Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau

Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau
Author: Carmen L. Robertson
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0887554997

Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau examines the complex identities assigned to Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau. Was he an uneducated artist plagued by alcoholism and homelessness? Was Morrisseau a shaman artist who tapped a deep spiritual force? Or was he simply one of Canada’s most significant artists? Carmen L. Robertson charts both the colonial attitudes and the stereotypes directed at Morrisseau and other Indigenous artists in Canada’s national press. Robertson also examines Morrisseau’s own shaping of his image. An internationally known and award-winning artist from a remote area of northwestern Ontario, Morrisseau founded an art movement known as Woodland Art developed largely from Indigenous and personal creative elements. Still, until his retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 2006, many Canadians knew almost nothing about Morrisseau’s work. Using discourse analysis methods, Robertson looks at news stories, magazine articles, and film footage, ranging from Morrisseau’s first solo exhibition at Toronto’s Pollock Gallery in 1962 until his death in 2007 to examine the cultural assumptions that have framed Morrisseau.

Seeing Red

Seeing Red
Author: Mark Cronlund Anderson
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2011-09-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0887554067

The first book to examine the role of Canada’s newspapers in perpetuating the myth of Native inferiority. Seeing Red is a groundbreaking study of how Canadian English-language newspapers have portrayed Aboriginal peoples from 1869 to the present day. It assesses a wide range of publications on topics that include the sale of Rupert’s Land, the signing of Treaty 3, the North-West Rebellion and Louis Riel, the death of Pauline Johnson, the outing of Grey Owl, the discussions surrounding Bill C-31, the “Bended Elbow” standoff at Kenora, Ontario, and the Oka Crisis. The authors uncover overwhelming evidence that the colonial imaginary not only thrives, but dominates depictions of Aboriginal peoples in mainstream newspapers. The colonial constructs ingrained in the news media perpetuate an imagined Native inferiority that contributes significantly to the marginalization of Indigenous people in Canada. That such imagery persists to this day suggests strongly that our country lives in denial, failing to live up to its cultural mosaic boosterism.

Norval Morrisseau

Norval Morrisseau
Author: Armand Garnet Ruffo
Publisher: D & M Publishers
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2014-09-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1771620471

Norval Morrisseau (1932–2007), Ojibway shaman-artist, drew his first sketches at age six in the sand on the shores of Lake Nipigon. By the end of his tumultuous life, the prolific self-taught artist was sought by collectors and imitated by forgers. Critics, art historians and curators alike consider him one of the most innovative artists of the twentieth century. Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird is an innovative and rich biography of this charismatic and troubled figure. Drawing upon years of extensive research, including interviews with Morrisseau himself, Armand Ruffo evokes the artist’s life from childhood to death, in all its vivid triumphs and tragedies. Ruffo draws upon his own Ojibway heritage and experiences to provide insight into Morrisseau’s life and iconography from an Ojibway perspective. Captivating and readable, this is a brilliantly creative evocation of the art and life of Norval Morrisseau, a life indelibly tied to art.

Injichaag: My Soul in Story

Injichaag: My Soul in Story
Author: Rene Meshake
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2019-10-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0887558496

This book shares the life story of Anishinaabe artist Rene Meshake in stories, poetry, and Anishinaabemowin “word bundles” that serve as a dictionary of Ojibwe poetics. Meshake was born in the railway town of Nakina in northwestern Ontario in 1948, and spent his early years living off-reserve with his grandmother in a matriarchal land-based community he calls Pagwashing. He was raised through his grandmother’s “bush university,” periodically attending Indian day school, but at the age of ten Rene was scooped into the Indian residential school system, where he suffered sexual abuse as well as the loss of language and connection to family and community. This residential school experience was lifechanging, as it suffocated his artistic expression and resulted in decades of struggle and healing. Now in his twenty-eighth year of sobriety, Rene is a successful multidisciplinary artist, musician and writer. Meshake’s artistic vision and poetic lens provide a unique telling of a story of colonization and recovery. The material is organized thematically around a series of Meshake’s paintings. It is framed by Kim Anderson, Rene’s Odaanisan (adopted daughter), a scholar of oral history who has worked with Meshake for two decades. Full of teachings that give a glimpse of traditional Anishinaabek lifeways and worldviews, Injichaag: My Soul in Story is “more than a memoir.”

No Cure for Being Human

No Cure for Being Human
Author: Kate Bowler
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593230787

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) asks, how do you move forward with a life you didn’t choose? “Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth.”—Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely? Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age thirty-five, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today’s “best life now” advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born. With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we’re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between—and there’s no cure for being human.

Unsettling Canadian Art History

Unsettling Canadian Art History
Author: Erin Morton
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages:
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0228013283

Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada. This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future. Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.

Before and after the Horizon

Before and after the Horizon
Author: David Penney
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2013-09-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1588344525

This companion volume to an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York reveals how Anishinaabe (also known in the United States as Ojibwe or Chippewa) artists have expressed the deeply rooted spiritual and social dimensions of their relations with the Great Lakes region. Featuring 70 color images of visually powerful historical and contemporary works, Before and After the Horizon is the only book to consider the work of Anishinaabe artists overall and to discuss 500 years of Anishinaabe art history.

Norval Morrisseau

Norval Morrisseau
Author: Greg A. Hill
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN:

His unique vision first came to public attention more than forty years ago. The life's work of Norval Morrisseau, founder of the "Woodland" or "Legend" style of painting-now known as Anishnaabe painting-is showcased in some sixty works drawn from public and private collections across Canada.

A Two-Spirit Journey

A Two-Spirit Journey
Author: Ma-Nee Chacaby
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0887555039

A compelling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and self-discovery. A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism. As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.

The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada

The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada
Author: Heather Igloliorte
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 582
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000608565

This companion consists of chapters that focus on and bring forward critical theories and productive methodologies for Indigenous art history in North America. This book makes a major and original contribution to the fields of Indigenous visual arts, professional curatorial practice, graduate-level curriculum development, and academic research. The contributors expand, create, establish and define Indigenous theoretical and methodological approaches for the production, discussion, and writing of Indigenous art histories. Bringing together scholars, curators, and artists from across the intersecting fields of Indigenous art history, critical museology, cultural studies, and curatorial practice, the companion promotes the study and dissemination of Indigenous art and stimulates new conversations on such key areas as visual sovereignty and self-determination; resurgence and resilience; land-based, embodied, and nation-specific knowledges; epistemologies and ontologies; curatorial and museological methodologies; language; decolonization and Indigenization; and collaboration, consultation, and mentorship.