Although she became a devout Anglican, Jessie Oonark was a young adult before Christian missionaries came to challenge the practices of the shamans in their small communities. Like many of the other first generation Qamani’tuaq artists, Oonark attempted to reconcile the traditional and imported belief structures. While she would often hybridize her work with Christian imagery, much of her drawing throughout her career were purely shamanic in subject matter.

In Day Spirit, the amautiq-clad torso of a female shaman hovers on the page, suggesting weightlessness. Even her hair sticks, one of Oonark’s preferred symbols of womanhood, seem slightly uplifted to suggest buoyancy. The eyes, faithful to Oonark’s original drawing, pictured in a Spring 1976 magazine article by Sheila Butler, are saucers of a glowing yellow that are dotted with a bullseye-like iris, reinforcing the sense that the we are in witness of a shamanic performance.

References: The print is reproduced alongside the stone block and sketch in Sheila Butler, “The First Printmaking Year at Baker Lake” in Alma Houston, ed., Inuit Art: An Anthology, (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1988) p. 104-5. The block, sketch, and another copy of the print are now in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.