 Hello everyone. Hi. Arising from this land is a nimble greeting word, Aquini, meeting peace on to you. I'm humbled to be speaking in the language of peace that grew a millennia from this land. I'm Travis co co artistic director of double edge theater, and the honor to introduce a living presence of our history, number nine. A conversation with indigenous screenwriters regarding representation on screen. The series is led by the Ocotea cultural center and curated by one of its co directors, Rhonda, Rhonda Anderson, in partnership with double edge. The Ocotea cultural center was found as an autonomous indigenous space, the first of its kind since colonization in western and central MA to develop and create much needed multicultural and multi tribal space for traditional life in the environment, and on the traditional lands of the and other tribal nations. The Ocotea space was donated by DE double edge in recognition of historical and present denial of novena of native sovereignty on these lands and the present needs to redress erasure. The Ocotea means to plant to grow in the nimble language fulfilled the truth of its name and grew beyond all expectations. D also entered into a land share agreement of our 100 acres in this rural town and traditional practices and more native people have returned to the land after over 500 years. I say this all to share that action is possible. The meaning of rematriation and cultural life and presence is palpable and brings meaning to this land, the people of DE and the community. However, at the same time, we live in a fragile and violent world enjoy cannot exist in a vacuum. The old story and native people on this land and their continued presence must be shared in order for the story to live, including truth and commitment to decolonization. Therefore, Ocotea as founders and directors Ron de Anderson and Larry spotted crow men have generously agreed to share beyond their own people. This educational series so that our communities can learn about the long unacknowledged history and presence of the knit muck and other tribal nations among us. This is a place where the voices of Ocotea indigenous people are determined and at the final word on their own identity. The living presence series one through eight has covered a wide range of topics, including first people's presence today and that relationship to the history and presence of understanding. The series has addressed the importance of indigenous peoples day, indigenous art and social change, who presented their work and discussed and shared how they use their art for justice and voice. One panelist calls this a revolution of the heart. The living presence number seven into had indigenous playwrights theater makers and storytellers who shared on a cross spectrum of national and local extraordinary creators. In the same light living presence number eight delved into the vast literary spectrum of indigenous people from throughout this land. The living presence series is a call for truth. It is also a call for action to look history in the face and see how we can heal the bleeding wounds to ask for a commitment not only to listen to understand the story of these many people, but also to understand the responsibility for that story to live fully in the present, and to make sure that erasure and disappearance gives way to reparation to colonization of our minds and our actions, sharing land culture space, and most of all justice. I want to take this opportunity to thank how around for broadcasting, the mass cultural council, Jacobs pillow and local cultural councils, and especially the Massachusetts foundations for the humanities expanding stories program, which has provided support to the community. And now, to introduce the co founders and directors of okay tail. Rhonda Anderson, and a new pick out of baskin from Coktovic. Her life's work is most importantly as a mother, a class lead trained herbalists, Silver Smith and activists. Especially as an educator and activists on the removal of mascots mascots water protector indigenous identity and protecting her traditional homelands and the Arctic national wildlife refuge from extractive industry, and in that light is also the curator of the living presence series. Rhonda Anderson's work on representation from the State House to local schools and businesses. She's on the advisory board of NIFA and was an advisor on decolonization efforts on the mass Council for the Arts, and most recently on for that philanthropy mass 52nd meeting as well as many other panels. She is commissioner of Indian Affairs in Western MA and was named a Commonwealth heroin of mass. Larry spotted crow man is a citizen of the knit book nation. He is a nationally acclaimed award winning writer poet and cultural educator, traditional storyteller tribal drummer dancer and motivational speaker, including youth sobriety cultural environments awareness. Larry shares music history and culture to mimic people and lectures on Native American sovereignty and identity regionally and internationally. Larry's books include Morning Road to Thanksgiving drumming and dreaming and the whispering basket. Larry premiered his play freedom and season here at double edge, and just premiered the film and no key, more than a photo more than a pow wow. He's on the review committee at the nation at the native American poets project and artists and residents at Bunker Hill Community College and writing a children's book series for indigenous youth. Larry is also the first native to have shared a traditional knit muck song and the land acknowledgement at the opening of the Boston marathon. Larry will now welcome you to the living presence of our history. Thank you all for being here. Appreciate this opportunity to share once again with you all. It's been quite the busy time here at okay tail. So we're grateful that you share this moment with us so I just like to offer some words and share a welcome song. We're not sharing the moment to talk about me. What do you can listen or come as the body which is about to. We're so good to hear who are not not as new woman and think. Can you tell you pen time you know. And I may only know I'm a quantum key chair. He said, you know. I want you to. We have you on that right now. It's hard for you to guess you're going to be a critic. I've got to see you do that. I'm going to go and look back. Thank you so much Larry for always bringing us into the space and a really good way. And I'm sure you probably need a law zing right now because you've probably been talking for almost a week nonstop. right? I am tired. So thank you so much for continuing to give voice. I really appreciate that. We have in-person audience, so check in in, making sure we're doing okay. Thank you for being here. I said welcome. Good evening or good afternoon in my traditional language. Thank you for being here and thank you for listening. I think it's important to say that I've lived in this area for most of my life here in Western Massachusetts. I choose to live here. Went to school next door, right up the road in Ashefield, Gropin Plainfield, and the land that I'm privileged to steward and live on currently is in Colerain, which is the traditional homelands of Sokoki Abenaki and Pakumtuk, and I live in the Pakumagon Watershed, which is known as the Green River today. Before we go further, as always, I want to recognize this land, this land that we are all from, and give deep appreciation for her living being and all that she provides us. She provides us with everything we need to live and be happy. It's also important to say that tribes historically local to this area would be Sokoki Abenaki, Pakumtuk, Nipmuk, Nanatuk, Norwatic, and Mohican tribes. Even more importantly to say is the contemporary tribes are Nipmuk, Abenaki, and Mohican. It's important to remember that while Indigenous communities have lived here for thousands of years, they lived here, born here, gathered, hunted, farmed, buried their dead, had ceremony, they are still here, and I don't mean metaphorically, like physically still here. So please get to know the Indigenous people of your area and ask what you can do to lift and raise their voices and honor and respect their sovereignty. And as always, I seek to go by these words and lift others. So in that spirit, I have three action items. You all have homework to do. I'm assigning homework. The first thing, and I will keep saying this request, most of you in this audience probably have heard me say this time and time again, but please recognize and make changes to a dominant narrative that glorifies colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples of the area, no matter what area you're from, it's there. Please be mindful that problematic terms like Pioneer Valley, which is local to this area, is a reminder of a legacy of dispossession, removal, genocide, and subsequent erasure. Second, as always, please look for ways to create intentional and meaningful reciprocal relationships with tribal citizens and tribal representatives. Look for ways to inspire you to reinforce, lift, center, Indigenous voices, narratives, literature, public art, movies, TV shows. Please consider also meaningful ways that you can allow for access to land for traditional medicines, foods, and ceremonies. And lastly, of course, there are five bills in the Massachusetts State House that six tribes of Massachusetts support. So please visit MAindigenousagenda.org to learn more information and different ways to support. So Koyinaknalag Nagivsi, thank you for listening. Again, Pagalagivsi, you know, welcome right to the living presence of our history part nine. Yay, I can't believe we're at nine already. This is a conversation with Indigenous screenwriters and producers. And I really want to express gratitude, deep gratitude for our panelists who are tuning in for most far away as Alaska. They're tuning in on the road and amid very, very busy schedules. I'm sure it's been a wild ride these last few weeks for our writers, especially now that the Writers Guild of America reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Let's hear a hand for that. Because they've started working after a strike of more than 150 days. So I bet it's busy right now. But I have to say, I'm super excited about this ninth panel. The research that I've done has been so much fun. Usually I'm reading tons of books and no, I get to watch TV shows and movies. For the first time in my life, you know, I've really seen that I've had this lineup of Indigenous shows to watch weekly for the past few years, right? We've been witnessing history being made. And again, the research for this panel, lots of fun. Suffice it to say, I'm completely nerding out over here. So I would like to start introducing our panelists. And as always, if you have tuned into Living Presence before, I introduce our panelists with a rapid question. About two minutes to answer or so panelists. Then we can get into deeper questions afterwards. But this is just a little question to warm up and get to know who we're listening to. I think I would like to introduce Vera, Vera Starbard. She is Klinkett Denayana Playwright, magazine editor and an Emmy nominated TV writer. She was a playwright in residence at Perseverance Theatre through Andrew W. Mellon National Playwright Residency Program and a long time newspaper and magazine editor for various publications, including First Alaskans Magazine. She is a writer for the PBS Kids Children's Program, Molly of Denali, which won a PBD in 2020 and was nominated for two children and family Emmys in 2022. She most recently was a staff writer for the ABC show Alaska Daily. Yes, the audience is gasping right now. So Vera, please briefly describe in your own words, I guess, what Alaska Daily is and maybe when you first started screenwriting and how that path unfolded. Yeah, Alaska Daily. So you mentioned