Preservation,Provenance,Piracy: (Re)Framing Indigenous Art

Preservation

Breathtaking, isn’t it? This is an original painting by Norval Morrisseau, considered the grandfather of Canadian Indigenous art, founder of the Woodland Cree School and originating member of the Professional National Indian Artists Incorporation, known as “the Group of Seven” who shattered the “white ceiling” of the Canadian art market in the 1960s and 1970s. ¹ This painting is an untitled 6′ by 3′ acrylic on paper that exemplifies the signature aesthetic of the Woodland school that Morrisseau envisioned. Thick black outlines frame five interconnected and elemental beings: snake, sun, moon, fire, and human. The “x-ray anatomy” of the snake’s spine exposes the internal lines of power that connect all living things, and the coded figures that comprise that spine replicate ancient Anishinaabe petroglyphs. You’ll note the symmetrical duality rendered by the bisected sun and moon; the use of totemic colors—tan, black, ochre, bright-yellow, turquoise. Note, too, the use of brown “craft paper” instead of canvas. If you look to the low left corner, attend to Morrisseau’s signature in syllabics: “Copper Thunderbird.” This is the Ojibwe name he said he was given in a dream-vision that heralded his destiny as a “shaman-artist” and which is often used by gallery dealers and appraisers on traveling TV shows, to distinguish an “authentic” Morrisseau from the so-called “pirated copies” his work has inspired.

Born in 1932 on the Sandy Point Reserve, Ontario—just a handful of miles and a world away from where I was raised—Morrisseau, like many Ojibwe of his generation, was a self-taught artist with a fourth-grade residential school education and a bloodline legacy to the Midewiwin, the secret Medicine society of the Great Lakes Anishinaabe, whose rockface petrographs and birchbark scrolls are the oldest known writing in North America, carbon-dating to the 1st-century BCE. Morrisseau learned from his Mide grandfather the complicated geometrical patterns and symbols that codified 2 millenia of cultural wisdom, along with the traditional values, stories, and rituals that undergird them and from which they derive their spiritual power. When he began to study and recreate these images at 19, to vision them and himself in dreams, when he began to guide White anthropologists like Selwyn Dewdney through Ontario’s painted cliffs that are the First Nations first cartography, and when he illustrated Dewdney’s edited book on Ojibwe lore and iconography, Morrisseau knew that he was breaking taboo. He knew that by making these images and explanations public, he was making accessible and therefore marketable to the White world something that was sacred and secret and safe. But Morriseau persevered in what must have been a strategic commodification, for reasons that remain too complex and contested to address in this essay. Suffice it to say that a decade later, in 1962, an exhibit of Morrisseau’s work sold out in the preeminent Pollock Gallery in Toronto, and for the first time in Canadian history, Indigenous artwork in Indigenous idioms stormed the Canadian art market and forever transformed the national landscape of aesthetic value.

Provenance

This particular Morrisseau painting hangs on my living room wall, directly facing my sofa where it is often the first and the last thing I see in a day. Its dimensions are life-size, and its totemic presence looks back at me daily, in a way that demands I reflect on those skeletons under the skin, those reverberant spines that, in my case—in my case as a White woman witness—daily sustain the structures of power whereby an original Morrisseau graces my wall. These paintings are part of my “inheritance,” my familial property, the provenance of my parents’ estate, whose complex relationship to the Ojibwe community I’ve spoken of many times. ² In this iteration of family history, I focus on my mother, Marion Lamm, who was a dedicated collector of Indigenous art—perhaps one of the largest private collectors of Anishinaabe paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the 1980s. A decade before it was fashionable and not because it was marketable, my mother sought to express her genuine appreciation for Ojibwe culture and, I believe, to assuage her incalculable indebtedness to Ojibwe land and labor, by buying, framing, and filling her home with hundreds of original work by artists like Norval Morrisseau, Carl Ray, Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness, Morley Kakapteum, the brothers Kakageesick, and the Inuit women painters of Cape Dorset, on Baffin Isle, Hudson Bay, Nunavit Territory. These artists, all celebrities now, were household names in my childhood, first names on my White-child tongue—“Norval” & “Carl” & “Morley” & “Eddy.” There was a time when their appearance at our door or on the sofa with my mother seemed a daily occurrence, paper or canvas fanned out around them, heads together, equally intent on the curve of a line, or a pattern of color, or the subject of inspiration. My mother cherished these interactions as much as the artwork itself. Her favorites, she said, were when the artists had rendered the “old-time ways of life in the bush,” before or apart from the time of the Whites, like herself. She would ask the artists to speak of those traditions, and somedays they would share those stories, teach her how it always, already was coded into the work. And on those days, she would write the story down on a scrap of paper that she would tape to the back of a painting after framing. And for many days after, it was my job or that of my sisters to act as docent to her personal gallery and to retell those explanatory stories to our White neighbors, and White friends, and White incidental stoppers-by, who would be taken on a tour of that big house, where every inch of every wall was filled floor to ceiling with Indigenous art. My mother was a complicated curator, and she held her private collection sacred, secret, and safe.

