Juneau writer Vera Starbard nominated for fourth Emmy
- Ellie Ruel
- 12 hours ago
- 5 min read
TV show “Molly of Denali” spotlighting Alaska Native character and culture also gets recognition
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
State writer laureate Vera Starbard has received her fourth Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Series on PBS series “Molly of Denali.” The nominated episode, “Thanks-for-giving” aired last November and delves into Indigenous perspectives on observing the holiday and the complex history surrounding it.
The show, which was also nominated for Outstanding Preschool Animated Series, is the first nationally distributed children's TV show with an Alaska Native lead character. It won a Peabody Award in 2020 and a 2025 Children's & Family Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Series in March.
The timing of the 2026 nomination came as a bit of a surprise to Starbard.
“One of the creators of Molly called me when I was in an ear appointment with my husband,” Starbard said. “I texted her and I was like, ‘I'll call you back in like 10 minutes.’ And she was like, ‘No, now. Call me now.’ And I didn't actually realize the news had kind of broken, and I think she wanted me to find out through that instead of online. So I went out into the lobby and called her and she told me and I bawled.”
Starbard is a Lingít and Dena’ina playwright and writer with a background in journalism. Her original works have been featured at Perseverance Theatre, including her 2016 debut play, “Our Voices Will be Heard.” Since then, she has moved into writing for television, including the finale of ABC series “Alaska Daily” and multiple episodes of “Molly of Denali.”
Her screenwriting highlights Alaska Native voices and culture, which Starbard said wasn’t represented on television when she was younger. She recalled becoming emotional watching an unaired pilot of “Molly of Denali” that showed characters working on beadwork and wearing a sealskin vest.
“I grew up not seeing anybody that looked or sounded like me or had my history or knew the things that I knew or saw the things that I saw. And all of my TV heroes and people I looked up to were not native,” Starbard said. “I went to Boston, to the WGBH Studios — it's now GBH — and saw in the studios in where they're working, the big cutouts of Clifford the Big Red Dog and Sesame Street and all of these huge monumental characters that formed my childhood, and realized our Alaska Native kids will never know a world again that doesn't have them represented in it on television.”
Starbard pitched the Thanksgiving episode at the beginning of her eight years writing for the show, and wrote the script about two years before it aired.
In the episode, Molly’s Grandpa Nat teaches her and her friends about how Alaska Native cultures were silenced, recounting how their gatherings were outlawed and celebration items like his mother’s basket were destroyed when new people came to the land. Instead of celebrating the holiday, he recognizes it as a day of mourning.
“Mourning isn’t just about being sad,” Grandpa Nat explains in the episode. “It’s about remembering what was taken from us and honoring our ancestors who survived so much pain so we could be here today.”
After learning about Thanksgiving's backstory, Molly and her friends plan a community-wide gathering to celebrate the holiday with traditional foods and drumming. They also embrace the idea of communal grieving, which Auntie Merna explains is a way for people to heal and realize they’re not alone.
“A lot of American holidays can be complicated for Native people and I wanted to talk about that complication, that it's not a good or bad thing in the episode,” Starbard said. “Thanksgiving itself can be complicated for Native people because really deep in our cultures is the idea of gratitude for everything, gratitude for our family, our clan, the land. So, of course, you want to celebrate a holiday that's ostensibly about giving thanks. At the same time, the truth is rarely told about the holiday itself and the hypocrisy of sort of giving thanks for something that was very quickly taken from us. It can be about celebrating what was taken from us versus what was given to other people.”
Starbard said the show deals with heavy topics, so writing 11-minute episodes that carry a meaningful message and are digestible for young audiences can prove a challenge. In “Thanks-for-giving” the term “mourning” is contextually introduced within the narrative, and the darker stories of cultural erasure through colonialism are carefully parsed.
“It does have to navigate this space between not only the language, but the actual concepts and not wanting to traumatize kids. At the same time, you want to be truthful about what did happen,” Starbard said.
The Thanksgiving episode is personal for her, since she doesn’t usually celebrate, though she occasionally joins friends or family for dinner. Starbard said this year, she tried to use the day for progress, working on writing.
“It's not this cut-and-dry rule that we follow, just an acknowledgement that it feels a little weird to celebrate something with such historically mixed feelings,” she said.
As “Molly of Denali” draws to a close after five seasons, Starbard said she is happy to look back on the hundreds of stories featuring Alaska Native life and culture the show told to a wider audience. While she’s sad to see it end, Starbard noted children's series typically air repetitively so a new generation can age into and appreciate “Molly of Denali.”
“These Native characters and Native stories ultimately aren't owned by us, and so we don't have the final say in what happens to them, and that's the sad part about it. But at the same time, I'm really proud and really grateful for all the years that we have had this and that they will continue to air for quite a while,” she said. “Who knows how long we'll get to see Molly. But I hope it's a long time to come.”
Starbard said there’s just one more episode set to air on PBS. In the meantime, she plans to work on projects as the state writer laureate.
“It's been humbling just to know that my sort of ‘job’ is to represent literary arts in the state and understanding what that means and trying to figure out how to best do that,” she said. “I actually just finished a series online highlighting Alaska Native books throughout Alaska Native Heritage Month. And that was part of the project, and that was sort of a test case to see how best I could do more online. I'd love to do more online as the writer laureate, which hasn't been done much before.”
Her first year as state writer laureate got off to a slow start since her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer shortly after Starbard’s appointment, and died a couple of months ago.
“It changed a lot of what I thought I was going to do. At the same time, it's given me much greater focus on how I think I should be doing the projects and the speaking engagements,” Starbard said.
For Starbard, family plays a significant role in her creative works, from set designs to contributing their experiences in her plays. Her upcoming Scholastic book features a character that has her father’s job and his puppy, and she recently published his last book of formline coloring pages, “Seik'w.”
“There's no project I do that I'm not texting family members or calling them or having them show up and participate in it,” she said. “Family is inseparable from my art.”
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
