Cayuga artist's redesign of Ticats logo aims to add Indigenous pride to Hamilton's team

Kyle Joedicke has been a fan of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats for as long as he can remember.

"My parents and my wife's entire family are lifelong Hamiltonians and truly bleed black and gold," he told CBC Hamilton.

So it was "incredibly special" when he was asked to redesign the team logo.

"Apart from it being a major career mark for myself, it's also just an important thing for me and my family," said the Cayuga artist.

Even though he's been making art since a young age, Joedicke didn't pursue it in a serious way until 2020, when he was laid off from his construction job.

His first professional mural was made in August of 2021. He has now been able to quit his part-time job building fences to pursue art full-time.

"It's been quite a whirlwind of the last three years in terms of what I've been able to accomplish," he said.

Local project snowballed into league-wide redesign

The CFL posted Indigenous-made redesigns for team logos on Monday to their social media accounts, but the Ticats have been showing off Joedicke's logo since September of 2023.

Teams are set to show off the designs during this week's games as part of National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

The Ticats also have special merchandise with the logo with part of the proceeds going to the Hamilton Regional Indian Centre.

Courtney Stephen is the senior director of marketing and community partnerships with the Hamilton Sports Group, which owns the Ticats and Hamilton's soccer team, Forge FC. Joedicke also redesigned their logo.

Stephen said when looking for an artist, Joedicke's name kept popping up.

They chose to do the redesign to "highlight the strength" of their partnership with urban Indigenous communities as well as communities from Six Nations of the Grand River and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Some teams in the CFL were working on similar projects at the time, said Stephen.

One thing led to another, according to him, and eventually the redesign became a "league-wide thing" bringing teams together to learn from each other.

Stephen also said it's important to move these efforts beyond Truth and Reconciliation Day.

"From this point forward, I think we just try to look for other ways that we can support the local community and continue to work on making [it] a place where people feel welcomed," he said.

Woodlands style used to create the new logo

Joedicke said he wanted to keep Hamilton's identity in the logo, while adding Indigenous pride to it.

"The Tiger-Cats logo is something that elicits a major sense of pride in most, if not all Hamiltonians," he said,

"I wanted to give the Indigenous community of Hamilton a sense of ownership and inclusiveness in an environment that's not always been incredibly welcoming for systematic colonial reasons."

The logo was redesigned using the Woodlands style — created by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau — a style he often uses in his murals.

"The style of art itself is used to turn our oral traditions into … something that can be easily disseminated and shared while also still holding all of the traditional and ceremonial importance of the context of the actual pieces," said Joedicke.

"What I was really trying to capture in terms of the flow of spirit, is the individual ovals inside of the piece are meant to represent the organs of the body, and there's a certain sense of a balance between the body and mind that I was trying to incorporate into the piece as well."

All about 'starting conversations'

Joedicke said this redesign shows the CFL's commitment to "doing actual work around Truth and Reconciliation."

"Showcasing Indigenous culture and art in this way is one of the most positive directions that you could take … because it takes the really hard edges off of the hard-to-swallow reality around residential schools and the history of colonialism in Canada," he said.

He said it adds to other initiatives in the CFL, like the moving away from Indigenous-themed mascots.

"As an Indigenous person, [the old logos and names] put a tarnish on watching some games because you're just constantly hearing these, in some cases, racial slurs just repeated on TV hundreds of times while you're watching a simple sporting event," he said.

Joedicke hopes non-Indigenous people can continue discussions around Truth and Reconciliation as a takeaway from this project.

"This is just about starting conversations in a way that … gives people a little bit more of a common denominator … where normally a conversation about reconciliation might not happen in a football stadium," he said.