This Artist Recreated Famous Movie Posters with Indigenous People
Toronto Indigenous multimedia artist Jay Soule is no stranger to doing things himself. His grassroots work can be seen across the city, from a piece on a concrete planter on Queen West to his sticker designs dotting light posts across downtown Toronto. While Canada 150 celebrations forwarded narratives and imagery that appropriated and erased Indigenous identities in Canada, Soule has been fighting for representation, autonomy, and decolonization with a mix of activism and art.
Soule works under the name Chippewar (a nod to both his identity as a Chippewa Native American of the Thames and the ongoing hostility his community endures), and with his recent movie poster series, he's Indigenizing and reclaiming pop culture imagery and narratives. By inserting Indigenous identities into iconic movie posters, he highlights both the necessity for and a staggering lack of representation of Indigenous identities in the arts.
This art confronts us with the fact that until Indigenous people are restored full agency over their representation and narrative, any use of their identities and culture by non-Indigenous people will function as an appropriative tool of colonialism and erasure. Soule is creating art that resists that structure and reclaims narrative power.
