One of the most famous early Baker Lake print images, Shaman was both designed and skillfully printed by William Noah, Jessie Oonark’s youngest child. With its intense yellow and red inks punctuated by flashes of other eclectic colours and encased in a bold black outline, the image resonates with power and energy. While skeletal markings are frequently seen in Inuit art – all the way back to prehistoric times – alluding to shamanic practices, here Noah offers a surprisingly graphic x-ray image of a shaman-as-hunter. In his 1929 publication, Knud Rasmussen outlines the initiation process whereby the shaman acquires the ability to see himself in skeletal form, “...by the power his brain derives from the super-natural [. He] divests his body of its flesh and blood, so that nothing remains but his bones." [1] Our vertical presentation of this important and rare print corresponds to the orientation of Noah’s original drawing.

1. As quoted in Blodgett, Eskimo Narrative (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1979), p. 45.

References: For an illustration of William Noah’s original drawing see “My Uncle Went to the Moon: An informal conversation with K. J. Butler” in artscanada: Stones, bones and skin: Ritual and Shamanic Art (Special issue, Dec. 1973/Jan. 1974, 154-158), p. 157 (note the vertical orientation of the illustration). Shaman has been widely reproduced, including in: Ernst Roch ed., Arts of the Eskimo: Prints, (Montreal/Toronto: Signum/Oxford, 1974), p. 219; Helga Goetz, The Inuit Print, international travelling exhibition, (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1977), p. 217; Bernadette Driscoll, Baker Lake Prints & Print-Drawings 1970-76, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1983), p. 67, reproduced alongside the original drawing. 

Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / New York: Harry Abrams / London: British Museum Press, 1998), pl. 36, p. 49; and many others. The drawing for this work is reproduced in Jean Blodgett, Eskimo Narrative, (Winnipeg, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1979), no. 57, p. 45 and in Jean Blodgett, The Coming and Going of the Shaman: Eskimo Shamanism and Art, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1978), cat.10, p. 45,as a horizontal image. This print is referenced in Jean Blodgett, Grasp Tight the Old Ways: Selections from the Klamer Family Collection of Inuit Art, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1983), p. 52. Other works by William Noah that feature a skeletal form include Spirit, 1971 #22, The Skeletoned Caribou, 1974 #19, and The Vision of a Man Cutting Snow Blocks, 1978 #34.