Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird by Armand Garnet Ruffo

Reviewed by: Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird by Armand Garnet Ruffo Albert Braz Armand Garnet Ruffo, Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2014. 320 pp. $32.95. Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise that the growing presence of indigenous people in Canadian cultural and academic life would not only add new perspectives to scholarly discourse but also challenge the very notion of what constitutes scholarship. This is certainly the case with Armand Garnet Ruffo’s Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird, a learned biography that does not include a single citation and tests the distinction between the factual and the fictive and the empirical and the mythical. An Anishnaabe from the northern Ontario town of Chapleau, Ruffo is a poet-academic who has made a reputation for himself primarily with biographical long poems about figures like the conservationist and nature writer Grey Owl, the Apache political leader Geronimo, and now the iconic Anishnaabe painter Morrisseau. His best known book is arguably Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney, in which Ruffo documents the relationship between the Englishman who pretended to be indigenous and his own family, the Espaniels. In terms of form, though, Grey Owl is a traditional text that borrows heavily from published biographies of the subject. However, this is not what Ruffo does in Norval Morrisseau, which is not only (mostly) in prose but also eschews empirically-based Western research methods in favour of an “Anishinaabe epistemology” (3) that embodies other ways of knowing. Ruffo makes his perspective explicit from the outset. He explains that the impetus for his study of Morrisseau was the 2005 invitation that he received from the art curator Greg Hill to produce a text for the catalogue of the National Gallery of Canada’s retrospective Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist. Since at the time Ruffo knew little about “the acclaimed Ojibway painter,” he pondered the offer and “waited. Waited for something to tell me either to take on the project or let it go” (1). That all changed one fateful night. While in bed, through “a combination of dreaming and remembering,” he thought he heard voices, voices that “had come from [End Page 241] the old flat-roof house of my childhood in the north. Perhaps from my mother and the neighbours who had dropped by for a visit, a chat, a drink” (1, 2). Upon reflecting on what he believed the voices had imparted to him, Ruffo deduced that Morrisseau’s “experiences, while extraordinary in their own right because of his unique gifts, were fundamentally connected to something larger than himself. I realized that Morrisseau’s life was representative of the profound upheaval that had taken place in the lives of Native people across the country” (2). Consequently, the significance of the painter’s achievement could only be captured from an Anishinaabe “mythic worldview” (5), which is what Ruffo proceeded to do. In his book, Ruffo traces the life and career of Norval Morrisseau, Copper Thunderbird (circa 1932 to 2007), from his birth in an isolated Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario, through his emergence as the founder of the Woodlands School of art, to his apotheosis as one of Canada’s most celebrated artists. Since Morrisseau had no formal training in art, many critics have been perplexed by his achievement. Ruffo, however, has a culturally-informed explanation: Morrisseau is a shaman-artist. In fact, he is not only a shaman-artist but comes from a long line of shaman-artists. As Ruffo has the painter explain to a client, “ ‘All the pictures that you bought from me are taken from the dreams of my grandfather.’ ” Or as Ruffo elaborates, “Whatever good fortune [Morrisseau] has he credits to his grandfather, Potan, the man who raised him in a world of manitous and demigods” (64). Ruffo goes so far as to state that by the time Morrisseau has his major success in the early 1960s, he “firmly believes that he is a born artist and cannot learn his kind of painting from anyone—as the sacred drum arises from the earth, his paintings arise from the old stories, and he is merely the instrument of their creation...

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