"dear fellow settler colonizer," is a Minus Plato series, rebroadcast on Broken Boxes for STTLMNT Digital Occupation as resource archive directed towards education of settler ancestors who may like to more relationally engage with work created by and centering Indigenous artists, such as with the STTLMNT project.

“The show will explore the transformative work of contemporary global Indigenous artists from the explicitly problematic perspective of the settler colonizer. By critically examining our complicity in ongoing structures of colonial violence, the show offers tools for settler colonizers to engage with Indigenous artmaking beyond positions of exploitation, appropriation and other harmful moves to innocence.” - Minus Plato

dear fellow settler colonizer - episode 5 - image.jpg

"This episode focuses on STTLMNT: Indigenous Digital Occupation, by asking how settlers can change our relationship to the internet as part of the reclamation of digital space by and for Indigenous artists and audiences. The whole episode comprises a conversation between Cannupa Hanska Luger, concept artist of STTLMNT and filmmaker and Red Brigade Films Director Razelle Benally.

Through an intimate exchange, the two artists share their experiences at the very heart of the STTLMNT project; how the conceptual core of the project shifted to digital space and how this concept was expanded and enriched through the intense and exhausting labor of Benally’s pandemic-era travel across the country to create the sequence of films devoted to the participating artists and their practices. Expanding on her statement about the project posted on the STTLMNT website, Benally discusses her films as ‘vessels of access’ to the participating artists as a generative alternative to settler colonial methods of occupation, extraction and erasure. Her process in careful dialogue with each artist challenges the very language of documentary film that speaks of ‘shooting’, ‘capturing’, and ‘cutting’ within the filming and editing process. The conversation offers a compelling insight into the making of the STTLMNT project that shows how its uniqueness as an Indigenous online art project cannot be simplistically accessed or consumed by curious settler audiences, but must be engaged as part of an ongoing process of unlearning entrenched ideas about what it means to occupy space across, even across digital networks." - Minus Plato

Image: taken on-site in Tulsa, Oklahoma at Wild Mountain Studios while gathering footage of participating artist Elisa Harkins as part of the final region of the Red Brigade Films short documentary series for STTLMNT. The image features Director Razelle Benally,
Cinematographer Adam Conte, Executive Producer Ginger Dunnill
and was taken by Jade Begay, 2021, with text in Pueblo typeface by Vier5