Anaija was one of the pioneers of the Taloyoak carving style that focused on shamanic and spiritual themes, mostly in whale bone, beginning in the late 1960s. The preeminent Taloyoak carver in this early period, he influenced many artists including the much younger Karoo Ashevak, whose meteoric rise in the early 1970s eventually overshadowed Anaija’s own achievements.

Anaija’s Spirit from 1969 is indeed one of the artist’s great achievements. It certainly deserved to be featured both in the famous international travelling exhibition and catalogue Sculpture/Inuit and in George Swinton’s landmark book Sculpture of the Inuit. Carved from a dense and heavy piece of bone, Spirit is a work that to us clearly prefigures Karoo’s sculptural style. It is a serious, haunting figure with an almost beseeching facial expression and pose, and yet its proportions lend it a quite charming, almost gnome-like demeanour as well. Interestingly, the projections at the back of the sculpture can be read as either hair or horns. We like to think of this sculpture as being a life-size depiction of a shaman’s helping spirit.

References: This work is reproduced in George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972/92), fig. 811 (along with two other works, figs, 808, 814). See the section on the artist in Darlene Coward Wight, Art & Expression of the Netsilik, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2000), pp. 58-61.