Emmy win for animated PBS show goes to X̱’unei Lance Twitchell and Raye Lankford
By Mark Sabbatini
The Juneau Empire
An episode of the animated PBS Kids show “Molly of Denali” co-written by Juneau resident and Alaska Native language expert X̱’unei Lance Twitchell won the award for Writing for a Preschool Animated Series at the third annual 2025 Children’s and Family Emmy Awards on Saturday.
It is the first Emmy for the series that debuted in 2019 as the first U.S. children’s show featuring an Alaska Native as the lead character. The series won a Peabody Award in 2020, as well as other awards, and has been nominated for multiple Emmys over the years, including two this year.
The episode “Not a Mascot” that premiered March 27, 2024, as part of the series’ fourth season won the best writing award among five nominees.
Twitchell, in an interview Monday, said he had the awards program on his phone while at the ceremony — with his category on page 61, which meant a long wait scrolling through one at a time as other winners were announced. “And once we got to page 50, my heart rate was sky high. And then once we got to page 61 and I was like ‘This is it. This is it.’”
“I remember they said ‘And the Emmy goes to…’ — and there’s this pause and my heart is just racing, and it’s beating so loud in my head or in my body — and then they said ‘Not–’ and then everybody screamed around us. I was just like ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’”
During his one-minute televised acceptance speech, delivered in a mix of Lingít and English, Twitchell thanked ancestral storytellers as well as modern ones working with him on the show.
“Finally it has happened,” he said in Lingít, according to the broadcast’s subtitles. “The storytellers of ancient times, the ones of today, the ones of tomorrow, this one is for you all.”
Continuing in English, he said “So I heard that if you speak an Indigenous language on Indigenous lands in an industry that is maybe finally Indigenizing, then time immemorial is your 3o seconds.”
“To all you writers out there, all you Native writers, all you Native babies who might be wondering ‘Can I tell my stories through film and television?’ Mahsi’choo — letʼs go!”
Controversies about sports teams and mascots with Indigenous names have existed for decades, and been particularly prominent the past several years as some franchises have changed those names. Twitchell said he was seeking a storyline that avoided a confrontational approach.
“I wanted to try and figure out if I could do it in a way that wouldn’t hurt people’s feelings too much or make them feel embarrassed, but instead have the children model conversations that I think adults should be having about these schools, these Native American mascots,” he said.
“What I was hoping to show was that you could change a mascot and not get rid of the history of a place if kids still have that history. And I want to just acknowledge that the connection that people feel to their sports is very real and to not diminish that, but just to say that doesn’t mean it could never change if it’s inappropriate or if it creates harmful stereotypes.”
It is the second half of a two-part show that begins with a story titled “Meteorite, Out of Sight,” that involves Molly and other characters setting out to find a meteorite.
Twitchell, a language professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, has long been involved in a multitude of projects to revive Native dialects and culture, from co-authoring the Lingít-language children’s book “Kuhaantí” as part of a youth-oriented series to serving as the chair of the Council for Alaska Native Languages. He was among nine recipients of the 2024 Governor’s Arts and Humanities Award presented last October.
He said he is currently working on a fiction novel and a screenplay based on a true story, both involving themes of Indigenous struggles.
The other co-writer of the Emmy-winning episode is Raye Lankford, a contributor for numerous other episodes as well as other children’s shows including “Sesame Street.”
Other Juneau tribal citizens involved in the writing and production of “Molly of Denali” include Frank Katasse, ‘Wáats’asdiyei Joe Yates and Vera Starbard, the latter of whom is the current Alaska State Writer Laureate.
“The Indigenous writers on Molly of Denali are the most talented, brave, and loving group of creatives I have ever had the honor to work with,” Twitchell said in a press release issued by UAS in January after the Emmy nominations were announced. “We have collaborated with non-Indigenous writers and many different peoples in production and administrative capacities to continue to create Molly of Denali. It has been life-changing to see an Indigenous woman as the lead character in a national series that has global reach. The many legacies of generations of Indigenous storytellers flow through the hands of the Indigenous storytellers today, and it is wonderful to see that groups like the Emmy Awards and PBS are including Indigenous voices and stories.”
“Molly of Denali” also received a nomination this year for best Interactive Media. Previous Emmy nominations for the show include Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program in 2023, and Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program and Outstanding Preschool Animated Series in 2022.
In addition to winning a 2020 Peabody Award, the show was the 2020 winner of Outstanding Achievement in Youth Programming from the Television Critics Association, 2022 winner for Animation from the NAMIC Vision Awards, and 2022 winner for Best Performance in an Animation Series from the Leo Awards for Zane Jasper’s performance in the episode “Uqiquq,” according to the Internet Movie Database.
Twitchell was at the first Emmy ceremony “Molly of Denali” received a nomination for, which was a thrill despite not taking a trophy home.
“The first year that I went I got to experience the high of being nominated and then the disappointment of watching somebody else win which, you know, there can only be one who gets the award,” he said.
He didn’t attend last year’s ceremony and mentally prepared himself for another possible disappointment this year when he returned.
“I remember thinking to myself ‘Well, gee, I want to win. That would be incredible,’” he said. “But then I had to just sort of prepare myself for if that didn’t happen.”
Instead, he received a barrage of congratulations at the ceremony, and was greeted with songs and dancing from a group of residents when he arrived at Juneau’s airport on Sunday night.
“I’ve been getting texts, lots of family, lots of friends,” he said. “It’s my birthday today, so that’s been like so much fun. And so texts were flooding in from all over the place…So it’s just been surreal and just living in a dream.”
Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
