HomeCFLHall: A deeper dive into the Indigenous-themed CFL team...

Hall: A deeper dive into the Indigenous-themed CFL team logos

@sportvortex
@sportvortex
4


By day, Chris Chipak works as a Grade 5 teacher for inner-city Saskatoon kids with behavioural and learning challenges.

“The best feeling is seeing those students who really struggle trust you and open up to you,” Chipak says. “It’s a really rewarding job.”

Outside of school, Chipak is celebrating a reward of a different kind this weekend, one that came via an invitation from the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

RELATED
» Indigenous-themed logos highlight CFL’s support for Truth and Reconciliation
» CFL stands up for Truth and Reconciliation
» Diversity is Strength stories, podcasts and much more
» Power, Beauty, Grace: Stampeders learn the Spirit of the Horse
» Subscribe to the CFL’s newsletter for exclusive offers and league updates

The CFL club asked Chipak, who grew up on the Red Pheasant Cree Nation, to sketch an Indigenous-designed logo for the Green and White.

“I dropped everything to do it,” he says. “I’m absolutely going to take advantage of this opportunity.”

The Riders punted the ball to Chipak, and he ran it back for a touchdown with a design that will be on display for all to see Saturday when the Roughriders host the Ottawa REDBLACKS at Mosaic Stadium.

This weekend, all CFL teams will sport Indigenous-designed logs on their helmets to commemorate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

“Before where we are now, there were people who went on vision quests, and they just saw things,” Chipak says. “They knew how to express themselves.

“I feel like I’m a modern-day daydreamer.”

The Calgary Stampeders are on a bye week. They featured their commemorative logo on September 14 against the Montreal Alouettes.

“It’s just about hope,” Chipak says of seeing Indigenous-designed logos for all CFL teams. “This healing process of reconciliation is something that everyone needs to feel. It’s never going to be something that’s told to you. It’s something everyone has to feel.

“And I think the one way that we can get to reconciliation is through visual art and storytelling and connections.”

Inspired by the Treaty 4 flag, the Roughrider logo incorporates symbols such as the buffalo, the sun and the ribbon-like skyline.

“I would describe it as reconciliation for the prairies,” he says. “I really wanted to just emphasize the land and show that we’re all on it, and the sun shines on us all the same way.”

Born in Meadow Lake, Sask., Chipak moved to the Red Pheasant Cree Nation at age 3. In the early years, he remembers realizing that he didn’t quite look like the other kids who lived nearby.

“My mom is blue eyed and white skinned,” he says. “My two older sisters, they’re half-sisters. They have a different dad, but they look very indigenous compared to me. And my biological father, who I never knew, was from Beauval, so very up north. He was not in the picture in my life.

“So my stepdad and my mom raised me to the best of their abilities, and there was the moment of not being accepted because I was a lighter skin.”

Once people learned more about Chipak’s heritage, they accepted him as one of their own.

Through it all, Chipak loved to lose himself in art at its simplest.

“Colouring books were my childhood escape,” he says. “Eventually I got to the point where I would colour a picture that I liked in a colouring book, and then I’d want to draw it again, but, change the arm or add a hat. And I found myself redrawing it to colour it again, and my drawings looked pretty good.”

Or at least so he thought until he took art classes at the University of Saskatchewan.

“I got told what I was doing was totally wrong,” he says. “When you draw, you’re supposed to draw from the middle and go outward and start from the outside, going inward.

“Art was my escape through university. It was really hard for me to go from a small community reserve school that had 12 people graduate to sitting in classes that had 300.”

Upon graduation with an education degree, Chipak faced a hard decision: stay in Saskatoon or return to his roots and teach on a First Nation.

“A lot of those children and youth on the reserve. They have strong communities,” he says. “They have relatives. They have friends. That’s all around them.

“But you think of inner-city Indigenous youth, they have their house. And if their house is in disarray, they have the parks and wander throughout the city. So I definitely think staying in the city was the right thing.”

Some of Chipak’s students are diehard Roughrider fans. Some are not. But Chipak hopes this weekend — regardless of team allegiances — Saskatchewan youth tune in and glimpse a better future through the wonder of visual art.

“I really want to dedicate this to the youth who have their heads in the cell phones and the youth who are away from what we consider being in the present,” he says. “Hopefully, through this visual, they can draw some connections and get some education on how lucky we are on the land we do have.”

After all, Saskatchewan is the land of living skies.

“We can look outside and see the pinks, the oranges, the purples, the colours,” he says. “We can be sitting outside with plus-28 weather, and it rains on us that night.

“We’re just so lucky on this land.”

***

Kyle Joedicke cherishes his memories of watching the Hamilton Tiger-Cats on TV with his grandfather John, who worked as a millwright at the Proctor & Gamble plant in Steeltown.

Joedicke, a Cayuga from Six Nations of the Grand River, Turtle Clan, says it feels surreal to be the artist behind the Indigenous-designed logo for the team his grandfather loved so much.

The Tiger-Cats are selling merch with Kyle Joedicke’s Indigenous-designed logos (Ticats.ca)

“I hope that it’s inspiring to the youth,” Joedicke says. “Because there’s a lot of times where we just don’t see ourselves included in these sorts of institutions whether that be in healthcare or post-secondary or high-achieving athletics like this.

