Legends of My People The Great Ojibway

The relationship between Norval Morrisseau and anthropologist,Selwyn Dewdney was an important one for both. They met in 1960 when Dewdney traveled by canoe through the Red Lake district searching for petroglyphs along the waterways. Morrisseau signed on as a paddler and guide. Together they
explored the petroglyphs of the Great Lakes, which proved to be influential in his paintings, helping Morrisseau to formalize the stylized visual vocabulary with which he created his iconic paintings. The journey was fruitful for both and culminated in their collaboration in 1965 on a book of Ojibway
stories that Morrisseau wrote and illustrated with his fluid drawings and Dewdney edited, called Legends of My People, the Great Ojibway. At all times in Morrisseau’s art, the artist is conscious of including the narrative of his own life and context, searching for a way to make intelligent use of his ancestral culture and his own life in a rapidly modernizing Canadian landscape. For Morrisseau, Dewdney was a friend and colleague who provided him with an artistic vocabulary, a means of
expressing his Ojibwa heritage from his perspective as a 20th century Ojibwa negotiating the barrier between the white world and the aboriginal world.