“Legends state that the bear was at one time in the early history of the Ojibway a human, or had human form,” writes Canadian painter Norval Morrisseau in his 1965 book, Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway. The bear, Morrisseau notes, is considered a demigod to the Ojibwe people, an animal whose body parts, including teeth, bones, and claws, are held sacred.¹ In his description of the rites of the Midaywewin religious society of the Ojibway, Morrisseau describes a ceremony in which the bear takes prominence:

...each member would bring out Midaywewin bags of powerful medicine, each with its otter skin. An Ojibway woman would then take up the big bearskin that was tied to some poles and her husband, through his power, commanded the skin to come alive and it would crawl and try to get itself loose from the buckskin strings that tied it. All the otter skins that were running around would jump into the medicine bags in fear of the bear.²

Significantly, the bear also featured prominently in Morrisseau’s own spiritual development. The animal appeared in a dream that became the catalyst for the artist incorporating Ojibwe beliefs and oral traditions into his work.³

      The bear’s capacity to traverse spiritual realms appears to be the subject of this 1990 painting, Medicine Bear, where the animal emerges out of the green on the right-hand side of the work into the yellow of the left, as if moving between ethereal and worldly domains. Its snout turned upward in a smile, the bear carries over this right paw a medicine bag which features the same spiral pattern as is found on its body. In the mint green field behind it, a coterie of fish and birds (and one creature that is neither fish nor fowl) flock on its back and paw. The speckled pattern of the fish is echoed in the contents of the medicine bag. Linked by the black line that forms the basis of their bodies, the animals simultaneously separate the two halves of the painting and unify the composition. Morrisseau transforms the flowing, commingling forms of a mystical vision into an image of lucid clarity, accessible even to viewers without cultural context for his work.

      When Morrissseau’s paintings premiered in a 1962 solo exhibition at Jack Pollack Gallery in Toronto, the show sold out instantly and the artist was catapulted into commercial success.⁴ Media scrutiny followed Morrisseau for the rest of his life, as critics struggled to compartmentalize a Native painter who used contemporary materials and embodied the Western trope of a troubled artist. The reductivist portrayals that followed often pitched Morrisseau as unable to reconcile modern-day success with his Native background. These representations failed to account for the traumatizing life circumstances—including physical and sexual abuse the artist suffered as a child at an Indian boarding school—that likely contributed to his later struggles with alcohol and self-destructive tendencies.⁵ Throughout his life, Morrisseau’s artistic production was tied indelibly to his spiritual beliefs, which developed over the course his life. He drew from traditional Ojibwe practices, Catholicism, and, after the 1970s, Eckanar, a twentieth century spiritual movement which incorporates beliefs of universal unity and soul travel between astral dimensions. Medicine Bear, with its distinct depiction of a crossing between two dimensions, nimbly merges these later beliefs with Ojibwe traditions.

¹ Norval Morrisseau, Legends of My People, The Great Ojibway, (New York: The Ryerson Press, first paperback edition, 1977), 38.

² Ibid, 44.

³ Greg A. Hill, et al, Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2006), 17-18.

⁴ Ruth B. Phillips, “Morrisseau’s Entrance: Negotiating Primitivism, Modernism, and the Anishnaabe Tradition.” in Hill, et al, Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist, 44-50.

⁵ Hill, et all, Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist, 41.


Image courtesy Bockley Gallery.