Norval Morrisseau's family seeks to restore late artist's legacy, worth after fraud

More than a year after police in Ontario unravelled a massive art fraud involving the works of Norval Morrisseau, the late Indigenous artist's family and estate say they're still paying the price for the decades-long scheme.

More than a year after police in Ontario unravelled a massive art fraud involving the works of Norval Morrisseau, the late Indigenous artist's family and estate say they're still paying the price for the decades-long scheme.

In monetary terms, the fraud has greatly diminished the true value of Morrisseau's real works, his estate says. But the repercussions extend beyond the financial losses.

One of Morrisseau's children, Eugene Morrisseau, said he and his siblings have been grappling with questions about the wide-reaching fraud and how to wipe the stain it has left on their father's celebrated work.

"People were profiting off my dad's legacy, his artwork," he said in a recent interview.

"My sisters and my other brothers ... we always knew that something was going on."

Norval Morrisseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird, was a self-taught artist of Ojibwe ancestry and a trailblazer for contemporary Indigenous artists across Canada.

Allegations that an organized group in northern Ontario was creating and selling art under Morrisseau's name – and in his distinctive Woodland School of Art style – began to circulate long before his death in 2007.