INDIGENOUS RESURGENCE IN THE DIGITAL AGE: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF SHINA NOVALINGA’S SELF REPRESENTATION ON INSTAGRAM AND TIKTOK

Résumé

Social media have become an established source of entertainment and information for most people and today serve as the preferred method of self-presentation through digital personal profiles (boyd 2010). Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok dominate mainstream online activities, offering users a space to share snippets of their daily life through photos, videos and texts, and engage with others through comments and likes (Chen 2023). Additionally, social network sites represent an essential tool for activism, especially for marginalised communities. To Indigenous communities all over the world, digital platforms become outlets to recognise Indigenous strength and talents (Carlson and Berglund 2021), demonstrate Indigenous control over their own self-representation and create counter-discursive spaces of resistance against neocolonial powers (Mongibello 2021). Indigenous peoples have thus emerged as key figures in digital landscapes, making their own personal profiles online topical expressions of Indigenous resurgence (Wemigwams 2018). Shina Novalinga, an Inuk influencer-activist, exemplifies one of the newest forms of Indigenous political advocacy, with more than six million followers between her Instagram and TikTok profiles. Her online presence as both an influencer and an activist for the Indigenous community clearly intertwines with the dynamics at the core of digital platforms. This paper explores the ramifications of Indigenous activism online through a multimodal critical discourse analysis. Adopting this methodological approach to compare Shina Novalinga’s activities on her Instagram and TikTok profiles, this work shows how Indigenous presence on social network sites challenges social power structures, how an Indigenous influencer-activist represents her cultural heritage and digital identity online, and what strategies she adopts on the two platforms. The observation of Shina Novalinga’s activities online offers insights into the processes of Indigenous alterNative ways of being in the world (Simpson 2011), and into the radical power of Indigenous transformative storytelling.