[2] The son of actress Tantoo Cardinal, he was born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and grew up in Toronto and Los Angeles as his mother pursued her career in both Canada and the United States.
[2] He had early acting roles in productions such as Michael Hollingsworth's The Saskatchewan Rebellion[3] and Kenneth Williams's Three Little Birds, and made his debut as a playwright with Stitch at the 2009 Rubaboo Performance Gala in Edmonton.
[8] After Huff and Stitch were published together in book form, Cardinal was a nominee in the Alternative Format category at the 2018 Indigenous Voices Awards.
[10] In 2019 and early 2020, he toured the variety show Cliff Cardinal's CBC Special, in which he performed a mixture of short acting monologues, storytelling and music.
[12] Advertised as an indigenous-themed adaptation of William Shakespeare's As You Like It, the play actually featured no Shakespearean content at all, and instead consisted entirely of Cardinal performing a monologue on Indigenous Canadian political issues through the framework of a satirical land acknowledgement nominally preceding the Shakespeare play that wasn't really being performed.