the W.A. strike got canceled during the strike. So that's over now. But we kind of saw that coming. It was a show with starring Hilary Swink and Grace Dove who are journalists and they're trying to tackle the topic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, specifically a mystery sort of case. But we use that case to unveil the sort of foundational problems of sort of why we have this problem in Alaska, like specific to Alaska, but I don't think most Native people would find what we were looking at at a foundational level, very unusual for wherever they lived. And it was really pretty cool to be involved with as far as the stage you were on. But we got the one season and then the strike was sort of the death now. I got started in screenwriting actually through my playwriting. And I got started in playwriting through my journalism. I've been a journalist since I was 18. Really, I've been a journalist since I was 14, but I've been paid since I was 18, which led to playwriting project, which led to Molly of Denali, which led to Writing for Netflix and Disney Junior and now Alaska Daily. And now I wish I could tell you some pretty cool projects they have coming up that are pretty Indigenous fun. But yeah, Molly of Denali was my sort of gateway into screenwriting. Thank you for sharing. That's so amazing. And what a tease. Oh my gosh, I can't wait. Yeah. And you're you're playwriting, right? With Larissa Fasthorst, she was one of our panelists last year. So yeah, she's been my mentor from the beginning. And literally taught me everything I know about playwriting. Again, I'll just say like everything she said, totally, totally what I would have said in that panel, too. Thank you for sharing. Next, I would like to introduce Yadabay Evans is the creative producer for the PBS series, Molly of Denali. Yadabay is Atna Athabaskan from Mantasca, Alaska. And she is the proud mother of four incredible boys. And over the last decade, she has held the position of Alaska native educated education director and advocates for culture, language, diversity, equity and inclusion. Recently, Yadabay was awarded champion for the kids for kids by the Alaska Children's Trust. And she enjoys reading, biking, snowboarding and swimming in her spare time. So Yadabay, we recently met at Springfield Museum's exhibit of Molly of Denali. And we found we had so much in common, right? From friends, right, from friends to spaces such as Fairbanks and Western Massachusetts. But please, please tell us what Molly of Denali is and what a creative producer for Molly of Denali does. All right, well, good afternoon, everybody. It's so great to be in this virtual space and see so many of you there in the audience. This is incredible. Thank you for putting this on Rhonda and inviting us. This is just a wonderful opportunity. And I wish I I would have taken you up and flown out there for two hours next year next time. But yeah, being a creative producer for Molly of Denali has been really incredible. And what a circle of life kind of experience for myself, as Rhonda mentioned, we first met together back in August this year. And we're at the Springfield Museum exhibit showcasing Molly of Denali, which is the first Indigenous animated series to feature first Children's Series to feature an Indigenous lead characters. It's on PBS Kids. We talk about Alaska Native culture, and we teach kids different Alaska Native words. We talk about the different values from all the different cultures. I mean, there's over 220 different tribes. So we're really trying our best to bring it all into one series and accurately represent, you know, many different peoples here in Alaska. And I just want to give a shout out to my son. He was super excited to hear that I have four incredible sons. And so he's listening when you introduce me. And he's like, yeah, a creative producer for Molly of Denali really worked on all aspects of the show, from brainstorming ideas with our writers to working with our advisors. We have Alaska Native advisory group that we work with. There's a couple of elders on that committee, as well as cultural knowledge bears. And so we meet together to really kind of direct and oversee the entire series. And also this position is responsible for pretty much being the mediator between all Indigenous people that are involved with the show, which is well over 100. And the rest of the team, which is a huge responsibility for one person. But we have an amazing group of people that we work with. And, you know, not only are we reaching the folks directly with the production team and children's department, but really all of the organization of GBH that is the production company for the series. Thank you so much. That is a huge responsibility. And I want to get into more of that later. All right. Next, I want to introduce Magisy. Magisy Pansano. Panka Ojibwe was and I just pulled your bio offline. So if it's not right, you just make sure you let me know. Yes. Was born and raised in Minnesota and attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Magisy has worked for a major in independent production companies as a writer and producer for film and television. He is the co-creator of the popular comic group 1491s who recently received a commission to do an original play between two knees. Magisy has also covered scripts for Warner Brothers and the Sundance Institute and has written several published pieces on the interaction of Native Americans and popular culture. Magisy has finished writing on the TV shows Barkskins, Rutherford Falls, two sentence horror stories through Netflix and Reservation Dogs. Yeah. Magisy, I'm sorry, but I can't have this talk first without asking about the 1491s because I started following you guys in 2009. So it's been a minute. So I began following the shorts for 1491s back then, but I remember there was this dramatic shift a few years later, like 2012 or so, maybe 2013, with the represent and the smiling Indians and indigenous words, love projects. So I really appreciate the work that went into those videos. They're so meaningful. But what was this turning point and will there be more of 1491s? Oh, God, I hope not. So when we first started out, we started, 1491s was born out of myself and Sterling Harjo initially getting very frustrated with what they call open writing assignments. It's where producers will hire a screenwriter to do some piece of project that they already have in some form of development. And everything that came across our desks was always something incredibly depressing, had no humor in it. And obviously, there's a lot of darkness you could delve into, but that's not where we were, what we wanted to make. So initially, my little brother, Dallas, who plays Spirit on our show, Reservation Dogs. So me and him just started making silly videos in our backyard for our parents, for our friends. And Sterling saw that from Oklahoma and hit me up. And he's like, what are you making in Minnesota? I don't know, I'm just some stuff to make ourselves laugh. And he said, well, let's do stuff together. So we got together at 20 of these 2009, because it was at the end of 2009 that we started making videos together, like actually officially, nobody takes credit for who started calling ourselves unfortunate ones. But we all, that was sort of like the inception. And we didn't think anything was going to happen with it. But it started getting, our videos started getting shared around Indian country. And we started to realize that we had a platform that we wouldn't otherwise have. We kept making silly videos. But eventually, we started doing gigs around Indian country from east to west, north to south. And what we saw was there is just this wide swath of diversity. So we would ask people, when we go to these communities, if you could, you know, obviously we weren't going to film any ceremonies, although we did once and we didn't know. We were like, if you could show the world some aspect of yourself, that's like something fun. And usually it was just like dancing or singing, you know, the representative videos were something like that. But some of them I didn't really understand because I'm not from those communities. But we were like, if there's something that you could share that like your family or friends would go like, Hi, that's us. What would you do? And so we started, we called a little series, the represent videos. And we started to realize that there was more to our platform, more to offer from our platform that we had been doing, which is like by out of shape, dudes just get naked together. So we started, you know, we started like asking, asking community people like, if I had an obviously there was no pressure, but like, if there's anything you want to do, like, like we could throw it up on our YouTube channel, whatever people could see it. So that was, that was where that came from. And a lot of it, like I said, a lot of it is just songs, a lot of it's dancing, a lot of it's like cool things. But it's always usually culturally specific, or it's like specific to a place for people that were, you know, that we were hanging out with at the time. And that was, that was, so we ended up doing both kind of these like silly videos. Again, we never sort of went away from like making fun of ourselves, like sort of the toxic masculinity of like chiefly native dudes, which is, which was, you know, all of our uncles and whatnot growing up, which eventually we infused a lot of that into reservation dogs. And then we, we, but even though we never kind of went away from that sort of silly stuff, we took very seriously the responsibility that we had with like, oh, there's a lot of Indian country watching us now. So we should, you know, make sure that what we're doing actually has some heft in the soul, I guess, you know, so we wanted to be more serious about what we were doing and not take that responsibility lightly. So that's where those videos came from. So it's a very long-winded answer to your question, but that's where those came from. No, no, that's great. And you reminded me of long-winded because my daughter is in the Love Words project. And she was going to say, but my partner farted, and we started laughing so hard. And so that's, that's the video at 30 seconds in is my daughter holding it up and ready to say, I love you, but then I start laughing wicked hard. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Yeah. So that's the story there. So long-winded works. So Ghanu Benton, who is with us today, is a storyteller, filmmaker, singer, dancer, and composer of Ojibwe Heritage and grew up on the Shinnecock Nation territory. Ghanu is known for weaving traditional perspectives with modern filmmaking, that is in the genre of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy. Ghanu has several shorts to his credit, and they include monotony, the hatricks. And you've also served as a co-director for the documentary Crossroads. Yes. Right. And notably, you directed the Looking Glass. Just Looking Glass. Oh, Looking Glass. Sorry. In 2021, that was, that was pretty powerful. Anyway, and you also completed the feature script, Iron Shirt, the legend of Ogle Mazah. Ogle Mazah. And you directed the Micro Short. Well, let me try this. Wena Bozo. And Bozo in Bogodjinini. It's part of my dad's book, the Mashoma's book. My father is Edward Benton-Bene, and is part of an assignment for practicing with puppetry. I created a short film, a four minute short film, Wena Bozo in Bogodjinini. And for those of you don't know, Wena Bozo is what we call our first red being that we call him in Ojibwe. And Wena Bozo really means the first to walk around, so the first red being. And Bogodjinini, some people call him Bigfoot, but he's also just like one of our older brothers in our creation stories. Oh, that's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I noticed that in your other, your other films that you have, your first feature film, The Dim, is coming up. And wait, that's entirely shot on the iPhone? Yes. Wow. But I've noticed that, you know, like I often speak about identity and how we as Native peoples don't have autonomy over our identity and mainstream society, right? But I also heard you say a few times about recognizing the impacts of colonization in film and the importance of reclaiming identity. So to get us started on our conversation, can you kind of expand on that a little? Decolonization in film. Well, to me, that really means telling a story from, you know, it may sound cliche, but it's true from our perspective. And one of the things that I talk about whenever it is that I come on panels is that, you know, people who've seen my film sometimes don't quite always understand where certain perspectives are coming from. And that's deliberately intentional because a lot of the times what I notice in, you know, regular Hollywood films is that they don't care what it is that they're showing us because it's from their cultural perspective. And it's an assumption that we should automatically get it or learn what it is that they're trying to say. So when I try to make a film, I try not to explain too much what it is that I, what I'm trying to do in my films that I just do it from my heart and from an honest place of indigeneity so that later on, if the questions do come up, then it would be a great conversation starting point to educate people about our cultural perspectives and specifically the Anishinaabe Ojibwe perspective that I come from. And we begin a lot of symbologies and oral history and things imagery that people probably won't consciously get until later on in the conversation. Yeah, that's very important. Thank you for starting this conversation. I think Magistie, you wrote a really powerful short story for the Netflix Two Sentence Horror Stories titled Manifest Destiny. And it's kind of, I think, in the same vein of this conversation where mainstream society, how they portray us and who gets to tell our stories. Can maybe you expand a little bit on the theme of that short story? Yeah, honestly, I kind of forgot about it. I didn't have a lot to do the making of it, but the writing of it was was a fun. It was almost like an exercise. They asked me to come in and do this, you know, they had an idea for sort of a possession story. And I turned it into what it became. And the idea is that there's this kid who goes to one of these old like Wild West reenactment places and he sort of sees people sort of doing like the red face and hooting and hollering and all that stuff. But in one of their, and so the narrative around this place, this Wild West Recreation place is that, but the narrative is all these like Indians were like savages and all this stuff. And at some point he gets possessed not by any real people, not by any like real ghosts, but he sort of gets possessed by the stories that are being told and how powerful they are. They actually make him one of these like savages and he has to like shake himself out of it and then become who we actually, you know, sort of respond to his own history as opposed to the story that these white people are telling about and his people. So, and then everybody else in the town, they buy into their into this their own thing and they sort of become these weird Wild West savages. It's weird and insane, you know, it was fun, it was fun, but the idea behind it I had a lot of fun with, which is the power of story that if it gets told enough times, it starts to be believed not just by the people telling it, but by the people that it's about. And that's very, it's directly saying about how we need to like get ahold of our own story and tell our own stories because we're the ones that hold that truth. And if we don't if we don't grab ahold of these stories, especially in the public realm, those stories are gonna are gonna start holding a different kind of truth that other people believe and maybe we'll even start believing ourselves, which is a dangerous path to walk down. So that's what that's what I came from. Yeah, thank you. That's that's a really important thing to understand is who gets to tell our stories, when to be reclaim our identity. And in this, I kind of want to bring in a study to sort of expand a little bit more of this conversation. It was sent to me by my excellent and amazing friend, Laurel Davis Delano, who's probably watching. And it was done with her and her colleagues, Folsom McLauren, Easton and Freiburg. The study was published in 2021. And it was called representations of Native Americans in US culture, a case of omissions and commissions. And essentially, the survey respondents left like roughly 22% of them could not name any famous dead Native American and even worse, like up to 75% of the respondents could not name any living famous Native person. 32% could not recall a film with a Native character. And 65% did not know any television shows with a Native character. So this is kind of what we're up against. And, and even still those percentages are skewed because some folks didn't even write NA. So if they left it blank, they weren't part of the percentage. So that really changes. It makes things much, much worse as far as the numbers go. But the representations that are recalled are, as you are saying, you can see this bloodthirsty savage, a noble savage, the drunken homeless Indian, these stereotypical appearances or stereotypical spirituality or even like cultural appropriation by non-Natives was considered like okay. And so also shockingly, not shockingly, there are no memorable female leads other than share whose identity is kind of questionable. But this report came out two years ago. We have the giggles. And it was, it was evident that mainstream settler society had very little awareness of contemporary Native Americans because of blatant omission or lack of representation. And unfortunately, what that means is that if folks don't see who we are, or have a sense of who we are as Indigenous people, there's no understanding of our needs and challenges of our Native communities. That's impossible to learn. But it's even more likely that they'll never ever support us and take action to help Native interests. So again, thankfully here today are some really incredible leaders in screenwriting and producing mainstream television, short films, feature films that accurately depict and mirror Indigenous cultures, needs and challenges. So I kind of want to dive into that, like what are our community's needs and challenges and the importance of telling these critical issues such as MMIW, MMIP, Two Spirit boarding schools and how that gets written into, how that gets written into the stories through like, let's say for example, Alaska Daily Vera, what was the backstory and inspiration for the MMIW movement really being a central anchor for Alaska Daily? And you know, yeah, let's just start with that. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's even kind of complicated. The short answer is it was a series that won a Pulitzer Prize at the Anchorage Daily News written by Kyle Hopkins and pro-publica and Anchorage Daily News, a partnership about the law enforcement or lack thereof in Alaska, where so many villages don't have any police. Some have police who are sex offenders. And that caught the attention of Tom McCarthy who amongst, you know, many other things has wrote spotlight, wrote and directed spotlight, which was an Academy Award winning film about exposed when the Boston Globe exposed the Catholic child debates in Boston in the Boston area that caught his eye. He reached out and they started to develop it. And they actually kind of turned it into the missing and murdered Indigenous women issue. And actually when I was, I had heard about it quite a bit before and I actually was not interested in participating in another project that is written by white men about missing and murdered Indigenous women. And I just, I really was like, no, you know, like it's been done and it's been done the same way every time and they're sort of missing a point. I got Kyle Hopkins who's the journalist hooked me up with them and had a meeting and it was really interesting. I would say right before that actually he snuck me the pilot like he was supposed to show me the pilot, but he snuck me the pilot. And I'd read the script and the script had some problems, but when the pilot came around, they'd fixed some problems. I later found out Andrew McLean, who's in a new act filmmaker, had had added some things and really made this really strong Alaska Native character of Ra's friendly. And I liked that character. She had agency. She right right in the front said like, exactly what I was thinking, which is like, I'm not interested in this white woman coming in and taking our story and making it and then leaving and doing what she wants. And I liked that she was voicing that and then I had this meeting and they they said they were interested in really looking at the issue and not just making a sensationalized version of what happens. And that caught me and that kind of convinced me. Like, I shouldn't say convinced me, I still wasn't convinced. I was like absolutely terrified that I was going to be involved in a project that sensationalized it again. And I wasn't going to be able to go back to Alaska, you know, like this was this was my fear. It's like, I'm getting kicked out and both both Andrew and I and hopefully he's okay with me saying we're both like, we're never going to be able to go back. Fortunately, the room was very open to and besides just being really great writers in the room, a lot of journalists who are interested in the why, not just the sort of, oh my God, a woman was killed and how could we make this the most fantastic story and sort of use that trauma. There's a lot of literally journalists in the writer's room who dug into the details of just the 911 the 911 or lack of a 911 system in Alaska is part of the problem. The legislators lack of movement on this like really digging into the why, not just like that it happens, but why it happens and it was painful and I think being the only Native woman in the room that was a bit rough sometimes when you are sort of going over and over and over again, why are Native women killed and nobody cares so much and that's what you're talking about all day every day. But at the same time it was one of those like, if we can get this right, this can not just sort of make people aware of the issue, but make them aware of what they can do, what legislator can do more. There was some movement by the Alaska government, some responses that definitely weren't in response to the TV show, they just were very coincidentally unrolled. So yeah, it was that's like the shortest version of like the most intense six months of my life to this point. No, thank you so much for sharing because I feel like you shed light on this travesty. It's an absolutely critical issue that we need to educate others on. So thank you for your voice. Let's see, I'm going to have fun with this. So make it see, Reservation Dogs season three, episode three, Dear Lady. That was a pretty powerful moment in educating on a couple of different fronts. Would you like to share a little bit about that? This is a show that's like, let's talk about the darkest episode that we have. It's a really intense episode. Sterling wrote most of that just sort of on his own with the other co-executive producer, Taj Mahal, myself making contributions here and where we could. I mean, the hardest thing is that you have a responsibility because a lot of this is going to a non-native audience and some of these people have no idea about boarding schools, residential schools, and so there's a bit of what we don't like doing or what Ginyu was talking about, which is like explaining to