{"id":3339,"date":"2019-07-22T18:20:02","date_gmt":"2019-07-22T18:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2019\/07\/22\/with-molly-of-denali-pbs-raises-its-bar-for-inclusion\/"},"modified":"2019-07-22T18:20:02","modified_gmt":"2019-07-22T18:20:02","slug":"with-molly-of-denali-pbs-raises-its-bar-for-inclusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2019\/07\/22\/with-molly-of-denali-pbs-raises-its-bar-for-inclusion\/","title":{"rendered":"With \u2018Molly of Denali,\u2019 PBS Raises Its Bar for Inclusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dozens of Alaska Native writers and advisers were recruited to help create the children\u2019s series, one of the first to have a Native American lead.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

VANCOUVER \/ July 15, 2019\u00a0<\/strong>\u2013 When two children\u2019s television producers from the East Coast set out to make a show about\u00a0an\u00a0Alaska Native\u00a0girl\u00a0whose parents run a rural trading post, there was no question that they would need some cultural guidance.<\/p>\n

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Dorothea Gillim, who was executive producer of the \u201cCurious George\u201d television series, grew up in Rochester, N.Y., where the grocery chain Wegmans originated, and she had long imagined a children\u2019s show that centered on a store that was the hub of the community. The show\u2019s other creator, Kathy Waugh, who was a writer on \u201cArthur,\u201d envisioned a story about an adventurous young girl living in a remote area.<\/p>\n

The setting for the show came to Gillim in 2015, when the news media was covering President Obama\u2019s trip to Alaska. On the eve of the visit he announced that the name of Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in North America,\u00a0would be restored to Denali<\/a>, its Alaska Native name.<\/p>\n

The show that the producers dreamed up,\u00a0called \u201cMolly of Denali,\u201d<\/a>ended up becoming a PBS cartoon about a 10-year-old Athabascan girl with a video blog about life in rural Alaska.\u00a0PBS says<\/a>\u00a0it is the first nationally distributed children\u2019s series with a Native American lead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The show, which premieres across the country on Monday, was written for children ages 4 to 8. It follows the spunky and inventive Molly Mabray and her friends as they solve kid-friendly problems, like earning enough money to buy an inflatable tube to ride on the water or finding ways to keep four-legged creatures out of their garden.<\/p>\n

It also represents what is perhaps PBS\u2019s most ambitious effort yet to educate its young viewers about a distinct cultural group, while investing in making sure that members of that group are involved at every level of production.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0core narrative of the show involves Molly making new connections to her Native identity. But neither of the creators had Native roots, and they knew they would need to educate themselves about the cultural heritage of their main character. PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit that distributes federal funds to public broadcasting stations and programs, including \u201cMolly of Denali,\u201d urged the producers to find a way to intimately involve Alaska Native people in the making of the show.<\/p>\n

In the past, one or two cultural advisers might have been considered sufficient for informing a children\u2019s show about an Alaska Native family. But for a television show created in 2019, after years of reckoning with inadequate representation in television and film, there\u2019s an understanding in the industry that Alaska Native people should be integral to the process of telling a story about themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor so long people have come in and literally just taken our stories and have done what they wanted with them,\u201d said Princess Daazhraii Johnson, a creative producer and writer on \u201cMolly,\u201d who is Neets\u2019aii Gwich\u2019in. (The character Molly\u2019s cultural heritage is from three Athabascan groups:\u00a0Gwich\u2019in, Koyukon and Dena\u2019ina.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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To make sure they got the show right, the Boston public broadcaster WGBH, which produced the show, involved more than 60 people who are Alaska Native, First Nations or Indigenous in writing the scripts, advising on cultural and linguistic issues, recording the theme song and voicing the characters. \u201cWe recognized our own ignorance of the subject and we didn\u2019t want to repeat stereotypes,\u201d Gillim said.<\/p>\n

The production had cultural advisers from each region of Alaska that the show addresses, and for each animated Native character, they hired a voice actor who was of either Alaska Native or First Nations heritage. It\u2019s a scope of inclusion rarely seen in children\u2019s television, one the show\u2019s Native writers and advisers hope becomes a new standard for how\u00a0TV producers\u00a0handle specific cultural identities.<\/p>\n

Growing up in the 1980s, Johnson, the \u201cMolly\u201d writer, said she remembers few Native role models in the media and troubling racist portrayals of Native Americans in television and film.\u00a0Even now,\u00a0stories in mainstream pop culture about Native American communities tend to rely on tropes about \u201csavage\u201d or \u201cnoble\u201d warriors and focus on the anguish of poverty and alcoholism, instead of showing Native Americans in everyday roles, according to a\u00a0report released last year<\/a>\u00a0by the First Nations Development Institute, a nonprofit focused on improving the economic conditions of Native Americans.<\/p>\n

Instead of outsiders continuing to co-opt and misrepresent Native culture, \u201cwe have to be a part of informing\u00a0 what that image is, and we have to be at every level of production,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n

