Published in conjunction with the first solo exhibition of work by a native artist at the National Gallery of Canada, Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist provides readers with a stunning retrospective of the Anishnaabe artist’s works along with three essays that contextualize and offer varying interpretations of that work. The text is accessible and intelligent, avoiding the pitfalls of curator-speak and academic noodling.

Professor Ruth B. Phillips provides a scholarly overview of Morrisseau’s oeuvre, placing it in the larger context of the Canadian art world while focusing on the particular cultural forces that made his first exhibition in 1962 such a momentous event. Particularly interesting is Phillips’s examination of the influence on Morrisseau’s work of white Canadian culture, including the stained-glass windows of the Catholic churches he was exposed to as a boy and the comic books and magazines he scrounged from the local dump. Greg A. Hill, the book’s editor and the assistant curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery, examines Morrisseau’s role as both artist and shaman and the artist’s spiritual journeys, while poet and author Armand Garnet Ruffo fills in the personal details of Morrisseau’s life with an impressionistic, lively series of biographical sketches.