Known primarily for his sculpture, Inuvialuit artist Abraham Anghik Ruben was born in 1951 in a camp south of Paulatuk, NWT, and lived a traditional nomadic lifestyle for the first years of his life. At the age of eight, Ruben was taken from his family and forced into a residential school (Grollier Hall) in Inuvik, where he lived from 1959 to 1970. In 1970, while on a trip to the University of Alaska, Ruben realized that he wanted to study art. The following year, he began his studies at the Native Arts Centre under Inupiaq artist Ronald Senungetuk.

This print dates to his early, 1970s period, when Ruben experimented with different media. While his later, large-scale sculptural work draws from Inuit, Viking and Norse mythologies, this early print appears to owe a stylistic debt to the Northwest Coast formline style. It clearly demonstrates Ruben’s interest in the shaman culture of his maternal great-grandparents, Apakark and Kagun who were respected Yup’ik Alaskan shamans, and in the centrality of storytelling to his early life.