people what this is. We really didn't want to do that, but we also felt like there was this is one of those episodes where it was okay to do because there was a little bit of responsibility to do it. So there was, we had to see her sort of get scooped, get taken, get put in this wagon, get thrown in and show like all of the pieces of this. The problem is that people, and the problem with doing like a native show at all, is that people will take what you've made and make it the representation for a lot of things, which it's not and it's, the boarding school was the setting, but we weren't telling the boarding school's story. We were telling the dear lady story and how she sort of became who she was and with the boarding school as a backdrop. So, you know, one of the things that I'm always very aware of is the idea that like we, you know, and even people, they say like, oh man, like this is, reservation dogs are such a like a, you know, a glimpse into modern reservation life and it's like, no, it's not, like it's not really, what it's a glimpse of is like this kind of an idealized version of a bunch of late 30s and 40 year olds of our lives in the 90s. You'll notice that these kids don't use cell phones a lot, even though they have them, you know, they're a convenient plot device when we need them, but like, these kids are like, they're basically weird versions of all of ourselves from, you know, like when we grew up in like the 90s and early 2000s. And so it was, it was not, it's not like a super representational show in that regard. You're not going to be able to let go like, oh, I know what res life looks like if I'm going to, if I watch res talks in the same way you're not going to know what, you know, boarding school is actually like, if you watch that episode of dear lady, there, there are glimpses hints and glimpses and you get to see them, but we try not to over explain, even though we knew that there was a little bit that we had to sort of present, which none of us really, really liked or were comfortable with, because there's no way to tell that full story. It's too, it's too big, it's too gross. It was, you know, board school era, that stuff was very, I don't think people, one of the things that bugs me is that I don't think people realize that it was like a popular thing. People had to vote for this, like people were like, oh, that's terrible what they did. And I'm like, what they did, these were your grandparents, like they got behind this. You know, this is, this is the church and the government, like people had to vote for these things. And, you know, people still people really believed in that widespread that you could change Indians into a different class of human being. So, you know, like, there's no way to tell that story in, in what we have was like 20 some minutes. So it's like, we were able to like show some glimpses and show, you know, Dennis shot it like a horror movie, because that's the only way that we could like get that terror across. And to feel like we did any justice without feeling like we were exploiting our own stories, you know, I mean, we wanted to be really respectful. And on the day when we were doing production, a sometimes people would just start crying and have to walk off set because you know, it's like, it's a huge native crew, mostly. And you'd be like, it got me there was one, we lined up the kids to take a picture. And these kids are just like happy little like Indian kids from around Oklahoma. All extras, but they're dressed up in these clothes from the, you know, 40s and 50s. And then, you know, we, one of the details that the makeup department put in was that in order to cure kids of being left handed, they would, you know, cut off the circulation like tie, like either rubber bands or like string around and they would cut off the circulation to their left hand. So there's like purple hand thing. So if you look at old pictures of boarding schools, you'll see kids with purple left hand. And that when I saw that and these little kids like playing around like we did the makeup on that, I was like, nope. Like why, you know what I'm saying? Had to like, had a little mini, mini breakdown myself. But we had, we had medicine people on set all day. It was like nothing but prayers and hugs and love and everybody was like taking care of each other. It was hard because even, even being in that fictional life space was really, really intense. And even with that, we knew we weren't telling the full breadth of the story. This was just like, this is the backdrop. And we're going to treat it as such. And it's an important chapter to show. And it's important to show like, this is where the rage of like Dear Lady comes from, but it wasn't, it was never meant to be like a representative thing of like the boarding school like this. That's not the story we're trying to tell. It was about like, this is a glimpse of where Dear Lady's sort of righteous anger comes from, just like a little piece of it. So yeah. Thank you so much for sharing. That was a very powerful episode. I really appreciated how the adults sort of spoke and that peanuts garble, you know, that made a lot of sense for me. And it gave some clarity on, you know, Dear Woman and her, her role. Ghanu, I see a lot in your films touches on boarding schools, racism, dysfunction, that they're all sort of like caught up in your stories. Can you talk briefly about your films and why that's an important focal point of your stories? I think why my films are so personal is because that I think that I am an introvert by nature. It's through years of practice that I've been able to be able to come up in front of people and be able to speak and talk about my stories. So I've internalized a lot of things that I've noticed and watched growing up, especially just like Reservation Dogs. Mirror Man came out a couple years ago and it's been a very good conversational piece because it didn't enter a lot of native film festivals. So it's entered the realm of science fiction, fantasy festivals, horror festivals, and it's become a good point to be able to have this discussion piece with non-native audiences. And that came about, again, my cuckum was a survivor of a residential school. And before she passed away, she was awarded just $10,000 for her abuse that she went through. But before she passed, she would talk about what they would call Child's Hill, where they would see the spirits of the kids who went missing. And they knew that they were there even though that the graves weren't marked. And to me, it was like walking through a haunted house. And that's exactly the story that I wrote, where somebody of modern time went to what used to be a former Bowdoin school and was taken by the hand by a young child, the spirit of a young child, and goes room to room and sees all the atrocities, like those themed haunted houses that you go to. And I wrote that in observing my grandmother and what it is that she went through and wanted to share that story. So being able to express that in this kind of means, so that's kind of why it is that I make film. And I think that any artist can say that they're artist therapy. So when you're putting down on a film, when you're putting down on a paper, they're thoughts and feelings of expression, so that when you're sharing amongst people, you're letting go of all of these things too. And I think that's part of the process of coming into this new era of Native American film and representation and television movies, because we're getting that outlet of being able to. And I did work in drug and alcohol prevention. And you know that first step in recovery is admission, you know what I mean? So I think that is very prevalent in the work that we do. And we share all of the same stories. And I think that when we share our stories together, especially as Native American people, we can see the similarities that we have amongst each other, even though that we are different, we have our own languages, our own culture, our own ways and means. But when we come together with these these commonalities, it helps us all together to be able to to be able to heal and go through that process, you know. Yeah, thank you for sharing. So it's very powerful. I've seen part of my homework was watching these these powerful films. And it is kind of a catharsis, right? A little bit of a healing, a release. Yeah, because we every Native person that you meet is either a survivor, a child of a survivor, or a grandchild of a survivor of boarding schools. And like what Megasie was saying, I think on the internet, they they had this meme that says you guys think this is so long ago, but it was our grandparents, it was our parents, you know. Yeah, thank you for saying that is important to say that. And now on to something a little lighter. Yadabay, as the creative producer for Children's Cartoon, you know, Molly of Denali kind of like goes about busting stereotypes and educating children on these challenging issues, right? So the series first episode is Grandpa's Drum, where Molly learns about residential schools and how her grandfather is a survivor. So how does one create a formula in that respective way to teach children about these hard topics that we just dove into? A formula. Wow. Please give it another word. Right. Well, you know, like Megasie said, you know, they were tackling or attempting to try and share a little bit about the boarding school experience, but you can't really do it in 22 minutes or 11 minutes, which is our story length for Molly of Denali. And it's incredibly challenging to take such a complex and horrific experience, you know, so many people and make it kid friendly. So it doesn't traumatize the kids that are watching it. And if thinking about like our audience is it's aimed at ages four through eight year olds. And so to be able to take, you know, the boarding school experience and kind of wrap it up in 11 minutes and share something that's meaningful is an incredibly huge task. And I think that the amazing team that we have were really all hands on deck to be able to craft that original story grandpa's drum. And it was actually brought out through a conversation with our elder Luke Titus, who's from the village of Minto and his boarding school experience. And through him sharing his experience in one of the very original meetings with the producers at that time, you know, he gave permission to kind of share his story with, you know, the national audience, which is amazing. And, you know, Vera has had the incredible experience to share the story of Elizabeth Peratruvich and episode called Molly and Elizabeth. And I know Vera could talk, you know, how she did that firsthand, but I came on in the middle of the production at that time with Molly and Elizabeth. And similar to your experience, McGeasy, you know, it was just very challenging to hear those stories. And you have to like take a moment and pause, gather yourself. That's amazing that you all had medicine people there on set. We're zooming in. And so like, our medicine is, you know, the plants behind me, the sage in my home, my kids running by and flashing me, I love you signs. But, you know, it can be really challenging to do this work, although it's a cartoon. These stories are real. And, you know, we have to be able to share them in this kind of really strict format because it's for PBS. And it's educational television, right? And we're sharing about the fact that there were no natives allowed in restaurants here in the 1940s. And, you know, we weren't allowed to go in a lot of establishments and like movie theaters. And, you know, people were told that you were essentially dogs and told not to speak our native language here, in order to vote and having somebody stand up along with other folks. In addition, Elizabeth Parachovic was amazing. And that was before even Alaska was a formal state. It was just