Local officials continue to face difficult questions about their response. Why have the number and magnitude of wildfires on Maui increased so rapidly? Could more have been done to eliminate invasive grasses that are thought to increase wildfire susceptibility? Should the electric company have cut power on the morning of the fires due to the high winds? Why weren’t the community’s sirens, built originally to warn the community of tsunami danger, used to warn residents of the fire? There will plenty of blame to share.

The number of confirmed dead is now at 115 and is expected to climb, making it the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in more than a hundred years. Meanwhile, at press time, 388 people are listed as missing. Hawaii governor Josh Green told the press that .

Those families whose lives were spared by the fires face other horrors. For many, their homes and all their possessions were destroyed in a matter of hours. Where will they sleep? Where will their children go to school? Who will care and educate their youngest children as they attempt to rebuild their lives and livelihoods? And by this week, as K-12 schools reopened, just how these children would recover from the trauma of returning to schools and child care centers with classmates and family members forever missing?

This is parenting in 2023. This is child care in the age of climate disasters. The tragedy in Maui raises a further question for not only our local, state, and government officials, but for all of us: With parents clearly unable to shield their children from the ever-expanding list of climate threats on their own, how can we rebuild our systems to promote young children’s safety, health and well-being?

More than 3,000 buildings were destroyed in the fires. According to national child care network Child Care Aware, that number includes four of the nine licensed child care centers in Lahaina. At least 150 child care slots were affected by the fires, according to PATCH, Hawaii’s child care referral network. PATCH began working immediately with local providers to create and publicize available slots, and to donate infant formula, diapers and financial resources to families and providers who need it.

PATCH’s Interim Executive Director Carol Wear said, “The impact of the fires has caused considerable distress among both the staff and the children under their care. To address this, local organizations specializing in infant mental health have been offering support to some of the affected centers.” PATCH is working with national partners who bring expertise and training when confronting such emergencies, and they’ve found they are not alone. They are leaning on a variety of local and national allies for support.

Climate Disruption and Children

According to a recent report by Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies, an open network of representatives from NGOs, UN agencies, governments and academic institutions, the disruptions caused by climate disasters can have long-lasting and devastating impacts on children, including their health, both physical and emotional, their access to nutritious food, their access to responsive caregiving, learning opportunities, and their safety and security.

The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization has found a in the past fifty years. UNICEF reports that over one billion children on the planet are , including fires, typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes.

Elliot Haspel, director of Climate and Young Children at the think tank Capita, says early education, like many of our systems, is underprepared for the consequences of climate change. “But unlike some other systems,” Haspel said, “early education is working with an acutely vulnerable population, a population that is essential to building a resilient and happy future.”

Haspel points to FEMA and other interagency disaster response plans as part of the reason young children are particularly vulnerable. That lack of inclusion of early education systems is at least in part a result of how fragmented child care and early education are in general in the United States. “Although there are over 100,000 schools in the United States, they’re organized into districts and have a central office that an agency can coordinate with. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for the early years,” said Haspel.

The millions of small, home-based child care centers and family child care providers across the U.S. are especially difficult to reach, meaning not only that they aren’t included in evacuation plans at the outset of a disaster, but may also not receive the critical resources they need to continue serving families during the recovery period or to sustain themselves beyond it.

Capita and the Aspen Institute co-convene a task force to draw attention to the relationship between climate and the early years of children’s lives. They recommend a strategy that mitigates climate change, adapts our current systems for our new climate realities, and prepares our systems for inevitable losses and damage that will result from them.

What kinds of changes might this result in, in practice? Experts have recommended numerous paths to act:

• focus on mitigation in communities of color, where extreme heat and pollutants are most impacting young children;
• adapt playgrounds and outdoor spaces to withstand climate changes, like providing shade in areas exposed to extreme heat;
• in the case of disaster, plan for what will happen to children when loss and damages occur, and for how to re-create stability for them as quickly as possible.

Moms Historically Have Led the Social Movements for Kids. Early Educators, too.

