March 15, 2023

To read about the other Culture Shifters, return to the list here .

Erica Tremblay vividly remembers the a-ha moment that ended up transforming her life. It came to her while going down Internet rabbit holes late at night, searching for something that might assuage the restlessness and uncertainty she had been feeling.

While she had built a successful career in advertising, online media and documentaries, she just couldnt seem to shake the feeling that there was something missing. Having grown up in the Seneca-Cayuga Nation in northeastern Oklahoma and southwest Missouri, she had been looking for ways to renew her connection to her community and culture.

I was like, Well, maybe Ill go get my Ph.D. in Indian Studies or Native American studies. But I would look at the programs, and Im like, Do I really want to spend all this time going and learning from white professors? Im just trading one kind of unfulfilling thing for what I know will be another unfulfilling thing, Tremblay remembered in a recent interview.

Then, I just saw this small Native university that offered this program in my grandfathers language, and it hit immediately. I was like, This is it. This is it. I remember I found it at 3:00 a.m. It was a sleepless night where I was just feeling so lost. I remember that the office opened at 9:00 a.m., and I stayed up all night. At literally 9:01, I called this university, and I was like, What can I do? How can I come?

She had saved up enough money to quit her day job as the head of video at Bustle, a digital media company. That fall, she moved to a small reservation in Canada to start a language immersion program in Cayuga, her Indigenous language. For the first time in a while, she felt creatively inspired again and began writing scripts, including the one that became her 2020 short film, Little Chief.