Born and raised Yukoner Pavlina Sudrich is passionate about telling stories of her life in the bush
“That’s when I learned that men on the internet love nothing more than to correct a woman when it comes to things like hunting and fishing.”
She feels it’s important that people value the northern lifestyle and that comes from building an understanding.
The challenge of successfully delivering this education fills her spirit and nourishes her creativity. Becoming an internet sensation was just an accident.
Sudrich calls herself a content creator. She has just under one million followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube combined. Her audience profile is broad: equally male and female, 28 and older, and from around the world.
As a communications specialist, Sudrich realized she could better meet the needs of her contract clients if she understood the opportunities and challenges of posting video on social media. Short video was emerging as a popular communications tool on Instagram. First, she had to learn how to make one-to-two-minute targeted videos.
Sudrich decided to use herself as a subject and to talk about something she knows — hunting, fishing and camping. Her content was targeted at people who didn’t grow up with this lifestyle but were intrigued and wanting to try it out, yet feeling nervous about asking questions that may be seen as foolish.
Over time, Sudrich learned to break her stories into small bites. She started to develop what she calls, “teaspoonfuls of information.” This method has promoted more understanding and less of a reactive, generally negative response.
For example, she explains, “I got up, that’s a whole video. We saw a moose, that’s a whole video. We harvested a moose, that’s a whole video. We walked up to the harvest site, that’s another video.”
It’s about bringing her viewers along slowly, taking time to explain not only what is happening in the videos, but why. The effect has been the gentle building of an education about life on-the-land, and with it, more acceptance. Uninformed feedback, Sudrich has learned, can be hard to handle.
She references talking to people about fur and trapping. No surprise, this is usually a hot topic with outsiders.
Sudrich explains her motivation — “I have so many friends in Old Crow who are young men and women, who are fantastic on the land. Every time they share something about their lifestyle that they are proud of, and they absolutely should be proud of, they just get hammered online and their content gets taken down.”
Sudrich’s aim is to reduce the misconceptions and develop an understanding. “It’s impactful to their self-esteem, to be told that their lifestyle is dangerous and wrong.”
So how did all of these videos on fishing, hunting and camping in the north go viral? One evening Sudrich posted a fishing video and talked about the lure she had used to catch her fish.
The next morning, when she checked her social media accounts, she was shocked to see that she had gone from 2,000 followers to 6,000 people who had engaged with that video, overnight. This was the start of her accounts taking flight!
“That’s when I learned that men on the internet love nothing more than to correct a woman when it comes to things like hunting and fishing. All of their comments drove the engagement rate up. It became my first viral video.”
It turns out she had called the lure a Len Thompson, which was in fact the manufacturer of the lure, not the type of lure.
Realizing the opportunity however, Sudrich jokes, “I now fish on the internet as much as I do in the bush.”
These days her social media persona is humming along with ever-increasing popularity. Her dad Rudy is a favourite with her followers and features in many of her videos.
Rudy is over 80, a strong character, and originally from the Czech Republic. Her followers love the authenticity of Sudrich’s story-telling, how she relates with her dad, and her life in this rugged, challenging terrain. She’s constantly reminded by outsiders of how fortunate she is to live in the Yukon.
“It helps you see your own reality through the eyes of other people and you appreciate it more,” she says.
With a baby on the way, Pavlina and her partner will need to reassess. It will be their first experience of raising a little one on the land, navigating family privacy when creating social media videos, juggling the demands of work, life, and the online interactions with nearly a million people — there’s a lot to learn and there’s only so much time in a day!
Ultimately, Sudrich’s objective of helping people feel comfortable and confident, when going into the Yukon wilderness has been met. She just didn’t expect it would be this many people, from all walks of life, who would be responding to her call.
“If I can help people feel more comfortable getting out there, that’s rewarding,” she says.