Not all shows have the funding to reach that goal, said Linda Simensky, the vice president of children\u2019s programming at PBS. \u201cMolly\u201d could because the show received support from the U.S. Department of Education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, she added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The show qualified for Education Department funding because it revolves around informational text literacy, which means teaching children how to use tools like guidebooks, maps and internet search engines to solve problems. In the show, for example, Molly uses a map of the land surrounding her village to find and fix a wildlife camera that was livestreaming an eagle\u2019s nest while babies hatched.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"In<\/div>\n

In one episode of \u201cMolly of Denali,\u201d Molly and her two friends prepare for a canoeing competition.\u00a0<\/span>Credit<\/span>PBS Kids<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting\u00a0allowed WGBH to train six Alaska Native screenwriters and hire four Alaska Native advisers. The producers met the advisers in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2016, to develop the world of the show before production began.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became very clear to me that I\u2019m sitting with people who don\u2019t know anything about my culture, about where I came from,\u201d said Luke Titus, one of the advisers.<\/p>\n

Titus, 78, an Alaska Native elder who is Lower Tanana Athabascan, discussed growing up in a small cabin in an Alaskan village and the centrality of nature in his community. He eventually got used to the idea that it was O.K. to interrupt the producers to share his own insight, a behavior that isn\u2019t part of his culture\u2019s custom, he said.<\/p>\n

He shared painful stories, too, including one about being sent away to boarding school when he was about 12 years old, part of a broader\u00a0forced assimilation campaign<\/a>\u00a0by the United States government. Boarding school is a common childhood memory for Native Americans of a certain generation: Sovereign Bill, the 14-year-old girl who voices Molly and is Muckleshoot and Tlingit, said that her grandmother was sent to boarding school in Alaska as well.<\/p>\n

Titus\u2019s story inspired an episode of \u201cMolly of Denali.\u201d In one segment, Molly sets out to find her grandfather\u2019s lost drum, which he gave away when he was a child at boarding school. Using an old photograph of her grandfather, Molly tracks down an Alaska Native woman who had befriended him at school, who explained that he gave up the drum because singing Native songs wasn\u2019t allowed there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThey only wanted us to sing new songs,\u201d the woman says, \u201cTheir songs. In English. We were made to feel bad about who we were.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sensitive topic to introduce to 4-year-olds, but the writers and producers on the show said that they felt the appropriate way to do it was through the eyes of a curious child who wanted to help her grandfather.<\/p>\n

At other moments during the meetings about the show, Alaska Native advisers pointed out parts in the script that clashed with their culture. Gillim recalled that in an early draft, a script had Molly tossing a map at her mother in excitement. But the advisers told her that behavior didn\u2019t align with Alaska Native custom, which emphasized that children must show respect to their elders. In a revised script, Gillim said, Molly gently places the map in front of her mother.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came up there with all of our East Coast producer energy and with, certainly, the willingness to learn,\u201d Gillim said. \u201cBut we really learned the importance of slowing down and listening.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the advisers gave Molly her Native name: Shahnyaa, which means \u201cone who informs us.\u201d The concept of Alaska Native names became the basis for a segment in which Molly interviews the adults in her town about how they received their Native names.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the show are Molly\u2019s efforts to learn about her family\u2019s Alaska Native heritage and sustain it as a member of a younger generation. In another episode, Molly rows a traditional canoe, called a beedoye. As she pulls the oar back, she sees a mirage of an ancestor rowing along beside her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI could just feel my heart bursting,\u201d Rochelle Adams, an adviser, said of the canoeing scene. Adams, 39, is an Alaska Native linguist and an artist, and is Gwich\u2019in Athabascan.<\/p>\n

While embracing tradition, the Alaska Native advisers wanted to make sure that the show didn\u2019t adhere to the stereotype of presenting Native life as antiquated, relegating it to the past.<\/p>\n

Many of the stories are framed around Molly\u2019s video blog, and she often uses an internet search engine to launch one of her adventures. Her mother is a pilot, and her grandfather is a volcanologist, who, in the first episode, is trying to capture an eruption on camera.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s modern. She\u2019s not something of the past, something in a museum,\u201d Adams said. \u201cShe is feisty and educated and holds her culture strongly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Julia Jacobs\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Original Post:\u00a0https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/07\/15\/arts\/television\/molly-of-denali-alaska-native-pbs.html\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dozens of Alaska Native writers and advisers were recruited to help create the children\u2019s series, one of the first to have a Native American lead. VANCOUVER \/ July 15, 2019\u00a0\u2013 When two children\u2019s television producers from the East Coast set out to make a show about\u00a0an\u00a0Alaska Native\u00a0girl\u00a0whose parents run a rural trading post, there was … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3344,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWith \u2018Molly of Denali,\u2019 PBS Raises Its Bar for Inclusion - Thunderbird Entertainment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The new PBS cartoon \u201cMolly of Denali,\u201d which centers on an Alaska Native family, is perhaps PBS\u2019s most ambitious effort yet to educate its young viewers about a distinct cultural group.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2019\/07\/22\/with-molly-of-denali-pbs-raises-its-bar-for-inclusion\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"With \u2018Molly of Denali,\u2019 PBS Raises Its Bar for Inclusion - 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