You've seen the work. You know who he is. You know what is still happening. Discomfort is not an ending — it's a beginning. This page asks what comes next.
Chippewar's work is designed to provoke, not comfort. These are not quiz questions. There are no right answers. But there are honest ones. Click each to find a framework — then do the thinking yourself.
"Canada is committed to reconciliation and a renewed relationship with Indigenous peoples based on recognition of rights, respect, cooperation, and partnership."
Canada adopted UNDRIP in 2016. The government funds reconciliation initiatives. National Indigenous Peoples Day is a federal designation. The language of partnership and healing appears in official documents, speeches, and policy frameworks.
"We acknowledge the land we are on is the traditional territory of..."
Dozens of First Nations remain under long-term drinking water advisories. MMIWG continues. The 94 Calls to Action sit largely untouched. Parks Canada sells appropriated Indigenous art. National galleries hold stolen artifacts and ancestral remains.
The Indian Act still governs the lives of First Nations people. Land defenders are arrested. Pipelines are built through unceded territory. Treaties are violated. Children continue to be removed from Indigenous families at rates that mirror the Sixties Scoop.
"Canada has adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but they haven't implemented it." — Jay Soule
Support Indigenous artists directly. Visit chippewar.com — not for a souvenir, but for a statement. When you buy from Indigenous creators, you support Indigenous economic sovereignty. That is not charity. That is justice.
chippewar.com →A land acknowledgment is a beginning, not an endpoint. Find out the actual treaty relationship of the land where you live, study, and move through. Whose territory is it? What agreements were made — and which were broken? native-land.ca is a starting point.
native-land.ca →The Truth and Reconciliation Commission released 94 specific, concrete actions Canada must take. Read them. Know them. Then ask your elected representatives which ones they have acted on — and hold them accountable for the answer.
TRC Reports →Chippewar's work is designed to make non-Indigenous audiences uncomfortable. That discomfort is not harm — it is information. Sitting with it, rather than deflecting from it, is one of the most important things you can do. Discomfort is not a reason to look away.
When conversations about Indigenous rights happen, make sure they include Indigenous voices — not just commentators, academics, or politicians speaking about Indigenous people. Follow Indigenous journalists, artists, activists, and thinkers. Amplify what they already say rather than waiting for a non-Indigenous intermediary.
Reconciliation — or whatever we call the work of repair — will not be comfortable for those who have benefited from colonialism. That is not a reason to delay. It is a reason to begin. Soule's entire practice is a refusal to make it easy. Follow his lead: don't make it easy on yourself either.
I did not choose Chippewar because he is safe. I chose him because he is necessary. There are many Indigenous artists I could have featured — voices that are warm, accessible, and easy to receive. Jay Soule is none of those things. His work demands something from the viewer. I wanted this website to demand something too.
The design of this site is not decoration. Every choice carries meaning. Red appears throughout this site not for drama but for blood — for the women and girls whose names we still do not hear at the centre of national conversation, for the land that was taken without consent, for the urgency that Soule embeds in every work he makes. Black is power and grief together: the insistence of presence, and the weight of what has been suppressed. White — the background from which everything else departs — is institutional whiteness, the blank space of colonial erasure that pretends to be neutrality.
The structure of this site mirrors the concept of survivance. It does not begin with trauma. It begins with Chippewar's identity — his nation, his name, his presence. Trauma appears here, but it arrives in context: as something that could not extinguish what was already there, and could not stop what is still growing.
I made a deliberate decision not to soften the language on this site. There are no hedges, no passive constructions like "some people argue." The directness is intentional. Soule does not soften his work for a non-Indigenous audience. I owe the same honesty to the people who visit here.
The font choices matter. Bebas Neue — bold, modern, assertive, sans-serif — does not evoke anything "traditionally Indigenous." That is the point. Chippewar's work exists in the present. It is not a museum piece. It is not a relic. A decorative, "Indigenous-coded" typeface would have been appropriation in the very act of designing about appropriation. Modern sans-serif typography says: this is happening now.
The hardest part of building this site was the responsibility of centering someone else's voice. I am not Anishinaabe. I have not experienced what Soule experienced. My role here is not to interpret his work for him — it is to create a frame in which his own words do the work. That is why direct quotes appear throughout, unparaphrased, exactly as he said them. His voice leads. Mine follows.
What I hope you leave with is not information. Information is easy to store and forget. I hope you leave with a question you cannot entirely put down — about whose stories get told, who gets to tell them, and what it costs to keep things exactly as they are.
Jay Soule said this. He means all of us. Prosperity here is not wealth — it is what becomes possible when colonial divisions stop being the organizing principle of this country. That is not a utopia. It is a direction. Start walking.