Scholars Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips succinctly describe Jane Ash Poitras’s art:
[She has] adopted compositional collage as a means of examining, through prints, paintings, and mixed media works, the relationships that exist among seemingly incompatible knowledge systems—Aboriginal understandings of nature and Western science; shamanistic and Christian spirituality—as well as relationships between autobiography, family history, and official narratives of the past [1].

Tools of the Sacred is an almost altar-like presentation; affixed to the canvas is an Ethnographic photo portrait showing a man (probably a shaman), seated stone-faced and resolute behind a collection of the “tools of his trade”; two pipes have been accented with colour by the artist. A fragment of cloth with Anasazi designs crowns the photo. At the bottom, a colourful block with Navajo rug-like geometric designs, and over-painted with three crosses, anchors the canvas. In between, a single painted claw, inscribed with symbols, hangs overtop the cursive-written “Sacred.” This work by Poitras deftly and powerfully marries the realms of the political, the scientific, and spiritual.

1. Janet C. Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art, (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 232-233.

References: See Pamela McCallum, Cultural Memories and Imagined Futures: The Art of Jane Ash Poitras, (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011). For contemporaneous paintings by the artist see Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin, Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1992), pp. 166-169; and Allan J. Ryan, The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), pp. 82-83, 93, 94, 157, 208-209.