A new children’s TV show follows a Navajo child from the city who decides she wants to spend the summer with her grandmother, who lives on the Navajo Nation. Sadie, though, is a puppet, as are many of the characters on "Navajo Highways." It’ll start streaming Wednesday on the First Nations Experience platform.
Pete Sands, who's from the Utah portion of the Navajo Nation and the writer and director of "Navajo Highways," joined The Show to talk more about the project.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Where did the idea for this series come from?
PETE SANDS: Well, I had this idea for, oh, I started in 2020. I got that idea when I when I was out in New York Fashion Week, and I got to visit Sesame Street at the same time back in 2019 and came back to the reservation to work on the COVID relief program that I started. And during that time, I ran into a lot of families who were experiencing communication difficulties with the older generation staying at home with the younger generation.
The language barrier was there. And I just thought, how can I help? And I just had this experience with the teacher who was using a puppet to talk to her students, and then the light went off in my head like, hey, maybe I can use puppets to teach a language. So that's, that's how it came. And Sesame Street was very vital and helped show me how they do things back. And it was just it was just all this combination of that.
BRODIE: How did you try to incorporate the influence maybe of Sesame Street while not making it just sort of a Navajo Nation version of Sesame Street?
SANDS: The the difference between Sesame Street and “Navajo Highways” is Sesame Street does not use human puppets. Everything is, they call it beastaoids, so like every, if you think of every puppet that's on Sesame Street, it's not a person.
And “Navajo Highways” is what I want to do is focus on the culture, 'cause I didn't want to use like like a childish voices like, “hi, my name is,” you know. I wanted them to, I want to use it like real people, like real voices, you know, I wanted them to make them be as real as they can, but also appealing to kids.
BRODIE: Yeah, well, and interestingly one of the main things that Sesame Street aims to do and has really from the very beginning is talk about literacy and, you know, help, help kids sort of learn their letters and learn their colors and learn to read things like that. It sounds like in that sense with the Diné language that is very much what you're after here.
SANDS: Yes, a lot of programs, I mean, you think of all the childhood programs, besides Sesame Street, all this, all the childhood programs I've watched as kids, there's always a teaching tool. There's always an educational teaching tools.
And, you know, Native Americans, Indigenous people have always been very creative and very artistic in the way they preserve their culture. So I just, I just stuck with that cultural approach of using visual aid to teach language and culture.
BRODIE: What was the process of writing the episodes and filming it like?
SANDS: Writing in the episodes was a bit of a challenge because, you know, how do you balance culture and language with the show and still keep it entertaining? And as well as you gotta consider that the audience is watching this, you know, just because a person's Navajo have Navajo heritage or lineage does not know, it doesn't mean they understand language, or they have been exposed to it.
So I had to keep that in mind cause I did, I was doing speeches and conferences on Navajo language and preservation for years, and I know the Navajo language that the fluency at this time is below 10% of the Navajo population. So I had to write the show to where it catered to the much greater percentage of people who weren't able to speak the language.
So that balance was tough. But also, how do you connect with that audience that is coming into this show not knowing much about the culture or the language. So that's why I made the main character an urban, an urban Navajo child who comes from the city, born to see, and she wants to spend time on the reservation with her grandma, so the audience can go along with her and learn with her.
BRODIE: Does that make maybe the character and the content that you're trying to provide a little more relatable to to viewers, do you think?
SANDS: Yes, that's what, that's what I was mainly concerned with, is it relating, is the audience to relate to this character, and, you know, so they don't feel like they're being taught something they're being left out of the conversation.
Because this is a learning tool. It's about teaching people. I mean, a lot of the folks who've watched, they understand the concept of it now, ‘cause when, when I try to explain to people, they're like, what? A puppet show about Navajo language, but they don't talk the language, but you also gotta remember, remind the, the audience that this is for children.
BRODIE: Did you find that, you know, based on sort of the fluency levels and, you know, where viewers might be starting out from, did you have to maybe think about making the lesson part of this a little more maybe rudimentary than you, you might have wanted to?
SANDS: There's a lot of elements of what I was influenced me when I was a child and being able to have more than just the message of the word within the episode, ‘cause they have to learn what that word means, like what, what it really resonates with them, you know, in Navaj, in Diné, a word could mean five different things.
So, getting to the root of that word and also learning about the culture, about the lifestyle and the reservation, what it means to live on the reservation, what does it mean to grow up in a culture. So it's more than just the language.
BRODIE: How do you gauge whether or not this series has the impact that you're hoping it has?
SANDS: I think the reaction from the audiences, because before we even did the TV show, I used to go out and do presentation ‘cause I did small video skits from the web, web video skits for students where they learn like how to introduce themselves in Diné. And I would take these videos, these little skits out to the elementary schools on the Navajo Reservation, and the crazy amount of response I got from the kids was off the charts.
Just imagine like 200, 300 kids from kindergarten to third grade just screaming at the top of their lungs. You know, saying their words back to the, with the puppets and just enjoying it, and it's just. And people send me like parents and grandparents send me videos of their kids watching little videos I have, and, and I think that's the, that's the gauge, right?
BRODIE: I mean, it, it sounds like it's already having a bit of an impact before it even comes out.
SANDS: Yeah, when we did our screening in Wonder Rock, our premiere, our debut. I didn't expect, I wasn't prepared for the emotional impact it would have on the older generations, ‘cause there's a lot of grandparents in the audience there. And a lot of them spoke up saying, "this is what we need. This is what we're looking for, something to teach our young kids, so they can look at it on TV but they're speaking our language properly.”
There's a couple episodes that they feel like, you know, we do flashback scenes for some of the episodes back in the old days, so it's really, it there it touched them and it moved them, and it just just the the overwhelming outpouring of emotion and gratitude from the older generation really really was really overwhelming, and I didn't expect that.
BRODIE: That must have been really gratifying for you.
SANDS: I think it's a little validation, you know, like you don't know if it's gonna work. Like I didn't know it was gonna work. I'm just like crazy out the puppet idea. I don't know if it's gonna work.
And then you see this reaction from people. And, and then also you get reactions from non-natives who watch it, and they're like, hey, you know, I got a friend who's Navajo or I got a nephew who's Navajo, and we're trying to connect with him. And the show is gonna do that for us.
So like just a trailer, people saw a trailer and they were, they were going crazy over it. They're like this is amazing. It's gratifying, I guess is the word.
