Cultural Continuance and Agency in Cherokee Biographical Digital Storytelling

Abstract

The concepts of Native American cultural continuance and agency have become critical elements of both preserving, sharing, and extending the culture of Indigenous Americans into the future. Digital media platforms offer Native American nations a new opportunity to reach both a Native audience and society at large and contradict traditional media's cultural stereotypes and misrepresentation. Therefore, this qualitative content analysis of Cherokee Nation digital media explores what elements of cultural continuance and cultural agency are found in biographical digital storytelling. Using the key concepts extracted from the literature (visibility, envisioning a future, creative authority and autonomy, authenticity, and disrupting dominant norms) as the focus, six themes emerged from Cherokee Nation articles and documentaries.