But accomplishing any of this will likely require a public groundswell to demand it. After all, despite majorities of Americans supporting federal investments in early education and child care, Congress has failed multiple times to renew pandemic-era funding for early learning and care even as we approach a funding cliff that could close 70,000 child care centers, and as the cost of child care is rising at double the rate of overall inflation. Our children are as vulnerable as they are in the face of climate change precisely because we have historically refused to invest in infrastructure they need.

Parents, especially moms, have forged some of the largest and most successful social movements in modern U.S. history, particularly by highlighting the threat to children’s lives. Since its formation in the 1970s, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has from the local to the federal levels targeting drinking and driving. Moms Demand Action has galvanized a national movement against gun violence and won an impressive number of gun-safety victories, particularly at the state level.

At the local level, the connection between climate change and children’s lives is increasingly being made by : Science Moms, EcoMadres, Moms Clean Air Force, Mothers Out Front, Sunrise Kids NYC. As one mother and activist told the New York Times, ��� want to be able to say to my kid, ‘We’re trying to do something.’”

Native groups have long drawn connections between protecting the natural environment and protecting the youngest members of our society. With the , for instance, Mohawk women led research to measure pollutants in their water sources, pointing out that toxins in water would become toxins in breastmilk.

Early educators are also a potentially powerful voice in advancing this struggle, as they have become an increasingly vocal bloc in the . Of all the institutions that young children and their families interact with, it is most often early educators who take on an outsized responsibility for the overall well being of children outside their families, even in the absence of adequate funding and infrastructure.

One of the buildings destroyed in the Maui blaze was a groundbreaking Hawaiian language immersion preschool serving about two dozen Lahaina families. ʻAha Pūnana Leo O Lahaina is part of a larger movement of native Hawaiian educators to preserve the language and culture by teaching children through traditional Hawaiian methods and in native Hawaiian language. According to the network of schools, Pūnana Leo means “nest of voices,” a learning philosophy in which children are “‘fed’ solely their native language and culture much like the way young birds are cared for in their own nests.”

ʻAha Pūnana Leo CEO Kaʻiulani Laehā says that same philosophy is driving the center’s response to the disaster. They are focused first and foremost on nurturing the families they serve, including enrolling displaced families in one of their other locations on Maui and other islands, and raising funds to provide them any resources they may need.

ʻAha Pūnana Leo is also working to provide security and resources to their five displaced staff members. “You can imagine, our staff are incredibly specialized,” said Laehā, “so doing whatever we need to retain them is a top priority.” Laehā added that while some of their educators have been reassigned to teach at their other sites, others are still on the ground on Maui helping with the rescue effort and caring for children impacted by the disasters. Those educators are part of the ʻAha Pūnana Leo “ohana,” or family, just like the children they educate and those children’s families.

The extent of the human loss in Maui is sadly still coming into focus, as search and recovery efforts continue. But the destruction of Lahaina, and so many of its most vulnerable people, will undoubtedly be remembered for years to come as among the most devastating tragedies in U.S. history.

As a public we are only beginning to grapple with what this tragedy means about where we stand as a country and planet, marking the dangers of our present climate, and laying bare our immense unpreparedness for an inevitably growing list of weather-related disasters. The fires should also force us to reckon with just how truly vulnerable so many of our youngest children are, specifically in a warming world, not currently built for them or for their needs.

All webinars should start with a music video this rousing. The occasion? The Haaland v. Brackeen case currently before the Supreme Court, which threatens to erase the protections established by the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1982. organized the conversation so that advocates could understand the stakes and prepare, if necessary, to push for measures at the state level. (Disclosure: I have done some freelance writing for the Alliance.)

Here are our takeaways:

1. ICWA exists for a reason. Olga Gonzalez, executive director of , provided a capsule history of ways that the United States has treated natives as expendable. She described the courage of Hatuey, who “the first prominent freedom fighter of the Americas,” and the , the weeping mother.

For decades, federal and state government agencies took children away from Native American families and sent them to live in boarding schools, where they were cut off from linguistic roots and the extended family, elders and community that conveyed cultural values.

Officials also facilitated widespread adoption by white families. A 1975 found, “One of every nine Indian children are in foster homes, adoptive homes, institutions or boarding facilities. Indian children in these states are withdrawn from their homes at a rate of 20 times the national average.”

Gonzalez celebrated indigenous resilience and environmental activism in the face of the colonial mentality of the past and present. “May our work be our prayer,” she stated.

2. ICWA is the gold standard. Federal legislation “to protect the best interest of Indian children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the removal of Indian children and placement of such children in homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture” came into being 40 years ago.

Jack Trope, senior director of the Indian Child Welfare Program, , described the tenets behind ICWA and summarized research findings that keeping families together is in their best interest and that removing children causes trauma. “You help the child,” he said, “by helping the family heal from generational trauma.”

The extended family and tribal network, along with cultural and spiritual traditions, constitute protective factors.  Kinship placements, he maintained, are more stable and less disruptive than placements outside tribes, reducing behavioral problems and mental health issues.

3. ICWA is not always upheld the way it was intended. As with any law, implementation matters as much as what the words say. The ways that ICWA is interpreted and put into practice varies. a 2015 publication by the National Indian Child Welfare Association, identifies such hazards as gaps in training and misapplied standards about who qualifies as well as lack of data and willful ignorance.

A zeroes in on how states interpret or misinterpret the “existing Indian family” exception. Media attention around Haaland v. Brackeen has allowed misleading opinions to proliferate.

Larissa Littlewolf, associate director of the Tribal Training and Certification Partnership at the University of Minnesota Duluth urged better training of state administrators as well as K-12 history education that acknowledges prejudice. ���f you’re talking Native issues,” she said, “you should have Native people around the table.”

4. The foster system as a whole has moved in the direction that ICWA pioneered. As Trope observed, the biggest irony of the move to revisit ICWA is that advocates across the country are pushing for changes in the foster care system (also known as child welfare or child protective services) that would secure protections similar to those in ICWA.

“redirect[ing] resources to make help available within communities so that families can get assistance where they live, stay safely together and avoid unnecessary separation through foster care.”

5. Some states have passed their own versions of ICWA. California, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming have comprehensive Indian Child Welfare laws that complement or refine federal law. Legislation is pending in Colorado, Montana and North Dakota.

Dawn Gray, managing attorney, Blackfeet Nation, said that ideally, the state laws are written in a way that enshrines tribal values. She explained that tribes are familiar with each other’s processes. “This network,” she said, “helps children wherever they are in the state.” Whether the federal law is partly or fully overturned, Littlewolf recommended, “Get to know the tribes in your state. Find out how to be an ally, an advocate. Those conversations lead to action.”

Chris Riback: Council member Fournier, thank you for coming to our ELN studio.

April Fournier: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Chris Riback: What is the state of early childhood learning in Portland Maine today? Maybe give me both pre COVID and what’s happened since COVID.

April Fournier: Sure. I think pre COVID, just like a lot of places around the country, there’s just not enough spaces. And so we have so many parents that need childcare to work to make their household work, so that they have money coming in. Plus we also know the benefits of children being around each other socially, emotionally and being able to build their communication skills, learning how to create a community. When you don’t have all those spaces, you have children that really start to fall behind, especially as they enter public school. So I think before COVID we definitely had a shortage, but there were lots of small like family run childcares or in home childcares as well as lots of different centers.

I think what we’ve seen post COVID is a significant decrease in those programs. Whether the parents that would come and work in them couldn’t go back to the workforce because, they themselves couldn’t find childcare. Or we know that also early childcare workers are some of the lowest paid in the country. And so you’re coming out of COVID, you’re like, my bills are behind. I need to pay my mortgage. I need to pay my car and the job that I’m doing isn’t cutting it anymore, because I’m so behind.

