CURRENT POSITION Librarian and Associate Professor, Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta, Canada DEGREE MLIS, First Nations Curriculum Concentration, University of British Columbia, 2012 FAST FACT Loyer also writes fiction, including “Marked by Bears” in Apex Magazine and a preview of “A Bit of Baby Medicine” in Augur Magazine FOLLOW tiktok.com/@indigenouslibrarian; jessieloyer.com; @jmloyer Photo by Em Medland-Marchen

Tik Tok Teacher

“TikTok feels like a small city in the prairies,” says Jessie Loyer. She uses her @IndigenousLibrarian account to teach more than 28,000 followers about historical trauma, repatriation, and other Indigenous topics—significant in a field where Indigenous people and culture are underrepresented. She also covers citation styles, reconciliation protocols, and specific academic texts.

Loyer, who is Cree-Métis and a member of the Michel First Nation, says there are two groups whose responses she values the most: librarians and future librarians who’d never learned these things in library school, and Indigenous people worldwide “who have a moment of recognition when I’m talking about a problem they’ve experienced (professors telling them they can’t cite oral history in their paper, museums stealing their cultural items, library metadata referring to their nations by disrespectful names). There’s solidarity in seeing how processes of colonialism follow a pattern.”

Nominator Nicky Andrews, open education librarian at the University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library, says Loyer’s “growing audience is proof that this combination of scaffolded pedagogy and media savvy has resulted in a learning space where people are able to effectively engage with complex topics such as historical trauma, repatriation, and kinship with ancestral objects.” 

Loyer says one early-career experience in Vancouver helped shape her. When she was an archival intern at Tsawwassen First Nation, she assisted in the First Fish Ceremony marking the beginning of the salmon run. “For Indigenous librarians, our work is always, at its core, about allowing our people to thrive, whether that’s creating a metadata scheme or filleting fish.”