Abstract
Digital media platforms, particularly short-form video platforms like TikTok, have emerged as vital arenas where marginalized populations articulate agency, challenge colonial narratives, and construct hybrid cultural identities. This article presents a digital ethnographic inquiry into how Indigenous youth across North America leverage TikTok to perform cultural resistance, reclaim ancestral heritage, and negotiate selfhood within hyper-mediated online spaces. Drawing on 14 months of virtual participant observation, multimodal discourse analysis of 320 video posts, and semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 Indigenous content creators aged 18 to 26, this study explores the communicative practices through which youth deploy humor, traditional aesthetics, storytelling, and political activism. Our findings illuminate three primary modalities of digital practice: subversive counter-storytelling that dismantles settler-colonial stereotypes, pedagogical cultural preservation that translates traditional knowledge for contemporary audiences, and intertribal pan-Indigenous solidarity building. Rather than passively conforming to the homogenizing imperatives of algorithmic platform capitalism, Indigenous youth actively bend platform affordances—such as audio stitching, duets, and trending visual filters—to construct sovereign digital identities. This research contributes to digital sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural theory by articulating a framework for understanding how subaltern communities convert corporate digital infrastructure into virtual sites of decolonial resistance and spatial reclamation.