a territory at the time. But maybe Vera, you want to share a little bit more about how you brought out Elizabeth Parachovic's story. Yes, please, because that was actually my next question. So please. Yeah, I also want to point out with that with grandpa's job, that was written by a white writer. That was actually a really extraordinary meeting. And I don't say that to be like bad. What I love about being involved with them all, and boy, I'm fighting to like stay with them because like for a while with my contracts, I wasn't even allowed to work with them. But like I will do anything and everything to like keep writing because the environment is truly like a model of how you can still have a primarily white organization and production company and PBS and everything. But in partnership, truly in partnership, truly giving native people power, ceding that power really can make a difference. And that was exactly that experience with grandpa's drum being in the room when that was created. My job dropped of just like they had all the writers, except for me, I was the only native writer at the time and they had all these writers from all over. And they took into villages, they had them meet with elders, they gave them presentations on the history of Alaska native stuff. And I came the last day after they did all this sort of like Alaska native 101. And they completely changed all their pitches. And this was the first pitch. And it was just like, what, you know, I mean, I was stunned. I'd never seen that kind of thing happening. And it truly like, yes, he wrote it, but it was a very native lead experience in him writing that, which was to me pretty extraordinary. And kind of following that up. I don't even know how many. That was 2016 or 2017. And Molly and Elizabeth was a couple years later. And we've learned a lot. I, we went through every literal word, word by word, down to contractions and whether it should be like, I've never had that sort of intensity on getting it right. And I felt the pressure of that. Elizabeth Pradovich is a clinkett woman, I'm clinkett. She is an icon for clinkett people and for Alaska native people. So how do you portray to four to eight year olds one racism that she was not allowed in stores that no, no dogs, no Indians, this is the no dogs, no Indians time. And then she gave this really epic speech, like the original clap back, like she had the greatest like snarkiest speech you've ever heard. And I was actually reading that and going like, Oh, no, we can't use this. It's a little too snarky for PBS. And it's genius. But she also uses big words that are not for our audience. So I literally like the pressure of rewriting one of most like iconic speeches in our history like almost killed me. But I was pretty terrified as far as like, how that would be read by the adults, not the children. It's interesting how much when you feel that responsibility, you think about the elders and you think about who's going to be receiving that. At the same time, you know, you're writing this for children and what it's going to give them in their future. It, it took a lot, it took like four months to write this 11 minute episode. And in the end, saw it air, what a relief, we got Elizabeth medicine crow, who's a clinic and hi to icon in her own right living icon in her own right to be Elizabeth Pradovich and that was pretty cool too. And you can literally hear she was crying and she was speaking as a little bit and you can hear it in her voice and I love that. But while I wrote it, man, was that the work of hundreds, you know, to bring together of something I love about the medium is that it takes so many, especially animation, where you serve, you're done with writing, it still takes two years to finish the episode kind of a thing. It was quite a bit of work of care of so many. And that's not unusual for these episodes. Like I just finished one, what it over again, pretty recently, and while more confident, we're still not totally confident. And hopefully we didn't lose you, you lost the picture. But hopefully not just us talking to each other. I literally that was my next question was about this episode. So I want to share with you the audience, one of the clap backs of Elizabeth Elizabeth Pradovich when she was addressing the Senate. And as she said, quote, I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with 5000 years of recorded civilization behind them, of our bill of rights. End quote. Like that is like that's a timeless clap back from like 1945. It's still is still powerful today. So how do you put that into words that children can understand, right? And I that's just amazing. I also I also think about, you know, how much stronger our younger generation will be growing up with accurate, relevant, uplifting stories, right? And and right, just just imagine how good it is to feel seen and represented. And I'm hearing you, Vera, when you're saying like that, the amount of community engagement, it must be colossal. And the responsibility of representation on screen must feel so enormous. I would say so for what's really kind of extraordinary about working with elders and going and seeing the reaction, you get so many comments about how I wish I had this on her kid. And that's what I had coming in. We saw this in the pilot that actually, there's an original pilot that never aired. And you just see two things you see mom working on beating at the basket and beating. And you see an a new backman and Mr. Patuk and a seal skin vest. And I've never seen me portrayed that way before, you know, like, I'd never see, I'm going to get a motion, I get emotional every time I talk about it. I've never seen that. I never saw us represented in any way before. So that was really emotional for me to see. And of course, I would have done and I would have like volunteered at that point to write for this. And then what's really cool is not only do we get native children commenting on how that looks like me and that sees me. It's exquisite. But it's so many non native children commenting, wanting to be Molly wanting to be to me. My dad is a artist and he like has tourists come into who know all the time off of the cruise ships. And he makes trumps. And he starts getting comments about like, after the show aired, he started getting comments. That's just like Molly's grandpa's drum. And they like these children from who knows where came into Alaska and immediately recognized our culture from this cartoon. So to me, like, that's just like, there's never going to be a generation now that doesn't hasn't seen themself in that way from Alaska native culture. It's there forever, forever now, you know. That's so amazing. And, you know, I've been, I've been watching lots of Molly Denali lately in preparation for this. And I've got that little song in my head and cactovic is in there from cactovic to you know, I'm like, oh, it's so great, like just the amount of representation, you know, Philip Lanshet and Karina Mueller singing. And it's like, it's so great. Um, but it does have a lot of community responsibility and accountability that is heavy, especially when writing for Indigenous shows, right. So I know make it see I think that you've written for for several TV shows now. How does that, how do you navigate that? A culturally relevant representation? Oh, I don't just use what the white man's done. Just kidding. The simplest answer is something that you mentioned earlier, which is it's something that not a lot of non native, but in particular, white writers have, which is I got to go back home. Like I go back, I have to go to ceremonies. I have to see my mom. And like, if it's going to be something that they're embarrassed by, like there's, there's no way I can, I can, I can't get behind it. So that's where, like when you're, when you have something about native folks or, you know, that it has to do, that's like, I just have to like keep my family in mind. And that's, it's like the, it's the, you know, the guiding star is just like, oh, am I going to be embarrassed to go back home after this comes out? Like that's the big thing. And if it's, if it's not, then I know I've done all right. Now I can be silly. Like you said, I can dance around in my underwear online for, you know, with the Fortune 91s or whatever. And like that's still, you can't tell me that's not native, because that's, you know, whatever you're doing it. But, you know, so I can, I am embarrassed my mom for sure. But what I, what I can't do is, is disappoint her and like the people that, the people that I'm accountable to, the family I go back to. And I think having community, having people that you, you know, that, to whom you're responsible, it makes it really easy to, to know whether or not what you're writing out is, is, you know, BS or not. Yeah, thank you. That is so true. Accountability and with our communities, our elders, our families. I want to make sure that I'm, I'm asking Larry, I want to ask you, hear you talking about, of course, centering, I'm going to go now into centering Indigenous youth voices. Larry, and I want to share how you are lifting Anoki's voice as a native child who had his identity stolen through his photograph. And now you have your premiere just, just happened this week of him telling his story of the rediscovery of his identity and community. And so how do you, how do you share lifting his story in that way? Yeah, so and also I just want to say I'm just really sitting here enjoying myself hearing all the stories and all the different perspectives from Indigenous writers and filmmakers. So it's really wonderful with them to be part of this process. And yeah, so the story of Anoki just premiered here. We had two screenings this weekend. So it's been kind of a whirlwind and, and it was really, and I'll just add, you know, we're, as Indigenous writers and storytellers for the, for me, it's mostly just telling stories of people I know, myself, and, and trying to uplift the harms that have been happened to my community and the people around me. And so it was, it's really a lot of times not a really heavy script involved in sharing the story. So like, for example, me and my kids, we grew up on the powwow trail and singing and things like that. And when my son Anoki was about nine or 10 years old, we were singing in Montreal at the Indigenous Film Festival and Music Festival there. And, and a photograph was taken from him from a French filmmaker who was just starting her career. This was about 17 years ago now. And so she took these wonderful photos of my son and, you know, we kept that relationship through the years. And, and suddenly his picture, which actually ended up on the cover of my second book, by the way, but that photo of him was being used around in various memes and important sayings about save the environment, save the Indians, you know, and, and for the most part, we were, you know, we got upset about it because they were like stealing the photo and using it, but kind of dealt with it. But then about three or four years ago up in around Wendake area of Quebec, there was this fake shaman, fake medicine person who literally stole the photo and was proclaiming that this was his grandson. And so I have friends up there in that community. And so he's out there doing his shtick and talking about he's a medicine man. He needs healing. And he has this PowerPoint presentation. He, and he rose out the photo of my son there. And this is my grandson. He even gave my name, Jeremy, you know, he's changed. No, he call you middle name now, Jeremy or something. So he calls him Jeremy. This is my grandson. And he's going to take over the tribe and, you know, supporting me and supporting his future. And, you know, and people were brought the tears and the money was flowing to him and things like that. And, and I just so happened to have some friends up there from into intonation. And