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Nehiyaw artist Chris Chipak designed the new Indigenous Riders logo that was first unveiled on June 21.
He spoke about the popularity of merchandise with the new design on Monday’s The Evan Bray Show, featuring guest host Brent Loucks.
Chipak also designed an earlier iteration of the logo that was used in 2024.
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Listen to Chris Chipak on The Evan Bray Show:
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Brent Loucks: What’s your background as an artist?
Chris Chipak: I’ve been drawing my whole childhood, all the way up through university, to adulthood. It’s just been something I’ve been doing as a kind of stress relief and then it’s just taken off now to where I’m juggling it along with my full time job at teaching.”
Loucks: You did this logo last year for the Riders, what inspired you to do it in an even more colourful way this year?
Chipak: (The colours) that they dropped this year were actually the initial colours I had when I presented it to them (last year).
They were kind of taken aback by the colours and they were like ‘This is amazing, but we’re going to put it on the back burner because we need to follow regulations and make it our shades of green’.
For them to bring it out again this year and now tell the full story of why you chose colours was really nice.
Loucks: What’s the design all about, what does it mean to you?
Chipak: The shield and the S stayed the same, I couldn’t touch those things. I had to work everything within it.
So, on one side, I did the buffalo and I made that brown to tie into Earth and the land where the buffalo roamed throughout our prairies, and on the other side, I did a landscape of grass, water and the sun to signify the treaty promise of ‘As long as the grass grows, river flows and sun is shining’ — it ties in that. And then, within that, I just tried to put as much storytelling to bring that full circle. It’s pretty fun.
Loucks: What does this mean for you as an Indigenous artist to have your logo celebrated all through the province and Rider nation?
Chipak: It’s insane how you just roll and keep moving, and then that moment happens where they throw it up on the Jumbotron and they call your name out, and you kind of freeze.
Just to see it everywhere and to know that it just started out on my iPad and on pieces of loose leaf, and it came to where it’s just available for people to purchase.
It’s been really exciting for me, but also it’s a nod that if you just keep chasing things and keep working at it, it pays off. You’ve got to just keep pushing yourself.
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