Tribe Artist Society: Indigenous sovereignty and community-building despite systemic barriers
This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.
For two years, the Cultural Policy Hub has been working to better understand organizational precarity and resilience in Canadian arts, culture and heritage not-for-profit organizations. This research now leads the Hub to ask: what novel approaches are to organizational development, transformation and sustainability are organizations undertaking to address the precarity they face?
Over the course of March 2026, the Hub is sharing case studies that explore how nine arts and culture organizations across Canada are responding to unique opportunities and challenges, ranging from financial precarity to governance, space insecurity, connection to community and the impacts of climate change.
This case study focuses on Indigenous ownership, belonging and healing through the arts despite systemic barriers and chronic funding uncertainty.
In 2019, hip-hop artist and arts facilitator Dwight Good Eagle Farahat was running rap workshops with youth incarcerated at the Calgary Young Offenders Centre. Those youth asked Farahat to make a new kind of cultural space for them, one where they could continue to learn and belong to after they were released. That was the seed for Tribe Artist Society, a grassroots hip-hop collective that became a registered charity with support from Calgary Arts Development in 2021. Since then, Tribe Artist Society has distinguished itself through its programs and community building with Calgarians of all ages. According to Farahat, Tribe Artist Society is a unique example of an Indigenous-led organization serving both Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members. Despite its successes, the organization continues to contend with structural inequities and the deeply-rooted barriers of a colonial cultural funding ecosystem.
In this case study, the Cultural Policy Hub explores the premise of Indigenous ownership at the core of Tribe Artist Society, its work of community-building and healing through arts and the financial precarity the organization is still facing. This study is based on an interview with Dwight Good Eagle Farahat, Tribe Artist Society’s Executive Director and Founder. It concludes with insights from Tribe Artist Society for art leaders and for government policymakers and funders.
Read the full Case study below:
