PBS's Molly of Denali retains its focus on kids even as it deftly covers painful truths and sensitive topics
Recently, PBS Kids premiered with season one of 'Molly of Denali', a new groundbreaking series that is set in Alaska. The series contains both animated and live-action segments.
'Molly of Denali' is reportedly the first children’s nationally distributed series that features a Native American lead character. Molly Mabray is a 10-year-old Gwich'in/Koyukon/Dena'ina Athabascan girl who is spirited and ingenious.
The series was created by Princess Johnson, who leads the charge in ensuring a real and positive representation of Native Americans. In an exclusive interview with MEA WorldWide (MEAWW), Princess Johnson revealed how she came up with the idea to cover potentially painful, sensitive topics on a children's show, and how the show debunks myths about native and indigenous people, thereby telling more nuanced stories about these communities.
Starting off, Johnson spoke of the goal of having both animated and live-action segments on the show. "Well, all of the live-action segments are filmed right up here in Alaska with real Alaskans. We wanted to show the diversity of Alaska," she said.
Talking about how the show debunks myths about native and indigenous people, Johnson said, "Just by showing us in a modern context necessitates us to debunk some really romanticized notions or even negative stereotypes about Native people. Like any society, we also have beautiful things, the thriving elements of our culture and we're highlighting those right now."
She said, "So, the informational text is just the everyday text that we use to navigate our lives and it could be from reading an index or sometimes the kids they cross-reference some information from an elder, and they also find out it's a book. Just showing how we're capable of creating informational text. It's empowering I think to use these segments and show we are capable of creating these things and be innovators.
Johnson, who is an Alaskan native, also spoke about how that helped her shape her work on the show. She revealed that it was more like a community project because a lot of opinions from the native Alaskans who were in the crew went into the making. "I think most of us who are part of the production are Alaskan natives. I'm the creative producer but we have our four main Alaska native advisors. And then we have Alaska native language advisors. For every episode, we sometimes will pull in somebody who's a specialist in some area, If Molly goes to Cyclic or another village, we call and find an advisor from that village because we're really trying to be as authentic and as accurate as possible. So, having so many Alaskan natives involved just makes the show that much richer."
Talking about how they came up with an idea to cover potentially sensitive and painful topics on a children's show, Johnson said, "I think that we can never underestimate the perceptive abilities of our children - to be able to pay really strong attention to emotions. I think children appreciate truth as much as adults do. And, when you speak the truth and when you relay the truth through a story, even though it might be a little painful, I think it's necessary for our emotional development, to be able to take on potentially sensitive subjects and work through that. And to be in a place where the show is having young children, ask interesting critical questions because critical thinking is such a big part of how we learn even as adults."