A founding member of the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., Carl Ray was a self-taught painter and printmaker. After meeting Norval Morrisseau in the late 1960s while the two were working on commissions for Expo '67 in Montreal, Ray became an progenitor of the so-called "Woodland School," which sought to revitalize the culture and imagery of the Indigenous peoples of central Canada. The present work was executed in 1974, shortly before the artist's untimely death at age 35, and shows the increasing mastery and complexity of the artist's command of form and line.