We all have that same journey, kind of like that healing journey, that learning journey.

My name's Alexis Sallee.

I go by Alex.

I'm Iñupiaq from Anchorage, Alaska.

My mom is from the Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico.

We've always come from stories.

We've always had this oral tradition My background is as an audio engineer,and so I came into the industry really just wanting to do, like, sound effects for movies.

Just explosions and, like, cool sound design.

Our traditional songs, they do things like seal calls and, like make different noises, and it's like, wow!

Like, we are some of, like, the first sound designers.

So it's, like, very connected.

I went to L.A. and worked on these amazing, like, features, and then I started to feel like I couldn'tnrelate to any of the stories that were on the screen.

I started to understand if I ever wanted to see an Inuit or Alaska Native woman on the screen, like I see myself and my family, my friends, that I would have to be the one to do it because there was no one else doing it.

I shot my first narrative film last year.

The piece was on my ancestral roots back home at my aunt's fish camp in Alaska.

I stand here and I feel how this land runs through me.

It circles around an artist.

I'm showing our connection to our land, to our art, and the different work we do.

This is how we understand who we are.

The feedback from the community was really amazing.

It kind of propelled me to keep going.

Arrived.

Welcome to the Red Lake Reservation.

Welcome to My reservation I tell'em I tell'em I also do a radio show called "Indigefi", so I'm very familiar with Native music.

I tell'em The nonprofit I work with out of Alaska had got a grant to do a radio special, and I pitched them like, "Why don't we make this like a multimedia project?"

And the documentary I did was on hip hop, and how people are using hip hop to share teachings and culture and language.

I write a lot about Indigenous resistance.

We have to remember those seeds to our existence that have always been there.

We did a ton of research and I build to the time to come in and speak to people and not just show up like they do in sort of like this Western film world.

You take the time to speak to people and listen to them.

Next thing we did is we went out to the Red Lake Nation and Minnesota and Oklahoma, Washington, Alaska.

It was really amazing and so that was the first step into like getting that confidence.

For me, as a gay female who's also Indigenous, I do want to reach that like, larger market platform.

When you look at our matriarchs and how we're represented, we're represented in many different ways, and I want to be able to show those more and show them in a different light, like how we really are as Indigenous people.

I definitely just want to reach those markets and reach more people and just show white audiences too, like we're awesome people with great stories and we can relate to you.