbark in his practice. For example, a selection of birchbark cutouts in the Glenbow Museum collection, symmetrical geometric designs similar to paper snowflakes, are flat but would have been folded to cut. Another remarkable birchbark container, painted with a fish design, is unique in its vertical format, perhaps modeled on waste basket designs common among Anishinaabe souvenir makers but also intriguingly beginning to resemble the rolled vertical structure of the scroll.

Scrolls

The wiigwaasabak is an exemplary container of culture, medicine, lifeways, and knowledge. The format of the scroll brings the characteristics of birchbark, pigment, and object quality together with their associations of animacy, medicine, and cultural conveyance. And as these materialist elements extend across the first three decades of Morrisseau’s oeuvre, so too does the scroll as a format that followed Morrisseau from his earliest works to his maturation in the mid-1980s. The full quote of Morrisseau’s own account of his exposure to wiigwaasabakoon makes clear how central the scrolls were to his formation as an artist:

Other scrolls from the same collection and likely of a similar vintage are unrolled but the curving nature of the bark seems to threaten to roll the compositions back up tightly, the conjoined sheets of birchbark asserting their material force. These scrolls contain black and red designs of ancestral figures, animals, and sacred beings like a niibinaabe (mermaid or water spirit) and Mishibizhiw, freely arranged across the bark like petroglyphs rather than in the strict frame of the mide-wiigwaas. One of these scrolls features a jiisaakan ceremony, lines of power connecting sacred beings to the reverberating birchbark ritual structure​​. (A similar one can be seen in the film The Paradox of Norval Morrisseau.) As Phillips describes, the “flowing, calligraphic quality” of these scrolls from the early sixties enlarge Midewiwin-derived motifs and “freed [them] from the rigid geometries of ritual notation.” They are neither completely schematic in how the figures are defined within the bark space, nor do they depict single examples of legendary beings; these arrays of figures interact across the birchbark sheets, which are themselves untreated, fragmenting, and reveal the truth of their material. While these scrolls lack the dowel handles of others from the same period, they are poised to coil back up on themselves, as if the physical nature of the birchbark continues to assert a form of refusal, fighting to hide the entirety of Morrisseau’s imagery from view just as mide-wiigwaas were kept secluded from public consumption. These scrolls exist as simultaneously object and surface, painting and narrative record, animate and poised to enter the fine art world’s system of aesthetic values.

Conclusion – “I always wanted to make a scroll”

Morrisseau generally reduced his use of birchbark as an artistic material by the end of the 1960s, and we have few examples of works made on birchbark after the scroll he is filmed making in 1973 in The Paradox of Norval Morrisseau. This was not only because of his own interests in other media but also an acknowledgment of the values of the fine art world and its categories of proper materials, a move encouraged by Jack Pollock and others.

Thus, Morrisseau returns to the material and format of the scroll. But why does he do so at this point in his career when he has not only expanded his spiritual and aesthetic vocabulary, but has also found great success with his turn to modernist materials? Through the scroll, Morrisseau could resolve the seeming dilemma that Phillips once observed between “orthodox modernism” and “traditional Anishnaabek genres and media”—what she more recently identifies as the synthesis of “old and new,” “innovation and allegiance to tradition.” He returned to the scroll as a format not created solely for artistic expression, but rather as a materially and culturally significant artform situated in the web of relations and metaphysical properties that encompass wiigwaasabaak.

Scrolls made of birchbark, with pigments evoking shininess and whiteness, or exchangeable with them, function as animate containers of culture. When Morrisseau says “I always wanted to make a scroll... but... [they] told me first I had to be a Shaman,” he implies that in the eyes of his community, the “they” here, the status of shaman is first required. And in roughly the same year that he completed these two late scrolls, 1986, he was appointed Grand Shaman of the Ojibwa.

Morrisseau, then, returns to making scrolls as an object category at the most appropriate time. At this transitional moment in the mid-1980s, even as he began to reach new heights in modernist painting, he felt the need to make scrolls, objects with material potency and agency.

The wiigwaasabaak subcategory of Morrisseau’s oeuvre offers us an opportunity to take seriously a materialist approach to Morrisseau’s work, one which demonstrates that the incorporation of a deep understanding of Anishinaabe worldviews openis new lines of research and makes exciting connections across Morrisseau’s oeuvre. The breadth of Morrisseau’s artistic production includes objects and materials that exceed the categories of modern or fine art and instead must be understood as complex matrices of objecthood, agency, and animate materials, artifacts embedded with cultural knowledge alongside the images they bear. His work is most productively understood as the site of social interactions, cultural systems, and material characteristics. It is not just his birchbark scrolls that function in such ways. His two-dimensional works function as containers in kind, despite their flatness––containers of culture, power, and manifold material natures.