Dr. Savannah Howse-Smith, from Wapanatahk Media's first green-lit series Dr. Savannah: Wild Rose Vet.Tania Koenig-Gauchier and Shirley McLean have spent the past 20 years promulgating necessary but all-too-familiar narratives about Indigenous Canadians: residential schools, the 60s Scoop, the modern-day child welfare system, murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
I mentioned that Koenig-Gauchier and McLean “recently” founded their company, but they would say “finally.” The friends have been nurturing this dream for two decades, ever since they met in the Native Communications program at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton . They would become producers, they promised each other; they’d make television that told Indigenous stories from an Indigenous perspective. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Producer Shirley McLean is part of a Tlingit dance troupe that travels and tells stories that are 10,000 years old.“We’re not on the outside looking in,” Koenig-Gauchier says. “We’re living it every single day, and that’s important.” But they also want to reach “Canadians who haven’t met Indigenous people in their everyday lives,” who only know the kinds of hard-news stories the producers cut their teeth on.