And so you have a lot of people that have also left the workforce to go find something else that’s paying more. I think for Portland, we’re very much feeling that. What I hear on the council from a lot of families is, we need more spots. We need more childcare, or these children are just going to sit at home and then all of a sudden, they show up one day in kindergarten and they don’t know how to interact. They don’t know how to engage. And then I think you start to see, more that child’s a behavior problem, more that child is going to be tagged.

Chris Riback: It all connects.

April Fournier: Yes, absolutely.

Chris Riback: It all connects.

April Fournier: It’s critical.

Chris Riback: So you seem to be an extremely busy person. One role is council member. Can we talk about another of your roles?

April Fournier: Sure. Yes, absolutely.

Chris Riback: You currently are in a grant funded position that provides barrier free support to families within a pediatric practice setting.

April Fournier: Yes.

Chris Riback: What is the program? What are you doing it? And what do you see there?

April Fournier: Yes, so I’m an early childhood support specialist within the outpatient pediatric clinic. We see typically families who either require free care, or low cost healthcare, or Medicaid. So we have very few families that are private pay insurance. So these are often families that are living in poverty or within Portland, we have a lot of Asili families that have just newly arrived in the states.

My role is to help provide that connection. So pediatricians can spend 15 to 30 minutes often with a family and they’re really focused on the medical component. Then they have to go off to their next patient. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve been able to address some of those social determinants of health. Like, do you have safe and secure housing? Do you have enough food to feed your family on a regular basis?

Chris Riback: So does the family start with the pediatrician and then transition to you?

April Fournier: Yes. Yes.

Chris Riback: So it’s almost two separate, though, connected conversations?

April Fournier: Absolutely. I often will come in after the visit. So the pediatrician does their visit and then we have a quick little conference, before I go in and talk to the family. And so that could be, Hey, so mom mentioned that she’s working with this domestic violence agency to get some counseling because, her and dad were separated. Or this mom mentioned that she’s really struggling to get diapers on a regular basis. The baby has a diaper rash because, she’s trying to use diapers for longer periods of time because of that insecurity.

By having that quick little conference, I know what I’m walking into. I’m not asking the same questions. So the parents are like, I just told the doctor all this information. So one, it’s honoring that time for the family, but also jumping into the conversation that is most important for them.

Chris Riback: And you can really cover a wide range of risk factors.

April Fournier: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: I understand you collect data off of these conversations as well. What do the data show? What have you seen?

April Fournier: So the things that we’re looking at is, as we’re having these conversations are they identifying a housing need, or a social services need, or diaper insecurity, food insecurity? It’s a brand new mom who’s 19 years old and is trying to figure out, I don’t know how to bathe my baby. I don’t know how to do sleep routines or I’m not sleeping. So it’s really taking this holistic look at how do we help this family be successful, so that as this child develops, as this family develops, they have the best possible outcome. So I’m taking data, asking questions and then we’re able to pull that from our medical record system to see, we met this family when the baby was three days old.

Now the baby’s four months old, what progress has this family made with this intervention? And it’s amazing what we’re seeing, we’re just seeing really, really great results. They’re not diaper insecure or they’ve been able to connect to community resources that help them with housing or getting connected to wick, or even just getting health insurance. So they’re not getting these bills from the hospital that create anxiety and fear and I don’t know how to pay this. So it’s really helping connect all of the things for the family to help them be successful.

Chris Riback: In learning about your story, I realized as well, this is personal for you.

April Fournier: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: I mean you underwent quite a career change. Inspired, I believe, by your son.

April Fournier: Yes. Absolutely. I was on a trajectory with an insurance company, or in the financial services industry to be project manager or operational development.

Chris Riback: Or CEO of a multinational bank? Yes. Something.

April Fournier: One day. And so my youngest son, I had twins. So I actually have four children, but the youngest are twins. We noticed around age two, they weren’t exactly developing the same. They had some language development, but he was starting to do things like lining things up or he would get really frustrated and hit himself, or bang his head off the ground. And it was just like, I have no idea what’s happening with this kiddo. It just doesn’t make sense. And so the pediatrician did some screenings for autism and said, well, let’s go ahead and do some evaluation. Because he’s really kind of hitting all these different flags. And so after going through that evaluation, he was diagnosed with autism and it was like, I have no idea what to do.

Thankfully Maine has a program called Child Development Services that comes in to do early intervention. So it’s really around teaching parents, how do you work on your routines so that you’re able to bring language out or create social connections within the scope of your everyday life? Not every parent can take time off to do all of this development. So how can you do it within what you’re already doing?

And so in watching his transformation, his language development, he started to come back to us. And be like, Hey, I’m checking back into my family and I’m learning these things and we’re seeing less aggressions or less self-harm. Like, why wouldn’t you want to do something that’s going to do that for children. And just what it did for our family was incredible. So rather than going to graduate school for project management or financial services, I went to graduate school for early childhood special education.

Chris Riback: A different kind of education.

April Fournier: Absolutely. Yes.

Chris Riback: One both in school and in the classroom, but also in real life.

April Fournier: Absolutely. Absolutely. So then in doing different roles, I worked doing in-home services for families who have a child with autism. How do you connect them to community? How do you plan a grocery trip, knowing that you’re going to have tantrums, or knowing that you’re going to have behaviors that happen? How do you help families meet their goals?

I taught in a special education classroom and I worked connecting families in to that transition to kindergarten. And how do you work with public schools on implementing special education services? And then worked in head start. So lots of different facets to figure out, how do we most help these families within our community?

Chris Riback: Council member, what does it mean to you to be an indigenous Diné woman on the city council? What level of responsibility does that make you feel?

April Fournier: I’m honored to hold that space. There are so many people that came before me to make it possible. Not necessarily in Portland specifically, but on a national level back in my homelands. Being able to see Deb Holland, secretary Holland as part of the cabinet, it’s just incredible. And so by claiming these spaces and creating spaces for indigenous officials to walk into, it just allows us to have the next generations come along with us. So my children are seeing me run for city council, or they’re seeing me take advocacy space, or they’re seeing me take pictures in Washington, in our capital doing this work.

And so I think, when you’re a minority or when you’re part of a marginalized group, it’s hard to walk through some doors. And so if you see someone who looks like you, who has the same type of life experience, has a similar identity, it’s so much easier and comfortable to walk through that door and take that space as well. I’m again, incredibly honored to be in this space. I take my responsibility, very, very seriously and I am just so excited to do it.

Chris Riback: I’m sure that you do, I’m sure that you are. Your children see you, your community sees you.

April Fournier: Yes.

Chris Riback: Thank you.

April Fournier: Of course, thank you.

Chris Riback: Thank you for the work you do and for coming to the studio.

April Fournier: Awesome. Thank you for having me.

Yazzie-Mintz is looking forward to having a dialogue at the March Award Ceremony about complex issues affecting Native communities, families and children. “Engaging audiences in complex issues happens through the back and forth, and digging deeper,” she says.

The culturally grounded Indigenous Early Learning Collaborative (IELC) she leads collaborates with tribal communities to create systems in which families and children thrive. Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, this partnership between BTC and the facilitates community-driven and community-directed inquiry into advancing high-quality early care and learning opportunities.

BTC executive director Dr. Joshua Sparrow describes Yazzie-Mintz as a visionary leader. Yazzie-Mintz and Sparrow met at a conference in 2005, and she was glad to learn that Dr. Brazelton (who died in 2018) had been connected to her Navajo reservation. “He was a good friend of the medicine people in my community,” she recalls. “He knew all the places where I grew up.”

Both of Yazzie-Mintz’s parents were career Navajo educators, and she credits them with teaching her “to be a problem solver and to activate a change mentality, be it in early learning centers or social services or health care.” She recalls accompanying her father as he presented testimony to the Arizona State Legislature in support of a pedestrian overpass. “That was one of our adventures together,” she says.

Yazzie-Mintz’s approach to research departs from the familiar academic paradigm. Reaching beyond her master’s degree in educational psychology from Arizona State University, Doctorate in Learning and Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and five years on the faculty of Indiana University-Bloomington, she embraces a research approach that centers close collaboration with tribal communities. “The role that academics play is important,” she explains, “but academics are not the first audience for our work. We translate scientific research into usable ��ԴǷɱ���岵��.”

“With community-based inquiry,” she continues, “those who are most impacted by the research are actually the ones who are developing and asking their own questions. They co-construct processes to collect information. Making meaning of that information is another component of their inquiry, as is seeing the complexity of applying what they learn.”

Yazzie’s first stop after leaving academia was the American Indian College Fund (College Fund), where she designed and launched a series of early childhood initiatives from 2011 through 2019:

• , which addressed early learning disparities
• , which sought to strengthen systems of shared responsibilities among families, schools and communities
• , which was focused on strengthening systems of care and learning
• , the College Fund’s STEM project dedicated to strengthening the teacher of color pipeline

Upon leaving the College Fund in 2019, Yazzie-Mintz founded the First Light Education Project in Denver. “Tribal communities kept asking me, ‘How can we start our own initiatives in our communities? How can we change our health system? How can we change our rec center to be more racially equitable?’” More often than not, they already had the answers. “Native teachers and leaders are the experts,” she says. IELC’s value comes in helping these practitioners to obtain the resources needed to conduct the work.

“We’re bridging the space between research and practice, and offering our resources to find funding, to support local community-based research.”

Native Americans live in a wide variety of communities across the United States. Many are clustered around 32 accredited tribal colleges and universities. The College of the Menominee Nation, for example, offers a hub of resources for Native communities in northern Wisconsin. “A tribal college offers professional development and credentialing locally,” explains Yazzie-Mintz. “They have the faculty and infrastructure to train teachers, and they can partner with Head Start.”

Yet about three-fourths of the U.S. Native population lives off reservation land. ���n places like Chicago, they’re spread out in urban and suburban areas,” she notes. Local Native-led nonprofits provide cultural programming, workforce development and an early learning preschool. The University of Arizona and University of Oregon also offer Indigenous teacher education.

IELC is partnering with tribal communities as they address a range of challenges that predate the pandemic, including a dearth of culturally informed teachers. Yazzie-Mintz and her team collaborate with communities to use the evaluation methods they choose so that they can understand their own impact and demonstrate to funders the value of investing in their work. They train parents on communicating with school board members and city officials. Yazzie-Mintz says that regardless of the specific concern that brings her together with a community, the process often comes back to what her parents taught her about “activating a change mentality.” Research and inquiry invariably form part of the strategy.

Archuleta, assistant secretary for Native American Early Education & Care with the , says the traditional knowledge that Native Americans possess has relevance for other communities. “Home visiting programs, for example, existed long before any state began implementing them,” she says.

As the occupant of a new position, the first of its kind in a newly created department, one of only four in the nation, she approaches her work with both academic credentials and lived experience. This double orientation reinforces an appreciation for the culture—especially the rich knowledge of early childhood education—that has often been absent in the state’s government.

Working in consultation with tribal leaders, in a state with 229,000 Native Americans, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Elizabeth Groginsky, cabinet secretary for early childhood education, are committed to getting away from a longstanding colonial mentality. In 2019, when the state , Lujan Grisham hailed it as “a celebration of New Mexico’s 23 sovereign indigenous nations and the essential place of honor native citizens hold in the fabric of our great state.”

Archuleta says her extended family played an important role in her life when she was growing up in the Nambé Pueblo tribe. “My cousins and I were always at my grandma’s, and now my children have the same experiences.” she recalls. ���t was just normal for everyone to take care of everyone else.” Her educational path took her to New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) for her bachelor’s and MBA, and later she pursued certification in early childhood education.

She had her son during her undergraduate years at NMHU. ��� was a young mother in college,” she says. ��� know what it’s like to rely on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and food stamps.” This experience makes her sensitive to what families have to go through—a quality often lacking at the upper echelons of government. ��� was there once. I’m that mom who had no extended care and had to make hard decisions.”

