Jason Sikoak, Sacrilege, 2015

Sikoak’s choice of medium intensifies this confrontation. Executed entirely in black ink, the drawing strips the scene to its essentials: light and darkness, movement and immobility. Tulugak is fluid and dynamic, with ink splatters and curling lines that suggest breath and transformation. The missionary, on the other hand, is rigid and block-like, his presence almost suffocating. The starkness of black and white denies any resolution or blending, instead heightening the sense of oppositional forces.

The title Sacrilege signals both desecration and betrayal. For Inuit communities, the arrival of missionaries and the enforced adoption of Christianity often meant the suppression of spiritual traditions, shamanic practices, and ancestral cosmologies. Sikoak depicts this destruction as cultural suppression and also as an act of violence against the sacred. The Raven recoils as if scorched, while the man’s petrification suggests the internalized trauma of generations forced to abandon their spiritual inheritances.

The personal dimension adds another layer. Sikoak has spoken about how his family name was erroneously recorded as “Shiwak” by a colonial administrator—a doctor or Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) prefect who could neither pronounce nor spell the original—a distortion that persisted through official census and HBC records for generations. It was only through his great-uncle’s First World War service records that Sikoak found written confirmation of the original name: photographs of the celebrated Inuit sniper John Shiwak bear the notation “Sikoak” in parentheses, as though the true name survived just beneath the colonial record. In Sacrilege, this theme of misnaming and misrecognition becomes visual allegory: the man’s debilitation speaks to a larger historical process in which Inuit people were forced to live between worlds, their cosmologies undermined and their sense of belonging fractured.

What is most haunting is the drawing’s temporality, its sense of an instant in time. Sikoak does not portray resolution, victory, or collapse. Instead, he captures the unbearable stillness of a moment before something breaks. The Inuk man cannot move forward, backward, or sideways—his body locked in a psychic freeze. This threshold is where the horror lies: not in the presence of the supernatural but in the enforced rupture of spiritual continuity.

Sacrilege becomes a visual scream unmasking the silent trauma of colonial spiritual violence. In confronting both missionary authority and ancestral presence, Sikoak stages the cost of cultural erasure as an intimate, embodied paralysis. His drawing demands that silence be broken and trauma named, challenging viewers to reckon with a history still alive in the present.