These four Indigenous women are sharing their stories on social media to gain opportunities, grow their ventures and celebrate their cultures.
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Marika Sila Canmore, Alta. Marika Sila’s ambition has always been twofold: To build a career as a performer and have a platform to express the things she’s passionate about. Social media enables her to do both. Ms. Sila says her income from content creation, generated through paid brand partnerships, forms a larger share of her income than acting, particularly with recent strikes in the film and TV industry. “It’s provided me with so much financial freedom, to be able to travel the world and continue doing what I love.”
“Right now, I’m leaning into just sharing Indigenous joy, because there’s so much hate in this world, and it’s so important to share joy, because there’s healing in finding and following that.” Ms. Michel’s social media platform – including more than 167,000 followers on TikTok – has translated into business boosts. Case in point? When she made a video about a new sticker Indigenous collection she’d created, it went viral, selling out her inventory of that release. This enabled her to invest in a heat press and a Cricut cutting machine, helping her business grow further.
During the pandemic, spurred by the strange madness of lockdown, she self-published A Broken Blade, a fantasy adventure about a royal assassin. The book went viral on BookTok – TikTok’s dedicated and active community of book lovers – thanks to some clever marketing on her part. “For Indigenous people and a lot of marginalized voices, you don’t get noticed by the publishing industry until you prove you can create an audience and there’s an interest there,” says Ms. Blair, who has 45,000 followers on TikTok.
Instead, social media got behind her story, shared on TikTok, and she was able to transform a $5,000 grant into $1.2-million in revenue by the end of the company’s first corporate year.