Posts with Purpose: Alaska Native influencers choose substance over likes.

• Author: Simonelli, Isaac Stone
• Position: ALASKA NATIVE SPECIAL SECTION

What it means to be a social media influencer in Alaska--with its modest population of about 730,000 spread out over more than 663,000 square miles-is a bit different than the Lower 48, That's even more the case when your target audience is Alaska Natives.

Many Alaska Native influencers use the social media platforms TikTok and Instagram for a variety of reasons, often mixing creative entrepreneurship with social justice and environmental causes important to them.

"The most important thing to me is that it connects younger Native women to themselves," says Jacquii Lambert (@jacquiiwithacue).

Lambert, a proud Inupiaq dancer and auntie from Kotzebue, is also an artist who has created a line of products focused on solidarity.

"These designs are meant to show that we are a community that transcends the borders of four colonial states (Russia, USA, Canada, Denmark)," she writes in a recent post on Instagram.

Embracing one's cultural identity is a cornerstone of the conversations Lambert tries to generate through her social media posts, partially because of her own path to acceptance. As a child, Lambert says she was always sharing her culture with outsiders; she spent the summer performing at the local museum. Then, something changed.

"I went through a phase in my life where I didn't want to be Native in any way, and all of that insecurity was projected out by bullying other Natives who are more 'Native' than I am," Lambert says.

Lambert has been actively working to reclaim her cultural identity since college, she says. In addition to sharing her culture with other young Alaska Natives, Lambert seeks to create dialogues about mental health.

"I like to have the conversation, and I mostly do that through my captions, my photos, my visuals, and my poetry that I share," Lambert says, pointing out that in doing so she creates important conversations about generational trauma. "I will also talk about my awareness of my Native identity and how much that kind of connects back to my health."

Alaska Native Identity

Grappling with identity and sharing one's identity is a prominent theme among many Native social media influencers. Miss Alaska 2017 Alyssa Yax Adi Yadi London (@alyssaklondon) wrote a children's book that "seeks to help children be proud of who they are and increase their confidence in their identity."

The book, "Journey of a Freckled Indian," follows the path of a young girl forced to walk in two worlds as she discovers how to be confident in...