he said, it looks like Larry's kid there. And so I'm getting phone calls and your next, you know, he got found out. And, you know, I talked to a rally, the filmmaker who's here now who taken that photo where we were in discussion about what happened. And so then went then I said, well, you know, maybe we should do a story about this because this is very common about we're in a time now of a lot of appropriation, a lot of people pretending to be as when we couldn't be as and it's, you know, in a time where we're getting a lot of support and film and writing and literature and so on. So people are like kind of trying to exploit this opportunity that I didn't see growing up coming up in the 70s and 80s. So we decided to make this film. And it took a little while because a COVID hit. And so, but the conceptualization continued on about telling the story of my son. And, and part of that story was, as I said, he grew up on the powwow trail. And then in his later teens, as life happens here, especially in the Northeast, you know, you get a lot of a lot of things that will pull you away from your culture. A lot of things that are what can, you know, detract you from focusing on your communities because we have very small communities here. We're not on large reservations. So we're constantly in contact with the outside world. We don't get to just get away from them like we would like to. So there's a lot of distraction. So I know he had gone away from his culture for a little while. And so this story not only shares a story of how his identity was stolen, but his story of coming back to his culture by being part of the Oki Tail Cultural Center here. And so it's been, it was quite a powerful experience. And, and as Ghanu was talking about decolonization, decolonizing our work and the filmmaker who's sitting here in the audience, Aurelie, came back from France to do that. And, you know, when we were part of that, we, we told our story. She was just there to hold the camera, essentially, by no small part of mind you, because it's a lot of work and filming. And we had the support of the Double Edge team here as well. And, and so it's been a beautiful process. We did a couple of screenings here. And, you know, I, and my partner had to hold her hand. I was like crying to the first 15, 20 minutes. And, you know, it's a lot of laughter and tears. And, because, and as was mentioned earlier, it's not just his story, because we had our elders who had my mother talking and some of my other tribal elders, and they're sharing stories about themselves as little kids, you know, in the 20s, how my uncle was talking about how, when he cut his finger, the white kids wanted to see if his blood was red like his. And, and so you're, and, you know, that's another whole story, right, as we said, you know, and so there's a really powerful narrative that unfolded as we, as we told this story. And so this would be really coming out next year to be released next year. And so, but we did have an opportunity to share it. And, you know, and to the point of decolonizing our work. And so it's as a, as a writer, as somebody who created a play, Freedom and Season, it's really just sharing our stories. And, and that's kind of how I got into play, sharing the story of my great, great grandfather in the Civil War, and my other great, great grandfather, his father, so they were father and son in the Civil War at the same time. And all these other Native folks around here, while they were fighting for freedom, they were having their children taken. So I knew that was a powerful story to tell, which also kind of took a lot out of me to share and act, quote, act that role. And so when we get to tell our stories from our perspective, it really has a powerful resonance, not only with ourselves, but community and educators. And I'm finding a lot lately. I get calls and emails from non-native writers and filmmakers who want me to consult their work and, and, and consult their script or, and you know, I, I have problems with that in the sense that, you know, you've already created a character and a person that you want me to come in and, well, that's not right. You fix that. That's not right. Fix that. And so, and I, I don't like doing it and it's no, no, no hate on them because I think some of them do have good intentions other than Marge's coming to extract for another colonial grab. But I do believe some have good intentions, but still, it's a lot of difficulty in coming in after you've created an indigenous character and wanting consultation on, you know, I'd rather come in and create somebody that I want to see. You know, let me, let me be that, let me have the agency to put someone in there that I think would be appropriate. Now you have this person and I've seen it in books and I've seen it in film. And so it's a very powerful to have our folks to be able to tell. And that's why I'm coming out with the Trovans book series in the same way, because we know we have only 1% of indigenous books written by indigenous people. And, you know, they need to see brown faces, they need to see themselves reflected in this early education book series is meant to do that in its curriculum base. So it can be in the schools where all other children who are non native can also see our children sharing and acting normalizing, right, because we have these hard stories of the boarding schools of the trauma of the abuse that we faced of being having our identity still. But how do we also get to a place where we can just have things like the social development skills and just talking and playing sports and things like that. And so I think it's up to indigenous writers to, and to be able to create these characters and usually they're not characters just people that we know and grew up with like all my books are people I know, and people were fascinated by the, you know, they're so amazing. Well, yeah, you should have to live with these people. But, but so it's, it's, but there's stories that are just, you know, that we just tell and we're able to be able to bring them to light. So. Yeah, thank you. I like, you know, keeping on the importance of centering youth's voices. Yadda Bay, I wanted to ask you about Mali of Denali and the Ask Mali and the awesome Alaskan kids portion of that. I think that that's an incredible little segue sort of like it splits up the two different, two different, what is it? Storylines in an episode, but it's fabulous because these are completely filmed in a children's point of view and with children's leadership. Could you talk a little bit about that? Sure. So in between each of the animated portions of our stories is a live interstitial. So it's a live filming of kids in Alaska and they are either having a parent film them or they're filming their cells on their iPhones or a parent's iPhone and sharing with us, you know, all sorts of amazing adventures here in Alaska and who doesn't want to, you know, find out what we do way up north. But, you know, we see kids at fish camp, you see them skiing, you see the kids dog mushing, sharing their pets. My own son was featured in one in the River China River and actually it's with the special Wise Raven in Old Crow. So you can still check it out if you guys are interested. And it's a nice about an hour long movie actually. And, you know, kids say, of course, there's the old saying they say the funniest things, but they do. And we really want to feature, you know, our children sharing their lives and their perspectives in a way that other kids, you know, can learn from and see what it's like to grow up in Alaska. There's so many stereotypes. And, you know, folks still sometimes think we live in igloos that we dog mush. I like to tease folks and let them know that I take a moose to work, you know, my son's looking at me like what in the world mom. But it's a great way to just normalize our lives, right, and make us so that it's not such a mystery of who we are as Alaska native people. And that we're not some fantastical, you know, group in that lives in everybody's fantasies. We're real kids, we're real families, just like everybody else. And sharing those stories has been an incredible way to, you know, reach audiences and connect with people. And it's amazing to hear, you know, stories of kids from the States and even across Alaska when we get to talk to them about Molly of Denali and what they're learning and what they now want to experience and share. Thank you. I think that's really important and normalizing. Like, that's a word that I'm hearing when I'm listening to this. And so sort of the next topic I want to get into is normalizing spirituality, indigenous spirituality on screen. You know, some things are just not for public consumption. But I kind of want to get into how this was addressed so well on so many different settings, particularly with our panelists today. So for this, I'd like to start off with McGitzy. You're writing for Res Dog seasons two offerings episode nine. Right, I think that was probably one of the most powerful episodes in all three seasons, if I'm going to be honest. Billy Jack has visited the prison to see Daniel's mother, her auntie Hokey for guidance. And Hokey tells Willie Jack, you know, remember the stories I told you when we grew up by the people we came from generations of medicine people, caretakers. These are the ones who held us together as we arrived from our homeland, the healers who carried us and buried us as we marched. Men and women who sang songs, led us through the dark. They're watching you, my girl. You don't need me. You have them. The power, this is the power we carry when you really pray. They're around. They're all around you all the time. Like I'm like getting all like we'd be just thinking about it trying to read this. So how, how did you address spirituality and that relatable way of waiting stereotypes, normalizing, seeing spirits? But just, yeah, I'd like to know more about that episode, please. Yeah, so we, boy. Okay, so we ended up every season, we tried to break a yard sale episode where the res dogs hang out and there's like a community yard sale up and down their cul-de-sac and every season at the last minute, we've scrapped it for something that I have to write because Sterling just throws things at me last minute like that. So the offerings episode was one of those. So in the first, the first season of my episode was, the finale was about the tornado that rips through town, but doesn't actually rip through town because Uncle Brandon saved him. And then in season two, we had the yard sale coming up and I wrote maybe two or three drafts of it and it just felt wrong. Didn't feel like the show, didn't feel like what we were going through wasn't serious enough at all of the things. So that one wasn't broken by the room that was broken by Sterling and Tosby and myself about 48 hours before it was due to FX. So we were in production and we're, you know, we have to start thinking about our props people are already picking up, they are picking up stuff for a yard sale episode because that's what it was supposed to be, but then we're like, we're going to change it and FX is like, well, you got two days to figure it out. So we did and Sterling started talking about his uncle who was in prison and, you know, I really, I talked about my brother's here in prison, Todd has family that's in prison. We realized we all have family in prison. And that, but that, you know, there's, you know, my dad is one of these people that goes to, they have sweat lodge in prison, like in Minnesota State prison, they can go in, they can go sweats, like those, you know, these spiritual ways are available to people no matter where they're at. And the idea that spiritual power is lessened because, you know, somebody's behind bars. It was something that I've always thought of as bunk, like, you know, we, I went through some