Selwyn Dewdney

Selwyn Hanington Dewdney (October 22, 1909November 18, 1979) was a Canadian writer, illustrator, artist, activist and pioneer in both art therapy and pictography.

Selwyn Hanington Dewdney was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, on October 22, 1909, and was the son of Alfred Daniel Dewdney, who was the Bishop of Keewatin between 1921-1938 of the diocese of Keewatin.

His family moved to Kenora, Ontario, in 1924 and he received his secondary education there.

He attended the University of Toronto where he received a general Bachelor of Arts in astronomy and English.

In the summer of 1928, he accompanied his father on a 3,800 mile journey to visit the Ojibway and Cree religious missions in the diocese of Keewatin in Northern Ontario.

Much of this venture was travelled by canoe.

This experience established his interest in native culture and love of the bush in the Canadian Shield.

He spent the summer months of 1929 and 1930 as the student-in-charge at the Lac Seul mission in the Lac Seul First Nation, on the shores of Lac Seul in Northwestern Ontario while he was an Masters student in Theology at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto.

During this time, according to his diary, he debated the idea of whether to be trained to be a missionary.

This job meant that he had to hold religious services both at Lac Seul and Hudson under the supervision of Canon Maurice Sanderson.

The Lac Seul Mission was his appointment after ordination in Northwestern Ontario.

He spent both summers making canoe trips getting to know the locale.

In 1932, he attended the Ontario College of Education and received a High School Assistant's Certificate and Art Specialists Certificate.

He also took a course in landscape painting.

In 1933, he was hired by the Geological Survey of Canada, and was assigned to survey the transition zone between the Precambrian formations of the Canadian Shield and the Hudson Bay lowlands.

Among the muskeg and blackflies, he sketched the landscape and produced pencil portraits of the traverse crew at the survey camp.

His inspiration as an artist came from the great northern landscapes that he loved to visit.

His dramatic style is quite similar to that of the Group of Seven.

In 1934, he attended the Ontario College of Art, graduating with honors, and moved to London, Ontario, Canada.

In 1936, he married Irene Donner in a ceremony conducted by his father.

Their honeymoon was a 500-mile canoe trip loop from Kenora to Red Lake.

Their children were:

In 1936, he began teaching at Sir Adam Beck Secondary School, London, Ontario, but resigned in protest at the demotion of a colleague in 1945.

This experience was the subject of his first novel, Wind Without Rain.

One of the first London artists to paint abstracts in the 1940s and early 1950s, Dewdney painted a number of murals on commission for several clients, including Sir Adam Beck Collegiate and Victorian Hospital.

With a growing family of three sons, he turned to illustrating books, writing, researching, editing and painting commissioned murals to support them.

It was during this time that he became interested in art therapy when he was commissioned to illustrate Lionel Penrose's psychiatric 'M' test.

In 1947, while working at Westminster Veterans Hospital in London, he began giving art instruction to some to the psychiatric patients.

The positive results of this eventually afforded him the position of Psychiatric Art Therapist.

He and his wife Irene were pioneers in the field of Canadian art therapy.

During the 1950s, his ongoing exploration of Northern Ontario introduced him to the ancient native pictographs painted in red Ochre on the rocks.

A chance meeting with Kenneth E. Kidd, curator of the Ethnology Department of the Royal Ontario Museum, led to an opportunity to join Kidd and help record the pictograph sites.

By 1957, eleven rock-painting sites were recorded in Quetico Provincial Park.

Between 1959 and 1965, with two of his sons as field assistants, he discovered and recorded rock art from the foothills of the Rockies to the Atlantic coast.

His The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway (1975), remains the only volume dedicated exclusively to this subject.

By 1978, he had visited 301 sites in Canada and the U.S. In 1962, the first edition of Indian Rock Paintings of the Great Lakes was published, with Kenneth Kidd as his co-author.

Dewdney learned of a secret society within the Ojibway, the Midewiwin, which purportedly embodied traditional ceremonial rituals of healing and sorcery and included four degrees of initiation.

His work, and particularly his wife's, led to the development of an art therapy training program at the University of Western Ontario in 1986.

It is believed that some essential elements of the Midewiwin, which was first documented by Europeans in the early 18th century, were "elaborations of traditional Anishinaabe beliefs and practices".

Elements of this belief system were recorded on scrolls made of birch bark, sewn together with cedar roots.