The artistic works of the late Joe Fafard can be seen all over Regina. His life-size cows and horses created by this Order of Canada recipient are found at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, at both university campuses, in main floors of office towers as well as many prominent public gathering places. When Bev Robertson was creating the first brand for his brewpub he asked Joe if he could take the newly designed Bushwakker arch logo and give it some deeper meaning by creating images reflective of Saskatchewan. Joe was delighted to accept the commission and asked for no monetary compensation. Instead he requested Bushwakker beer to be provided free of charge to him anytime he visited the brewpub until he was no longer on the right side of the grass. Bev considered the terms of the deal acceptable.
Longtime bar manager, Grant Frew, asked Joe one day to explain the symbolism of the various images within his work. Joe explained that the two trees in the image divide the history of Saskatchewan into three periods of time.
The first nations hunter aiming his arrow at the bison touches upon the necessity the bison played in the survival of the people who lived here. Life came from life. The simple stick-figure drawing illustrating the person and the bison with two connecting lines between them again stresses the importance of the “life coming from life” theme which the bison and first nations peoples shared.
The middle panel depicting a Canada goose nesting on her eggs represents the birth of the new people who came to Saskatchewan. Below the goose is an image of a young child on a swing which represents the young European families who came to this province. Beneath the child is an image of the small towns and villages that quickly popped up across the prairies. This rapid settlement was aided by the availability of the trains which brought the Europeans to their new home in the west. The small train appears at the bottom of the centre panel.
The third panel depicts and image of a railway worker driving a spike into the rails which served as the pathway for the huge iron horses. The image of a Northwest Mounted Police officer represents the new order which came to Saskatchewan. And the small image of the horse drawing the plow is very significant because it was the scarring of the land which meant the new order and new way of life had come to Saskatchewan, and the previous ways of life would never be the same again.
Grant was quite intrigued by the complexity and various symbolism in Joe’s creation. When he asked Joe what the squirrel in the tree overlooking this new way of life represented, he was quite surprised when Joe replied, “That thing? That’s just a squirrel in a tree.”
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