The Life and Death of Benjamin Chee Chee 1944-1977

The serene, spare elegance of Ojibway painter Benjamin Chee Chee was probably my first consciousness of art.

I babysat the neighbour kids, amazingly named the Friends, and loved going to their house, which was free of the clutter that defined our home. The clarity and breathing room there was a safe haven from the manic pace I came from. Mom was a compulsive hoarder, and the closest thing we had to art were Old Testament felt storyboards and macaroni fridge magnets. While there were countless wonderful things about my own home, there was also much chaos. The Friend family had selective, neatly laid out objects. I felt safe there. And it was the minimalist lines of Chee Chee’s bird paintings that mesmerized me most. I stared at their artful flight for hours after the kids went to bed. Of course, I knew then very little of art or of Indians or even Benjamin Chee Chee’s name, but those stunning paintings stayed in my mind’s eye. I forever associated peaceful serenity with the Temagami artist’s monochromatic and linear style.

But the handsome young native’s life and imagination was anything but serene. Rather, Benjamin was an orphan, a drifter, an alcoholic with a raging temper, in and out of trouble, and in and out of jail. He abused drugs as well, until he saw an acquaintance overdose and die. He burned himself with cigarettes. He was 32 at the end of his short story.

He was also at the height of his fame, and galleries were selling out every showing. He sometimes received rush commissions for ten or more works in order to stock public demand. And he had recently fulfilled his 20-year desire to find his mother, reunited with her at last. This search had consumed much of his life, but the reunion was perhaps disappointing. Both were glad, but veritable strangers. Josephine was a recovering alcoholic, happy to see her son, but she had little to offer him. A few months afterward, Benny was arrested for public drunkenness for the last time. He fashioned a noose from his clothing and slumped against the bars of his cell, dying in hospital three days later.

Chee Chee was born in northern Ontario’s Temagami in 1944, in the cabin of “Angele,” a woman who was the first wife of the naturalist and native poseur, Grey Owl. His name was Kenneth Thomas Chee Chee, and it was Angele who added “Benjamin.” His early years were spent on the Bear Island Indian Reserve. He never knew his father, who died while gathering firewood when his truck crashed through the ice to his freezing grave.

Mom Josephine struggled to survive her grief and support her family. She had no education and her only work experience was as a cleaning lady. She earned about 30 bucks a month as a widow, not nearly enough to support her child. Benjamin was often left with friends while Mom went out to work. By early adolescence, he did not even know where his mother was. And while the tall and good-looking kid had a witty and outgoing persona, he maintained few real friendships. He joked around to get over his shyness. He was sent to juvenile detention, where like countless other native children, he was abused. The boy took to booze early on, preferring the buzz to fleeting human relationships. It was impossible to trust anyone. He later had one serious relationship with a woman, Yvette, toward whom he was very kind, but he was violent toward her when he was drinking and so the affair didn’t last.

Although Chee Chee was drinking from his early teens, he had another deeper interest: drawing. No one was around to recognize or encourage the drifter’s considerable talent, but the boy took some comfort in sketching and occasionally expressed his desire to be an artist.

His immense gift was evident much later to a lawyer named Frederick Brown, whom Chee Chee met at a party in Montreal. Brown introduced him to other artists and helped him find a job in a warehouse. But the lawyer saw that in addition to general disruptive behaviour under the influence of alcohol, Chee Chee exhibited a great deal of hatred toward whites. While it is absolutely true that the authorities were harsher with Chee Chee and other Aboriginal Canadians in detention, and that poverty and racism were grim realities from the start, it was white people who recognized and boosted Chee Chee’s art career.

In the last four years of his life, he was valued as an artist and was on the verge of becoming very famous. Chee Chee had no formal training in art. Other native Canadian Woodland-school artists were painting in the Norval Morisseau tradition- symbolic native legends in a very beautiful and popular style. But Chee Chee preferred to be known on his own, and his sparse, elongated wildlife merged contemporary minimalism with his own ideas of Ojibway art, creating a style unique to him. Benny sold a considerable number of works during his brief career: they sold for $200 or so per print- or even per original- and now fetch upwards of ten grand each. It could be surmised that his suicide has made certain collectors and art world figures quite wealthy.

Indeed, Al Evans, a retired professor from the University of Waterloo, blames Chee Chee’s tragedy on whites like himself, and his book, Chee Chee: a Study of Aboriginal Suicide contains most of the very limited information we know of Benny’s life. He speculates in his fascinating text on the redemptive power of art, and generally champions Chee Chee, interpreting all of his flaws and violent outrages as the unavoidable side effects of a bad childhood. It is undeniable that Chee Chee is a victim, and undeniable that most native Canadians have suffered countless abuses and racisms that have devalued their heritage and contribution. It is true that a man with no roots and nothing in way of stability had little to cling to even when he achieved recognition, success, and reunion. His lawyer friend Frederick Brown said that in the artist’s last days, he was filled with incredible self-loathing and tormented by isolation, rejections, and darkness. Not even art could assuage the hopelessness and meaninglessness he experienced.

Evans quotes Chee Chee telling an interviewer about his artistic hope. “I wanted to be my own man. I wanted to develop a style that was so much my own that anyone looking at a painting by me would say at once, even if the work was unsigned, ‘Now that was done by Benjamin Chee Chee.’”

Indeed, as a young lady first addressing my own madness and my own inclinations toward creativity as both a writer and an artist, I spent long hours looking at those prints, and in my head. I made up legends about the native group who painted them. Naïve to art or folklore, I assumed the various prints were a ‘style’ and that Chee Chee was one member, kind of like the Group of Seven of which I would later learn, or the Woodland painters. I found some books of Indian legends at the library and read about the Great Spirit and Quebecois mythology and east coast native mythology like Glooskap. I made up stories to go with the paintings, stories of deep serenity and elegance and clean, harmonious living with wildlife. I was inventing my own ‘noble savage’ ideology to take me away from the cluttered chaos and upheaval of my own personal narrative. I meditated on the clarity and serenity of Chee Chee’s loons, breathing in the perceived calm. It was the first conscious healing I received from art. That my impressions and research were crude and naïve is forgivable- I was only eleven years old.

Though Chee Chee’s work was known for its linear grace, he himself was known as a man who fluctuated wildly between gregarious joking and drunken brutality. I’m not the only one who read into his work- critics, patrons, and other various art people also tended to over-interpret his work. Curator Elizabeth McLuhan saw ‘visual longing for a family he never had.’ Friends also saw representations in the wildlife of that romanticized family. But Chee Chee himself said in a calendar, “My drawings of birds and animals have no symbolic meaning from the past. To me they are creatures of the present and I draw them because I like their clean lines and beautiful shapes.”

That may be, but the grace that Chee Chee never knew somehow materialized in those beautiful, mysterious wildlife abstractions. Little Lorette never tired of studying the prints after my charges had fallen asleep and the dishes were done. It was the Friend house, too, that brought me solace- every troubled little girl needs a place to go, and my early responsibilities, along with the serenity of an alternate life, gave meaning and direction to any adolescent upheaval I was experiencing.

But things change, and the Friend family moved away, and I never went back into that very special house next door. The spirit of the walls, emptied of the artist’s grace, held an alternate legacy for the new tenants. In an absolutely haunting irony, one I wouldn’t connect until much later when as an adult I heard of Chee Chee’s demise, the new neighbour’s child hung himself in the basement of that house, eternally suspended in seventeen.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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