Long Lake #58 First Nation Anishinaabekwe participates in the 2023 TikTok Accelerator for Indigenous Creators program

By Rick Garrick

TORONTO — Long Lake #58 First Nation’s Natasha Fisher was honoured to be one of 40 Indigenous creators in the third edition of the TikTok Accelerator for Indigenous Creators program, presented by the National Screen Institute.

“It’s a huge honour because there were a few creators that I have looked up to that were accepted into this Accelerator program and in past programs, there were also creators that I really looked up to,” says Fisher, who lives in Toronto. “It felt really nice to be recognized and to be a part of this group of really great up-and-coming content creators.”

Fisher says she has participated in every session of the six-week program, which featured free online part-time sessions from late October to early December.

“I’ve been utilizing the skills they’ve been giving me in those courses and placing them into the day-to-day things I do to make my content,” Fisher says. “The biggest thing for me is it’s been inspiring to see the other people that are on a similar journey as me as far content creation. Some of us are new to it as well so it’s good to see that there are people that are learning and want to grow within content creation, so it makes me feel a part of something.”

Fisher says she does a mix of reconnecting content on TikTok.

“I’m a mixed Indigenous Anishinaabekwe and I started making content when I got sober,” Fisher says. “I decided to get sober in 2022 and for me, I had all of this time on my hands and I was a creative person and I wanted somewhere to channel that creativity and somewhere to put it into so I decided to make content videos.”

Fisher says she has changed the focus of her content videos over time after starting her reconnection journey back to culture.

“Creating content was kind of a healing tool for me,” Fisher says. “I was talking about all this misinformation about Indigenous people; posting my healing journey like making my first hand drum and like going to pow wow dance class. Those things were a huge part of my life and I wanted to share them.”

Fisher says she has done talking videos about different topics such as status cards, the history of Indigenous people, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

“Most of my videos take me to research a lot of information,” Fisher says. “I talked about how, for example, where money for Indigenous communities comes from.”

Fisher says people have reached out to her to say they like her content.

“I just posted a video talking about sobriety and I had a couple of people message me telling me that I had inspired them to stay sober,” Fisher says. “It was never my intention to be like a sobriety role model, I just wanted to talk about it because it was something that I was going through and I needed to talk about it in some sort of way.”

Fisher says one of the biggest things that helped her when she quit drinking was reconnecting to culture.

“All summer long I went to all these pow wows and started talking to people,” Fisher says. “I’ve been learning how to sing hand drum songs, going to a pow wow dance class here in Toronto.”

Sarah Simpson-Yellowquill, manager of programs and development at the National Screen Institute and filmmaker from Long Plain in Manitoba, says the 40 Accelerator program participants were able to do sessions with TikTok team members or other content creators based in Canada to learn about everything from statistics and how to use the app, to editing to mental well-being, to how to create better content.

“They are able to utilize the tools that they learn within the program to create their content and grow their audience as well as just growing their online content,” Simpson-Yellowquill says. “You see a great variety of different kinds of content from educational videos to gaming videos to videos about comedy and different skits and just sharing knowledge from their own culture, just anything that they kind of feel like they want to create.”

Information about the Accelerator program and the 2023 participants is posted online.