Fierce Girls is a video series spread across different platforms and covers the story of two Indigenous girls who draw from their cultures to find super powers.
TORONTO, Ont.-In late June, Fierce Girls was launched at the Toronto Film Festival. Touted as the world's first superhero series created for Indigenous girls. Fierce Girls, is an international online series aimed at young indigenous girls, providing them with an engaging immersive story using a range of platforms, including live action and animation, as well as a variety of digital platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.
The 30-episode video series follows two teens who use superpowers and celebrate the strength and beauty of being indigenous in a challenging world-told through the eyes of Native Cree Canadians and the Māori people of Aotearoa. While dealing with situations most early adolescents face, Kisik and Anika draw from their cultures to make an impact on their communities. The audience can also interact with the characters and join the community of co-creators to help the girls' mission to save the world.
The show's creators and producers hope to empower young women to determine their own futures, and create positive communities and a brighter world for everyone around them.
Hollywood-style superhero narratives can ring hollow for Indigenous audiences, says Loretta Todd, the series' lead producer and director and the Métis Cree artist behind APTN's Coyote's Crazy Smart Science Show. Todd recently received a Vancouver Women in Film Artistic Innovation Award.
"In the Indigenous way, you're supposed to be not better or worse than anybody, and so what happens when two everyday kids start to have superpowers? Would you think you're better than everybody else or would you use those special powers to still be immersed in who you are and your culture? [The characters] turn to the culture, to the adults, to mothers and grandmothers for help, because they realize they can't do this all themselves," says Todd. "They need community."
A co-production of Tangata- Whenua.com-an independent Maori news and information portal in Aotearoa-and with the Canadian Media Fund and New Zealand On-Air funding, the series also uses young Indigenous writers and animators.
"Indigenous people creating superheroes is nothing new," 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 eight-to-twelve "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.
"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 its core, said, 'We're all superheroes and can use our power to do good things.'"
