Indian Giver

How do you reclaim history through design? By designing with authenticity in mind.

Setsuné (set-soo-nay) is an Indigenous fashion incubator dedicated to increasing and improving the optics of Indigenous creatives and Indigenous art, specifically in the fields of fashion, textiles and crafts. We were approached by Setsuné to design the brand identity for their Indian Giver exhibit which aimed to reclaim the term from its negative origins and insopen a dialogue about the way Indigenous culture has been poached for use by non-Indigenous companies, sports organizations and designers. In putting together a brand system for the exhibit that work online and offline, we decided to use old photographs of Indigenous men with a red overlay to speak both to the boldness of Indigenous culture, and they way it has been negatively portrayed. We selected a typographic theme that is distorted, but creative in nature and exhibit books were bound in a minimalist style to keep the users' focused on the content, creating an exhibit complement that was sophisticated and appropriate.