On an October evening, the Rock Garden at the Royal Botanical Gardens will fill with animals. Bear and Wolf and Deer. Turtle and Eel and Beaver. Snipe and Hawk and Heron. They will not be wandering the limestone paths in the flesh, but rendered large and vivid by the Hamilton artist Kyle Joedicke, whose one-night exhibition "We Follow Our Families" places his paintings of the nine Haudenosaunee clan animals throughout the garden's landscape.
The premise is deceptively simple and quietly radical. The Haudenosaunee are a matrilineal society: lineage, identity and clan membership pass down through the mother, not the father. The clans themselves are grouped by the elements they belong to. The Land clans are Bear, Wolf and Deer. The Water clans are Turtle, Eel and Beaver. The Air clans are Snipe, Hawk and Heron. Joedicke has spent his career translating those teachings into paint, and for this event he has scattered the animals across a garden built on a very different idea of how to organize the natural world.
That contrast is the point. The Rock Garden is the oldest garden at the Royal Botanical Gardens, and arguably the birthplace of the whole institution. It is a formal, curated space, and into that orderly setting Joedicke will introduce a new eight-foot by sixteen-foot mural in the garden's lower bowl, along with the clan animal works placed along the paths.
The evening is structured as a slow reveal. Guests arrive at six. At ten past, there are remarks in the Great Hall. By twenty past six, the gardens are open to wander, and visitors are invited to find the animals and watch the sun go down. From seven to nine, the mural is unveiled in the lower bowl, Joedicke speaks, and then he does something that sets this event apart from a standard gallery opening: he steps behind the decks. Joedicke is a well-known DJ as well as a painter, and the night closes with a live set in the garden. The event adjourns at nine.
Joedicke's own story is one of a family line that was, in a sense, split and then reassembled. He is of Scottish and Cayuga descent, a member of the Turtle Clan, raised in Caledonia. That upbringing gave him what he has described as a split understanding of his identity, and his art has become the means by which he keeps educating himself about the teachings of his ancestral heritage, and sharing them with a wider community.
He came to painting through an unlikely route. Joedicke was a self-described lifelong doodler who practiced graffiti, and he only began pursuing art professionally after being laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic. His first mural went up in 2021, dedicated to his late grandmother, whom he has called one of his most steadfast supporters. From there the work accelerated. He is self-taught, and his visual vocabulary draws from the Woodlands style pioneered by Norval Morrisseau, from west coast Haida art, and from the graffiti culture he grew up in. The content comes from Haudenosaunee teachings; the look is unmistakably his own.
In the few years since that first mural, Joedicke has become one of the more visible Indigenous artists in southern Ontario. He redesigned the logo for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, unveiled in 2023, and in 2025 a new Waterloo Warriors logo of his design was launched. His mural "The Great Law of Peace" was unveiled at the University of Waterloo, and his work also appears at McMaster University. He is currently an Artist Ambassador for the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Foundation. Underneath the commissions is a stated goal: to create more inclusion for Indigenous communities, and specifically a sense of ownership in spaces that have not traditionally been held for Indigenous people.
A botanical garden on the Niagara Escarpment is exactly such a space. The Royal Botanical Gardens spans more than two thousand acres across Burlington and Hamilton, making it the largest botanical garden in North America, and it was designated a National Historic Site in 1994. It sits within the Niagara Escarpment UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. Its formal gardens were laid out in a tradition that treats plants as specimens to be arranged and labeled. Joedicke's clan animals arrive as something else entirely: relatives, not exhibits, organized by a system that predates the garden by centuries.
That the proceeds go to the Native Women's Centre of Hamilton ties the evening together. The centre provides safe shelter and housing for women of any age, ancestry, culture or place of origin, with or without children, who are in crisis because of family violence, homelessness or conflict with the law, and it runs its programs with a focus on traditional healing. For an event about a matrilineal clan system, in which identity and belonging are passed through mothers, the destination of the money is not incidental.
Tickets are ten dollars, plus HST and a two-dollar service fee, and the event runs rain or shine, with portions moved indoors if the weather turns. The admission covers this event only and does not include access to the rest of the garden areas. It is, by the standards of a one-night art event with a live DJ and a new mural, a modest price, and all of it is donated.
What a visitor will actually see is a garden at dusk with animals hidden along its paths, a mural waiting in a stone bowl, and an artist who spent his childhood moving between two families now placing the whole of his clan system, land and water and air, into a landscape built to display plants. The sun sets, the decks come out, and for three hours the Rock Garden holds a different kind of taxonomy.