ceremonies this past year and had to ask some advice. I called up my brother and I talked to my brother in jail about it. I was like, I was like, hey, help me out, man. You know, you've been through this, I haven't, and then we did. So it was like weird, it was life imitating art, which was funny. But we, we wrote this so we broke it in about 12 hours. And then I spent about the next 24, just up all night and all day writing it out. And some of these things, like I said, you know, the person that I always like come back to is my mom and all of this stuff. And some of these things are things that she has taught us, told me, obviously I'm not, I'm not Creek. So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm Ponca from, so my dad's, my biological dad's side is from Oklahoma. I don't really know much about that side. So my background and my history isn't one of removal, you know, Red Lake Ojibwe to the bone. Like, and Gineers dad is like one of the most formative people in my life. That's where we're from, from Minnesota. And we don't have the like, the removal stories necessarily like we carved out our swaths of Minnesota. And, you know, to the detriment of a lot of Dakotas. So there were some aspects that I had to put in there about the removal stuff, like these are the people, you know, but they are there are things that I've heard Sterling talk about. So like, you know, the songs we sang when they marched, you know, that kind of thing. These are things that I knew from Sterling's experience. But the rest of it was basically it was a summation of a lot of conversations that I had with my mom and my dad and they were about how no matter where you're at, could be prison, could be whatever, whatever you're going through, the access that you have to traditional knowledge has never gone on. You know, there's always people around you watching out for you. And if you can't see them, that kind of thing. So that was the whole that was the impetus behind this thing. And that image of all of these like ancestors standing behind Willie Jack wasn't anything that we broke in the outline that came out in the writing. And while I was writing it, and I sort of was like in this, you know, fugue state because of how exhausted I was, because we were in the middle of production. So it was like, you know, just sort of like rocking back and forth. And I wrote this thing out. And you know, when I wrote it, it was a lot more sort of trippy, like the slip game sequence of 2001. It was like, we see like a whole line of like ancestors stretching all the way back to like whatever. And so I was like, okay, well, budget wise, we can't do that. What else can we do? And he talked about there's a movie called Uncle Boon Me, who can recall his past lives. It's crazy. It's a crazy insane movie. But they have they have a similar sequence where you, you know, the people of this guy's family sort of like slowly fade into you can into being able to see them. So we use that and we put that into sort of that scene with Willie Jack behind. But that was, I wasn't sure, you know, because your showrunner, who's like, it's weird having one of your best friends is like a showrunner, because essentially your boss. But I, it was it was an exciting time because I was just like, look, man, I don't know if you're going to dig this. But I wrote this sequence in there that we didn't talk about with it, which is the Willie Jack's ancestor sort of appearing behind her and he looked at it and he was like, yeah, so budget wise, we can't do that. He's like, but I know now I'm excited to direct it because now I know what this is going to be. And it was that sort of that little scene that unlocked the rest of the episode. And we knew we were building up to it. And so one of the things like, you know, if you're writing for television, you're not like, oh, I'm going to do this in one, you know, they have what they call bottle episodes where, you know, they take place in one location over there. But like generally, especially for us, it was like, well, we want to see all the rest of us and we're going to do whatever blah, blah, like I had like a 12 minute conversation between Willie Jack and her auntie leading up to that moment. But you need all of that time to build to get to there. And it was really powerful. And it was one of those things where in the moment I knew that we were writing something special. And it felt originally true without being exploitative and without being, you know, without tramping on anything. Like I said, one of those things that I can like look back on and be like, Hey, you know, my family can be proud of this. So that was the, the inception of it was the idea that we didn't want to do a yard sale episode. Let's do something a lot deeper than we did. So the, but realistically, I think, you know, when you, the, the cool thing about working with native crews and native people in your creative teams is that you don't have to explain where the line is. Like we all knew the line. We all grew up with our ways, which we all grew up in our communities, all of our, the writers in the room and all of the people that were involved in this production. We were people like from the community, from the communities, you know, that were a part of it. And there was never like nobody ever had to get pulled back. There was just one, there was just one where I, I wrote in season three, I wrote where Bear's mom is like hanging out with her friend cookie and a sequence with them like sort of like jamming out together. Like they used to do when they're kids, like dancing. And one of our dudes is from Pacific Northwest, my buddy Chad Charlie. He was like, no, no, no, he's like, we don't, you don't dance with your, with your passed away relatives. Like that's not, that's not a thing. It seems like for us, we can't, I don't want to show that we can't do that. And we're like, oh, shit. So we pulled it back and took that out. But like it was, it's too much. It's like you're trying to like bring them back over. It was like a whole way tabby thing. And I was like, oh, shit, then we're not going to do that. But outside of that, like, you know, like little things like that, we can have those conversations and be sort of be real without being cheesy or without being too precious about stuff. We could just be like, oh yeah, this looks, this is, you know, this is great. And that way we can get the humor out of it too. We can, we can say like, you know, bears and they're talking to spirit from little big horn and just sort of buy into it because we're not like showing any ceremonies. We're not doing whatever. We're just like, you know, this could be this kid's subconscious. We know in our lives that this is just real. It's just presented as real. But like we're, you know, for others, we're like, we're not too, we're not explaining too much. We're not showing too much. And we just sort of like inherently knew where that line was of, you know, where we would be exploitative or be respectful. And we always like just sort of walked that as, as often as we could. So again, long winded answer. But basically it was what we knew is that we just, we just had a team that understood it. You know, I didn't have to, nobody had to explain anything. Nobody had to like, you know, we were there to sort of like keep each other in check. But we often didn't have to because we all came from these communities and we just knew what we were writing about. So we could get that deep, we can get that heavy with that stuff and know that we'd be in good hands when it was, when it was being shot, when it was being directed, when it was being read. And to their credit, FX never was like, what's this about? They're like, all right, if this works for you kind of thing, which is really, really powerful. It's great. Wow, thank you so much. I ended up, I watched that episode. Was it yesterday just to like refresh? It was my fourth time balling totally tears. I was a blubbering mess. So it was, it was done so well that even though it didn't represent my culture, I felt it. Like it was very visceral. And I really appreciated that. Vera, in the last episode of Alaska Daily, there was a fire ceremony. And that one I rewatched as well. And I remember seeing the Cedar Planks going in and I saw Gloria and Nakoya Yikpin. And it was so, I was so happy to see that. Do you want to talk a little bit about the spirituality and that scene and how you got there? Yeah, that was boy was that a long road. I almost have like the totally opposite experience from make it seem like everything you just said it was such the opposite. To be honest, it's because he had an experience where he had so many native co-creators and native leaders and native producers. To be honest, I could identify everything and what he was saying as being the opposite because of that. And I was very aware of that and more aware as we went. It was actually talked about very early, very early, the first several days. And Tom McCarthy, the creator, had witnessed some ceremony. And it was a clinic ceremony. I kind of told him a little bit more about what that was about. And he loved it. And the room loved it. And because we knew this was sort of coming to, we roughly knew kind of what the end would be of the series from early on. It was sort of planned for the end of meeting to sort of wrap up. And when we talked about meeting, if you're going to bring an audience through this journey of this sort of terrible trauma of native women, native people, you also need to give them true catharsis. And you can't just leave them hanging and sort of leave us in our trauma as well. And so that was pretty present in the room. That specific ceremony was something I'd actually gone through in my first production, my first play, where a totem carver was doing out for drug and alcohol abuse, where he saved all the cedar shavings from the totem pole as he's carving this pole telling a story. And people were invited throughout the whole carving to write the names of those who were taken or were struggling with drug and alcohol abuse. And on the totem pole raising, those are burned. And fairly recently, he did that with missing and murdered indigenous women. And he's kind of patterned sort of this old clinic ceremony for a new thing that we never traditionally used to deal with. And I loved that. And I loved how it in sort of true clink of fashion joined the artistic with the spiritual with the practical and the health and the social issues all together in a community way. And I love that. So we knew somehow that was going to end the series. And I think it became very, like, if I wasn't going to write the episode, I was going to write the scene. The other writers, non native writers, you know, were terrified, absolutely terrified, rightly so, to try and write anything spiritually into this. But it was also into it was intended almost the whole writing period, which was about six months, to be an entire episode to give context to it. And we spoke a lot about you can't just plug in spirituality for an aesthetic place. The very practical issue we ran into was Hilary Swank got pregnant. And I could not believe how much of my life all of a sudden revolved around Hilary Swank being pregnant, because I was always going to write episode 11 of 13 episodes. And suddenly we were going every day, we go to the room, and they go, it's 10 episodes now, and I wouldn't have an episode. And then they come back and they're like, it's 11 episodes, and I'd have an episode back. And it went like that for two weeks. And we'd keep rewriting and it was just like chaos, it was just pure chaos in the room. For two weeks, we just rewrote everything we've done the day before. As we're airing, not even just filming, we're airing. It was just the craziest. And I'm trying to like bring this like great spiritual thing into this chaos. The kind of