Muskoday director’s Kokum and Dot beginning production on Season Two

Based out of Vancouver, Johnson was able to partner with Telus to distribute the show to audiences in B.C. and Alberta, and then later found a deal with SaskTel to air the show in Saskatchewan. As a result, Johnson has been able to share her creation with her home community of Muskoday First Nation. She said that has been an incredible feeling.

“I’m still digesting it to be honest. It’s really cool. I’m hoping that as many people are going to be able to see it as possible on SaskTel. I’m also hoping that in the coming months and years, we’re going to be able to share the season and the series with schools, Head Start centres, libraries. That’s the big dream, is that it’s going to be accessible for communities in Saskatchewan in many different ways. We’re still working on it, but yeah, it’s super important to me because P.A, Muskoday, Treaty Six really shaped who I am as a person, and so there’s so much of the stories of the land from there in the show.”

Thanks to Dot puppeteer Kellie Haines, there have even been discussions about bringing a live show version of the show to schools around the country. What’s undeniable though is that the show has already created a renewed interest in Cree language.

The show has started to pick up an audience on social media through their Tik Tok, Instagram, and Facebook accounts that have been sharing little tidbits of Cree language to the public. As a result, it’s started conversations about other Indigenous languages in the comments sections of their posts to share and compare similar words.

“One thing that we’ve noticed from the social media that we’ve been putting out is that people love the language, and it’s not just Cree audiences. It’s people of all backgrounds. There’s other Indigenous people who are saying, ‘oh, we say this word in this language’, and there’s just curious people and allies saying, ‘oh, this is really cool’, or ‘thanks for sharing’. So we want to make sure to incorporate as much Cree vocabulary, and new Cree vocabulary as we can.”

A big focus for Johnson when first creating the show was to keep all Indigenous imagery as traditional as possible, and that meant bringing in as many Indigenous creators into the crew as possible. The stars of the show, voice actor and Dot puppeteer Kellie Haines, and Kokum actress Renae Morriseau have both been huge in the production of the show.

Renae Morriseau as ‘Kokum’ hugging her granddaughter Dot, puppeteered by Kellie Haines. The show sees Dot come to visit Kokum, before shifting to animation as Kokum narrates a story featuring Dot. (Image Credit: Photo courtesy Luka Cyprian)

In particular with Morriseau, she has not only been one of the show’s two main stars, but she’s also responsible for all of the show’s music.

“The music is really happy, it’s cultural, it has a great tone and feel. It’s actually really, really great music, but she composed it with her drum group, M’Girl, an all-Indigenous women’s drum group. The music is all in Cree, it’s not a lot of lyrics, but it’s all in Cree and it’s really catchy and it’s really happy. So we’re super proud of our original composer, Renae Morriseau.”

Johnson also gave a lot of credit to the show’s animator, award winning Métis filmmaker, Tanner Zurkoski, for making the show’s animation fit perfectly with the Woodland Cree art style.

The stories told in season one all revolved around the seven sacred teachings of Indigenous culture: love, respect, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility, and truth, all of which are represented by a different animal. Since the original plan was to only have one season that revolved around these principals, Johnson had to find another avenue for inspiration when it comes to season two.

As a result, she brought together an ensemble of Indigenous story tellers to help write season two including family members of the crew already involved. That helped turn the writing process for Kokum and Dot season two into a family affair for the crew involved.

“This year we wanted to have more of an ensemble writing crew of emerging indigenous writers, so I wrote some episodes, my cousin Harmony Johnson who’s also from Prince Albert and has her own kids show, Stories of the North, she wrote an episode. I’ve got our animation producer who’s Métis-Cree wrote an episode, and then Jules Koostachin, who wrote season one, her son wrote an episode too.”

The show itself was inspired by one of Johnson’s college instructors, Cree language teacher Dorothy Visser, who brought puppetry into her lessons when Johnson was taking her course. Johnson said that Visser was integral in the production of season one when it comes to properly teaching the Cree language, and she’s already been a big part of season two.

“I’ve been talking with her almost every day right now because she’s helping with a lot of the Cree as we prep and get ready for production next week. One of the things she said was she thinks it’s beautiful, but her favorite storylines are the stories that are about Eagle. One of the storylines that we have in that episode is a direct story that she shared with me that has really changed the way that I think about love and self-love and community, and it was a teaching from Eagle that she had shared with me.”

The second season of Kokum and Dot is going to begin production in less than a week,

“We wanted to make Kokum more dynamic, so she’s got cultural teachings that she’s sharing, but she’s also showing off her regalia, showing off her sportsmanship, showing off her hobbies. It’s gonna be a lot more fun.”

The first season of Kokum and Dot is available on demand in Saskatchewan on SaskTel Max TV, and also airs on Mondays on channels 46 and 346, and will be dropping in B.C. and Alberta through Telus.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com

by Nick Nielsen

Muskoday director’s Kokum and Dot beginning production on Season Two

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