Fierce Girls focuses on superheroes
Series spotlights positive message for Indigenous youth
Fierce Girls is the first Indigenous superhero series created for Indigenous girls. The transmedia project, which runs across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, aims to “spark change and empower young Indigenous women in Canada, New Zealand and around the world.”
A co-production of TangataWhenua.com — an independent Maori news and information portal in Aotearoa — and with the Canadian Media Fund and New Zealand On-Air funding, the series was created, executive produced and directed by Loretta Todd. The Métis Cree artist behind APTN’s Coyote’s Crazy Smart Science Show received a Vancouver Women in Film Artistic Innovation Award on June 19.
“Indigenous people creating superheroes is nothing new and, as far back as the early 1990s, I have been trying to get something in production,” said Todd. “If you go into some of the stories we tell, a lot of the characters have what we could call superpowers, although it comes from a very different place culturally. This idea of beings using special powers to help people, or to not help them, is pretty much everywhere.”
Todd has long felt that there
wasn’t much media for Indigenous children in the eightto-12-year-old “impressionable age range,” and has been producing special programming for that market since 2007. She also looked at what was being produced in terms of how it presented young girls, and didn’t like a lot of it.
“A lot of it was conflict-heavy, with a lot of sarcasm and all the girls being very catty,” she said. “Even when they pulled together to solve a problem there was still this element of competition and pettiness to it. I wanted something more aspirational, a pop-culture phenomenon for that age group that, at it’s core, said, ‘We’re all superheroes and can use our power to do good things.’ ”
Kisik (played by local actor/ singer/YouTuber Jenine Yuksel) and Anika (played by Vancouver-based Maori actor Kaea Taurere) are two Indigenous teens with newly acquired, superpowered warrior spirits. Kisik is a Cree/ Métis who lives with her single mother in East Vancouver. Anika lives with her single father in Rotorua, New Zealand. The two are best friends who partner up to help protect Mother Earth and their friends, family, community and more. Each adventure they undertake somehow contributes to the greater knowledge of what feats they’re capable of and aims to spread the positive message to young Indigenous girls.
“There is live action, location shoots, animation and more, and I’m amazed at what we’ve been able to do. It’s been a really good learning curve scaling it back from my original version and learning about what you can do online exclusively,” says Todd.
She adds that bringing people into the aspirational world of the show while reflecting the real world is really embellished by modern social media. The characters maintain their own Instagram accounts, web pages and more to communicate with the show’s audience.
“The social media scheduling and production is like a huge other section in itself where we have been able to bring in Indigenous youth writers to use these mediums to give them the right flair,” she said.
In Fierce Girls, Anika and Kisik meet in Vancouver at an Indigenous youth Games. They become friends after bonding over a mutual interest in writing comic books, and continue to develop their friendship online when Anika returns to New Zealand. After a powerful dream in which Kisik sees them becoming superheroes in a comic book, the two begin to write one. As the characters experience real-life issues, ranging from daily teenage struggles to systemic racism, they solve the challenges in the comic book and bring it back to real life.
“So it’s kind of like a Native Degrassi, and if we had the budget it would have been,” said Todd. “But then there is the comic book giving them more expression around the stories with the superhero idea. By the end of Season 1, they come to realize that they are actually gaining superpowers.”
Ultimately, Fierce Girls is a test. Todd hopes the show could be made into a TV series with bigger budgets and production levels. But she is really excited to see what kind of community develops around this innovative package.