disappointment was it couldn't because then it was the final episode of the season and now the series. And honestly, we kind of knew somewhat because of Hilary's pregnancy, there's a likelihood that it wasn't going to continue on the series. So we were kind of setting it up for maybe a season two, but just in case a season or a series ender. So we had a lot of practical things we had to tie up like the murder. Like the governor's issues and the foundational things. So we literally couldn't. And I almost, not even almost, I advocated a couple of times actually to cut it because I didn't know if they could do it. Having seen what and of the hundreds and hundreds of people working on this show, there were two native writers in the room. And there was one native person in production in Vancouver. And I just didn't know that they were capable of doing it. And there were things that the other native writer and I, not to put it too strongly saying like we won't continue if you do this. Like this, we had to get that strong. And so at that point, I didn't know that I could trust that this could be done right. I think I'm ultimately happy with what was there. First of all, I could think about what wasn't there and the context that was never given. In the end, how it felt, how it felt on set and how it still feels to me watching it was, it doesn't have any context. And that was just sort of the gift to the native people who know. The little gift to all the native people who are watching this to see this ending and see this. And I get comments and I get comments from native people. I get very few comments on that from non-native people, if any. But I get a lot of comments from native people on that specific scene. And it was this sort of beautiful, it was the second to last day of filming. It ended up being an entirely Indigenous cast that day, where it was closed with native ceremony. And I don't mean in front of the camera, I mean, with native ceremony and gifts. And that felt like a much needed healing for me from sort of, honestly, some of the trauma of doing this series. It was pretty intense for a while. And I think for those there, a very needed time of just being around native people. It was, like I said, it was very opposite of McGitzy. It was fighting for our spirituality to be represented and pulling back right and left and saying, you can't do this. You can do this. If you're going to do that, then you have to change this. It was a battle. And it was, it was weird to be a battle for something that meant so much emotionally and spiritually and mentally and culturally. So I actually, I have to point, so I'm here, I sleep out of Florida this morning very early and I'm here with, I'm going to give you a little cameo. So Erin was in that episode. She was one of the two leading that ceremony at the end. And I will say I was very strategic in the end. And I got, I made a lot of fun of that I named these people Clinkett woman and Clinkett man because there was absolutely no way I was going to let them cast anyone but Clinkett people for this Clinkett ceremony. It was so stupid, like they were getting mostly first nations people because they're filming in Vancouver. And I wrote it entirely in Clinkett. This is not something you can learn, not, you know, actors are struggling with one Clinkett word, much less the whole thing. So they had to hire two Clinkett people and get Clinkett art, Clinkett drums, Clinkett button blankets. There's a lot of strategy that both Andrew and I kind of did with that. So it's, it wasn't easy. And I have ideas on how I probably address that next, like, per se that I think ultimately the answer is we'll do our own stuff enough with the non native led everything and get it native produced and native distributed and native written and native directed and native creative team, all of it. Because I want, I want more the experience of not having to pull back people. I think I feel like I spend my whole life in native 101, you know, sort of teaching the absolute most core basics. I really want to be digging into that nuance and that like complexity and there's the beautiful intricacy and complicated stuff we have. And instead we're sort of teaching people that we have more than one language, you know. Great. Thank you so much for sharing. We only have like about five minutes left and I'm super disappointed. I wish that I could jump into one of Ghanou's time machine. Let's do it. Anipis and because you I just I know I probably should have you talk on that but we only have a few minutes but you have a way of showing spirituality that I just alluded to. Yeah. Well, as native people, spirituality is intrinsic and tied in with who we are and our perceptive reality. To quote Jurassic Park, you know, genetic power is one of the most, you know, powerful things that we've ever seen. And I think that the dominant society knew that about us that we are hand in hand with our spirituality, our connection to the earth, who we are, our ancestors, even our perception of the future. And trying to get rid of that as an erasure and to integrate us, assimilate us into their society, which is closed-minded and, you know, very much perceived into the reality and the materialism. And I think one of the things that I did with tackling with looking glasses, trying to, let me start like this, growing up as a Madewan man and Eddie Benton-Beneb on being my my dad. One of the things that he always tried to talk about was trying to realize that we are an oral history people, our spirituality, our oral history is living practice culture, where our ceremonies are a living documentation of our past, our oral history, you know, everything from our water drums, to our lodges, to our teachings, our sweat lodges. They all come from a place in our history and they have a unique story that tells a lot about who we are, where we come from, and to be able to erase those things knowing that we had advanced cultures, we had technology, we had knowledge. We still do and these things are kept alive. I don't want to say that we don't have them anymore, but it's a miracle that we do still have those things. And that you can tell when it's genuine Indian writing when that spirituality is deeply ingrained in the writing and even if a person, a writer does not know exactly where these things are coming from and you know that it's going through instinct. I found myself doing that a lot as well in writing looking glasses because people would tell me about things that I didn't even know that I wrote into the film because they knew their traditional perspective and saw exactly what it is that I was, my intuition was giving. So it becomes a very complicated thing because how it is that we view this reality, our place in it, how we belong together, tracing back things, you know, it's said that with the coming of colonialism that our warriors were the first to perish while our spiritual people were left behind. And I think that being an oral history people, I think this would be a good conclusion where film and television can be an extension to be able to create that oral history language, you know, because there's a lot of separation still of our kids going to ceremonies and to being exposed to our traditional way of life. So if there's some way that we can use this media, use this technology into being able to reach a new generation and instill in them the information without crossing too many boundaries, but introducing them to a thought process that was originally theirs and being inclusive helps to mend that erasure that was supposed to be, you know, done to us. And you know, so when we talk about Native culture, Native film, and decolonizing that perspective, encouraging every single viewpoint, especially as Native American people, encouraging your fellow artists to tell their story, their oral history, whatever little that they may know is decolonization. And we have to stand with each other and by each other and reach out and encourage, even with what little that we knew, know, applaud your, applaud your fellow Indian neighbor in the work that they do. Okay, thank you. I know we literally are probably over time, but I do think that this is important. Panelists, if you can name one person, each of you, you can popcorn, whoever's ready, name one person that we should be looking out for who inspires you, who's doing something we need to see. Go. Vera, Vera Starborn, I guess. Excellent. Yeah, actually, there's too many to name. This is the true answer. There are a lot of people that are working right now from, you know, Lasky Daily, Molly Denali, I mean, Res Dogs and Rutherford and all this stuff. There are a lot of people coming up and it's just like, it's going to be like, it's going to be a wave. That's amazing. Yeah. Gannette Dio Horn, she's doing some neat things coming up too. Go ahead, Vera. Do you have anyone we should be keeping an eye on? Well, you already met Erin Tripp. She's a great actress and voice actress, I might add. And I'm going to put on actors. I feel like actors don't get some of the love. Isabelle LeBlanc is also an actor. I'm kind of excited about coming. So I love, I love the actors. Awesome. Thank you, Yaddy. I would say Kwanah Chasing Horse. Wait. Here you go. Can you hear me? Yep. I would say Kwanah Chasing Horse and just she's just taking the world, I feel like back. And just such an incredible leader for kids. We can all aspire to get involved, create change, advocate, be strong in who we are. She's amazing and watching her grow up here at Fairbanks and then seeing her now walking the runway in Paris is amazing. Knowing that she's a dog musher herself and she's just doing it all is really inspirational. And I think, for me personally, it's our youth that is who inspires me. It's the next generation, why I do what I do, why I want to share and help share our stories and create a better world. I believe that it's through our kids that we're going to see the difference made and that we can help shape the hearts and minds of our own kids as well as non-native kids to really work together on creating a better place that we all get to live in. Beautiful. Thank you for bringing up Kwanah. I met her in 2019, she's playing basketball down at the Howard Luke camp. Oh yeah. Awesome. Good new. I really don't want to take away from that last statement because it's, it rings so true. So just saying that when I lived on Long Island, Kwanah went to the city for the Met Gala. And as far as encouraging our future, she got in touch with Serene who goes to our lodge and Serene got in touch with me because I was in New York. So I ran all the way to New York City with Eagle Feathers for her to wear. It's one of those things where you know that encouragement and looking out for one another because you know it's our future. And we shouldn't stand in the way of anybody who's trying their best and their hardest. So you know, I appreciate your words. Thank you. Wow. Thank you so much. I want to just please, can we give it up to our panelists for being here? Thank you. Wow. I'm really grateful to hear your stories, to hear your words. I appreciate you all so much. We will try to put together a resource list. And if that happens, it'll be posted on our website and socials. If you're on our mailing list, you'll get that list in a few days. And also another good reason to be on our mailing list is that you get early notice of our events. So please visit our website, sign up, be on our mailing list. And again, thank you to HowlRound, Double Edge and all of our amazing panelists. Khoi Anakpap. Can I say one more thing? A little plug. We're looking for a producer on Molly Denali. Wait, say that again? We're looking for a producer on Molly Denali. And so if anybody's out there interested, you can go to the GBH website and apply. Awesome. Thank you. Bye. See you. Have a great day. Good health. Cheers.