Becoming a mother again 13 years later, shortly before the pandemic, added a new dimension to Archuleta’s understanding of the challenges faced by Native American families in her state. far exceeded those of other racial and ethnic groups in New Mexico. The pandemic, she says, has rekindled historical trauma for some, including such episodes as the removal and relocation, boarding schools that set out to erase Native American history, culture and language.

“Native communities,” she says, “showed so much strength during this period. I remember one woman telling me, ‘Either we are getting through this pandemic because we’ve always been in survival mode or because we have become resilient people.’”

While the pandemic exacted a toll of devastation and loss, it also meant Archuleta personally got to spend more time with her daughter and truly be her first teacher. “She also spent time with her own mom,” she reflects. “These learning opportunities, being embraced by culture and community—most children don’t that get these days.”

While Archuleta has started to visit many areas of the state, many tribes still have strict COVID restrictions in place. She’s also collaborating with other state agencies to expand access to educational, employment and health opportunities. She credits resources from the and other institutions, but places an even higher value on voices of tribal leaders.

Archuleta might have a bigger reach now than she did in her previous role with the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation—a W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant supported early childhood work with the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Council—but essentially, her mission remains the same: listening and building relationships.

“We’re here,” she affirms, “to support the goals of tribal communities.”

She may not be real, but she’s really incredible. Molly possesses the talent and drive of the others in the series—and then some.

��� love little kids,” says the star and namesake of PBS’s animated series Molly of Denali, upon hearing about Early Learning Nation. ���n fact, I used to be one!”

Each episode finds Molly and her friends exploring nature, science and Alaska Native culture in and around the Trading Post run by Molly’s parents. Grandpa Nat, Auntie Midge and other characters provide patient guidance and Indigenous knowledge. A vlog narrated by Molly is a part of many episodes and each story is followed by a live-action segment with real-life children asking questions and learning more about the themes presented in the animated portion. “That’s my favorite part,” Molly says, “Because I want people to understand what life is really like here. For instance, we don’t all live in igloos.”

Molly brought along a few friends for our conversation: Dorothea Gillim, executive producer, Princess Daazhraii Johnson, creative producer and Sovereign Bill, an actor of Tlingit and Muckleshoot descent who gives Molly her voice.

Gillim, creator of PBS’s , says that 10-year-old girls make for ideal protagonists of animated series aimed at four-to-eight-year-olds. “They are aspirational figures,” she explains. “They grasp abstract ideas, but they can also be playful and silly.”

“She has curiosity,” adds Johnson, who belongs to the Neets’aii Gwich’in people. “And she’s rewarded for being a problem-solver.”

Both Gillim and Johnson emphasized how much Sovereign has done to bring Molly to life. The 16-year-old actor, who lives outside Seattle, says it’s important for her that the show brings out stories and topics not always taught in school. “Native people haven’t always been represented accurately in the media,” she says. “Or represented enough.”

Over the summer, the Peabody Awards recognized “Molly of Denali” for celebrating Alaska Native traditions and values.

The series premiere traced the story of Grandpa Nat’s childhood experience in boarding school, where Native language and music was forbidden. “Our culture was taken away,” Sovereign summarizes. Subsequent episodes have addressed climate change and other issues not usually associated with children’s television programming. Johnson anticipates programming that confronts racism.

���’m not afraid to speak out,” Molly asserts. ��� may be just ten, but I’ve learned a lot, and I have a lot to share.”

Sovereign predicts that the show will continue to address climate change. “Native people respect the Earth, and we’re taught to take care of it,” she says. The show’s animators capture Alaska’s natural beauty, though she contends that the state’s actual mountains and forests greatly exceed the lush drawings.

“Molly of Denali” isn’t all about pressing issues of the day. It has plenty of mischief and gentle jokes, too. “A lot of teasing goes on in our culture,” says Johnson. Pairing the serious and the silly is a way of “respecting the emotional intelligence of our audience.”

Gillim notes that PBS’s “Arthur,” which has been on the air for two decades, paved the way for how children’s programming could address sensitive topics—including divorce, gender norms, immigrant rights and autism.