CFL clubs will proudly wear their Indigenous logos — designed by local Indigenous artists — on their helmets this weekend to commemorate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

With Calgary on a bye week, the Stampeders wore their commemorative logo on Sept. 14 in a home game against the Montreal Alouettes.

“Historically, a lot of the mascots and team logos for football teams, both in America and Canada, haven’t been respectful to indigenous people primarily, or just have been outright racial slurs,” Joedicke says. “So to shift away from those things in a genuine way — trying to build on community relations and trying to really make good on genuine mistakes that were made in the past — I think is the best possible way that this league could be trying to move forward.”

Here’s a breakdown of the logos. and their Indigenous creators, for teams across the league:

BC LIONS

  • Artist: Corrine Hunt
  • Kwakwaka’wakw/Tlingit
  •  Hunt hopes the logo evokes strength and unity among all who wear it with a shared sense of kindness, caring and collective energy.  “I stylized the logo that brings the Indigeneity of B.C.,” she said back in 2021. “The Indigenous roots here, and it is a reminder there’s another world that existed. We’re just discovering what that world was.” 

CALGARY STAMPEDERS

  • Artists: Jacob Alexis, Richard Running Rabbit and Dr. Tyler White
  • Siksika
  • The logo features the Stampeders’ iconic white horse adorned with paint styles that would be used on special occasions, including going into battle. The face is adorned with paint around the eye representing vision, while the stripes signify acts of valour. The spotted hind quarter represents creation stories and teachings.

EDMONTON ELKS

  • Artist: Conrad Plews
  • Metis of Cree background
  • A Grant MacEwan University graduate. Plews started tattooing more than 18 years ago and is the owner of Black Market Tattoo.  He was inspired by the 2021 Elks logo designed by Izaiah Masuskapoe, who attended Edmonton’s St. Thomas More Catholic Junior High School at the time of his creation.

HAMILTON TIGER-CATS

  • Artist: Kyle Joedicke
  • Cayuga from Six Nations of the Grand River, Turtle Clan
  • Joedicke wanted to stay true to the city and the team by preserving the primary design elements of the Tiger-Cats logo, but he meticulously re=imagined every part in an Indigenous style. “I’ve only been really working as an artist in a professional capacity  for the last three-and-a-half years,” he says. “So in that time, to be already having such, aprosperous partnership within the CFL — and specifically with a team that my family has generational support behind — it’s been amazing.”

MONTREAL ALOUETTES

  • Artist: Finnley Montour
  • Kahnawake
  • “For Truth and Reconciliation Day, it is essential to represent all Indigenous people in the province of Quebec,” Montour says. “This is why I chose to turn the logo into a dream catcher as an overarching theme. The red wraps around the bird, is the leather a dream-catcher base would be wrapped in.” The dream catcher webbing features star-style shapes, with the dozen points serving as a nod to the 12 players on the field.

SASKATCHEWAN ROUGHRIDERS

  • Artist: Chris Chipak
  • Red Pheasant Cree Nation (Treaty 6)
  • A Saskatoon elementary school teacher, Chipak hopes to educate and inspire all people with the Indigenous-designed logo for a CFL club known to unite the province in triumph and heartache. “I would describe it as reconciliation for the prairies,” he says. “I really wanted to just emphasize the land and show that we’re all on it, the sun shines on us all the same way.”

OTTAWA REDBLACKS

  • Artist: Mike Ivall
  • Chippewas of Georgina Island
  • Ivall designed the logo with two major elements. The first is the medicine wheel, used for generations for health and healing. “It represents direction, unity, elements of the culture, and all of the races,” Ivall said. “It’s everything that we hold value for.” The second major element is a what Ivall describes as squiggly line. But to him, it’s the creator. “I put him in everything,” Ivall says. “For me, he is everything. The creator is me, and it’s you. We’re all connected through that. He surrounds everything.”

TORONTO ARGONAUTS

  • Artist: Emily Kewageshig
  • Saugeen First Nation No. 29
  • Kewageshig focused the design on the four figures that emerge from the water. “The figures represent all Indigenous people — past, present, and future generations,” Kewageshig says. “Within the figures is an opening that I created in the place of their hearts.Our people are known s the `good hearted.’ And I wanted to make a point of keeping this area open so that message can be interpreted.
  • “The number 4 is symbolic as well because it references the four directions of the medicine wheel.”

WINNIPEG BLUE BOMBERS

  • Artist: Dené Sinclair.
  • Peguis First Nation
  • Sinclair is anAnishinaabe artist and star blanket designer. In First Nations and Métis culture, being gifted with a star blanket is a high honour. A star blanket — given to leaders in a community and wrapped around their shoulders in ceremony — is sewn or stitched in the middle with the image of a morning star, the brightest light in a dawn sky.



@sportvortex
@sportvortexhttps://sportvortex.com
Previous article
NHL Rumors: Anaheim Ducks, and the New York Rangers
Next article
My best bets for Newmarket and Haydock this Saturday

Copyright © 2024 sportvortex.com All rights reserved.