Chippewar's art is not comfortable. It was never meant to be. Each image is a demand — not a request. This page is about how he weaponizes pop culture, imagery, and irony to do what no petition or policy document can: make you feel it.
Chippewar's most confrontational series reimagines famous Hollywood movie posters — replacing white faces with Indigenous ones. Films like The Revenant, Apocalypto, Dances with Wolves are reconstructed so the Indigenous subject is no longer the savage, the victim, or the backdrop. They are the hero. The protagonist. The one who survives.
This is not parody. This is a direct challenge to a century of colonial representation that built its stories on top of Indigenous erasure, and profited.
Soule was once accused of culturally appropriating Western culture — for using pop art aesthetics in his work. His response was blunt: pop culture belongs to everyone. What he is doing is Indigenizing it, turning the tools of the dominant culture back on the institutions that wield it.
Meanwhile, Canada continues to sell dream catchers in Parks Canada gift shops, profit from beadwork it did not make, and display stolen ancestral bones in national galleries. That is appropriation with government backing.
Chippewar refuses to let the conversation stay in the past. When people try to reduce Indigenous suffering to residential schools as a completed chapter of history, he redirects: what about the missing and murdered? What about today?
His visual work around MMIWG does not aestheticize grief. It confronts it. The red dress — an image of absence — appears in his work as a symbol that demands you name what Canadian institutions have failed to protect: Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit individuals.
Canada has adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Soule is clear about what that means in practice: almost nothing. UNDRIP requires returning stolen land, removing appropriated cultural objects from government gift shops, acknowledging and correcting ongoing violations of Indigenous sovereignty.
Canada has done none of these things. For Soule, this hypocrisy is not an oversight — it is the system working exactly as designed.
Soule was taken from his nation as a child. He grew up without his language, his community, his inherited knowledge. The Sixties Scoop, like the residential school system before it, was not accidental. It was federal policy designed to sever the transmission of Indigenous identity across generations.
His art is itself an act of recovery — a rerouting of the story that was stolen from him. Every piece that asserts Anishinaabe identity, every poster that centres an Indigenous face, every work that names Canada's ongoing failures, is a refusal to let that severance be the final word.
"Most people won't take the time to read a whole article about something, but they can look at a picture and see a small blurb below it and see the connection through the imagery. It's the best way to portray struggle."
— Jay Soule / Chippewar
Not survival. Not victimhood. Not the tragedy of what was taken.
Survivance is the active, creative, defiant assertion of Indigenous presence and continuity —
in the face of every system designed to make that presence disappear.
Before a single canvas exists, the name Chippewar is already an act of survivance. He was taken from his nation. He returned to it — and named himself after it. That is not survival. That is reclamation.
Chippewar's work does not ask you to pity Indigenous people. It asserts power. Indigenous faces in Hollywood roles. Indigenous aesthetics dominating graphic design. The tools of mainstream culture, repurposed and returned. That is survivance in visual form.
Soule's use of digital media, graphic design, and social platforms means his work reaches young Indigenous artists — showing them that their identity is not a relic, it is a weapon. It is a language. It is alive. That forward-facing quality is exactly what survivance looks like in 2025.
There is no apology in Chippewar's work. No softening for a non-Indigenous gaze. No educational hand-holding. He demands that you reckon with what is in front of you — and that demand is itself the most powerful form of survivance: the insistence that Indigenous existence does not require your validation.
Chippewar's body of work spans print, poster, apparel, billboard, and digital installation. Each piece is a targeted intervention — not decoration, but disruption.
Iconic film posters — The Revenant, Apocalypto, Dances with Wolves — reimagined with Indigenous faces at centre. Challenges the colonial gaze in film and the industry's long history of profiting from Indigenous imagery while erasing Indigenous people.
A bold public installation in downtown Toronto challenging passersby to confront ongoing Indigenous rights issues. Art as a civic act — not contained in a gallery but placed in the public square, demanding acknowledgment.
Collaborated on visual design for Indigenous Fashion Week 2018, using clothing and body as sites of cultural reclamation. Fashion not as aesthetic indulgence but as assertion: we are here, we are alive, and we define our own beauty.
Opened a storefront in Toronto in 2017, inspired by the Idle No More movement — bringing his work into commercial space as an act of economic sovereignty. A refusal to let the mainstream art world be the only gate between an Indigenous artist and his audience.
Work addressing the national crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Does not aestheticize grief — confronts the systemic failures of Canadian institutions to protect Indigenous lives. Forces the viewer to name what they have chosen not to see.
Dozens of First Nations communities in Canada have been under long-term drinking water advisories for years — decades in some cases. This is not a legacy. It is an ongoing failure of the state to meet its basic obligations to Indigenous people.
Indigenous women and girls are disproportionately affected by violence and disappearance in Canada. The National Inquiry called it a genocide. The crisis continues. Soule insists we call it what it is and act accordingly.
Parks Canada, Tourism Canada, and national galleries actively profit from Indigenous aesthetics — selling appropriated art, displaying stolen artifacts, and holding ancestors' remains. UNDRIP was adopted. None of this has stopped.
Indigenous people are massively overrepresented in Canadian prisons. Indigenous communities face poverty rates far above the national average. These are not accidents — they are the predictable outcomes of policies that were designed to dispossess and disenfranchise.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission released 94 Calls to Action in 2015. The vast majority remain unimplemented. Reconciliation is a word. Chippewar's work is a reminder that words without action are a second form of erasure.
Most of Canada sits on unceded Indigenous territory — land for which no treaty was ever signed, and no purchase was ever made. Treaty agreements that do exist are routinely violated. Land is not a metaphor. It is the foundation of every other right.