Now there are a lot of ways I could frame my memories of those transactions and the art that accumulated: as a calculated commodification, as colonialist recompense, as cross-cultural communication, as a daughter’s nostalgia. Each frame would mark one part of the broad cultural canvas. But regardless of the framing, the nail in the wall from which all of this hangs . . . is that in the idiom of the marketplace, my family holds “First Provenance.” Breathtaking isn’t it? The inescapable imperialism of that term.

Piracy

When the land your ancestors have lived on for 2 millenia is “discovered” by French explorers in the 15th century and then claimed by an English King in 1670 so that all its goods and services are ceded in perpetuity to his trading company, the Hudson Bay, piracy becomes a generational enterprise. When your land and your languages and your lore, and even your most basic ways of making a living have already been stolen, what permutations on piracy remain to an Indigenous people whose culture-on-canvas suddenly commands a high price from the colonizers.

My sister told me a story when I was writing this essay. “You know, Norval came over to the house one evening in the late 80s,” she said, “and he was carrying armloads of unframed paintings.” Now this wasn’t unusual in itself, because everybody in those days knew that when you came into the city from the Rez, when you needed money and you came into the city with goods to barter, that Marion Lamm was always buying. My mother always bought something, even a paint-by-number your grandchild had sent, and she always gave a higher price to the artist than the galleries who took back half the sale in commission.

And on this particular evening, well past the heyday of Morrisseau’s popularity, when his hands were already unsteady from Parkinson’s and alcoholism, he’d brought dozens of rolls—maybe thirty or more my sister recalled—and he unscrolled paper and canvas and spread them all out till they covered the living room floor from the French Bay window to the cabinet of English bone china. A cabinet, incidentally, where a series of pencil-sketch landscapes on paper plates by Eddy Cobiness stood propped among the porcelain. And they sat together on that couch, Norval and Marion, and they talked for a long time. “This is not your work,” she said, with an eye for authenticity he’d helped train. “I see that you’ve signed your name to them as if they were yours, but these paintings, they don’t belong to you.” He explained that he’d started an art school up in Red Lake because he wanted to preserve the tradition, and the young people on the Rez knew little of lore and had no way of making a living in an economy that refused them entry. And besides, there’s an old-time tradition before and apart from the Whites, he said, where artistry was a generational enterprise, where the young apprenticed to the elder, and idea of ownership was a concept that came with the Whites. And besides, he needed the money. ³

And I can’t look away from that scene, because in my mind’s eye it echoes every scene stretching back to First Contact in which a “noble savage” and “wealthy white” sat in a circle of trade goods and bartered the buying and selling Ojibwe culture in the currency of the time. Each was guided by their own understanding of preservation and provenance, and piracy. I cannot tell you how the negotiations ended that night, or whether they came to an understanding, or what happened to all those paintings in the end. That conversation is the provenance of two people, both long dead now, and all that remains is the work.

This is the work I’ve inherited.

This life-size roll of “butcher paper.”

This is the work of the colonial child, the curator’s daughter,.

This is the work that frames my day,

And it fills up the room where I live.