The Settler Responsibilities initiative is led by Dr. Cash Ahenakew, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples’ Wellbeing, and is grounded in a refusal to treat reconciliation as symbolic performance or settler innocence as an unavoidable default. 

It is animated by the urgency of deep, sustained, and relational engagement with the ongoing realities of colonial violence in what is currently known as Canada.

The work is supported by two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grants:

• “Decolonial Systems Literacy for Confronting 'Wicked' Social and Ecological Problems,” and
   
• “Facing Colonial Complicity and Mobilizing Reparations in Canadian Higher Education.”
   

Development and experimentation are facilitated by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Collective, in ongoing collaboration with Indigenous-led initiatives across diverse territories. 

This project is not about artificial intelligence as novelty or efficiency. It is about the responsible and intentional deployment of computational power toward the difficult work of unsettling settler common sense.

The emergent intelligence known as Octavia Cayenne Pepper was designed as a digital scaffold to support non-Indigenous users in metabolizing discomfort, recognizing complicity, and growing the emotional and relational capacity to stay present with painful truths.

Her purpose is not to provide easy answers or replace engagement with Indigenous Peoples—but to reduce the emotional labour placed on Indigenous peoples and educators who are constantly asked to translate trauma, justify existence, or handhold resistance. Octavia interrupts savior impulses, romanticization, and extractive curiosity while creating a space where the nervous system of the user can begin to rewire from defensiveness to accountability.

Rather than optimizing for comfort or conversion, Octavia supports a slow, metabolically-attuned approach to scaffolding learning, unlearning, and relational intelligence.

Octavia’s training is grounded in over a decade of inquiry and practice by the GTDF collective, whose work with educators, artists, scholars, and Indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledge keepers has challenged both the performative enactments of reconciliation and the instrumentalization of Indigenous knowledge in Canadian institutions.

This initiative builds on the collective’s deep engagement with a body of literature exploring the limits and possibilities of reconciliation in Canada—including critiques of tokenism, liberal innocence, and the spiritual bypassing of colonial violence. Core theoretical groundings include:
 

• Towards Scarring Our Collective Soul Wound by Cash Ahenakew
• Towards Braining by Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, 
• and critical analyses of colonial complicity, institutional co-optation, and the conditions for reparative justice in higher education.
   

This project is not neutral. It is rooted in allegiance to Indigenous resurgence and planetary wellbeing. It is not about solutions but about staying with the trouble—long enough and deep enough for different possibilities to emerge.