Lloyd Caibaiosai

Ojibway artist Lloyd Caibaiosai was born in 1947 on Spanish River #1 Reserve in Ontario. He was employed by the Alberta Indian Education Center as Coordinator of Curriculum Development before his death at the young age of 29. A self-taught artist, Caibaiosai's paintings evolved within the “Woodlands School” Aboriginal art movement that arose in Northern Ontario during the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties. The movement included such well-known Canadian artists as Norval Morrisseau, Jackson Beardy, Blake Debassige and Carl Ray.

Like his peers in the Woodlands School, Caibaiosai's art drew on the subject matter and style of traditional pictographic imagery as seen in birch bark manuscripts of the Ojibwa and in the ancient pictographs and petroglyphs that still exist in the Canadian Shield region of Northern Ontario. In his series of paintings titled “Hunting Medicine,” Caibaiosai made reference to a traditional strategy used by the Aboriginal peoples during times of famine and hunger, in which the hunter would consult a spiritual leader of the community for assistance with the hunt. The spiritual leader would create a depiction of the animal that was drawn with an arrow through the heart as a method of calling the animal. In this way, the animal would be invited – through this “medicine” offered as a gift to the spirit of the animal – to, in turn, give his body as a gift to the people.