My name is KiIiii Yuyan.

My primary connection to my heritage was my mom and my grandmother telling me stories from their various cultures, like our heroes, riding on the backs of orcas, that stuff I grew up with and think is still very cool.

Storytelling has, I guess, been a natural thing for me.

I am a traditional kayak builder and in the process of doing that, I would take people out on long trips and we'd go paddle in these really remote places and dig for mussels and clams and live off the land.

I'd send out an email to friends and family, and they were like, oh, that sounds nice.

And then I started taking some pictures and then all of a sudden, everyone was like, that's so cool!

I want to go do it!

So I realized then that storytelling for me was going to be a lot more powerful with photography and then began to learn it.

But I've always been a really visual person.

The things that I want to cover personally are mostly human culture related.

Working with Indigenous peoples, then of course, it's all about understanding the natural world and having that deep connection.

Especially at National Geographic, we say, the photograph should not say one thing, it needs to say at least three different things.

The first and foremost is it has to move you.

It's got to tell me what is the story that I want to know?

What's the big picture?

And then I needed to know a little bit of the sort of mechanics, of what's going on in this picture?

A good photograph takes all of those different things and does it at the same time.

Even more than as an Indigenous photographer I feel it's important to be an ambassador between worlds.

Helping to tell bigger themes about what's happening to Indigenous peoples in many different places.

That ambassadorship is something that I take seriously, because there's so few people that are in that position to be able to do that.

Even as I move forward, a lot of the stuff I'm working on is dedicated towards Indigenous conservation.

This is a thing that I'm going to keep working on for a long time.

And we're starting to see that people are figuring it out.

One of the big things that I do though, is I go into a new place and spend a lot of time getting to know what's going on.

I'm very, very hesitant to do anything until I figure out how permissions work Indigenous protocol is largely built on permission.

They're very likely to give you permission if they trust you and you build that trust slowly over time, by not shoving cameras in people's faces.

People think of photography and filmmaking and these kinds of things as messing with the camera and learning the technical stuff about it.

But that is just the period at the end of the sentence.

When you click the shutter of the camera, it is the very end of photographic process.

It puts you in the right place at the right time with the right set of relationships so that when you click that shutter, you are just dotting the period at the end of the sentence.