Club Friday Q&A: Producer Jas Morgan on Their New Web Series, 'Kin'
By Stacy lee kong
Image: Courtesy of Dane Stewart
For writer and researcher Jas M. Morgan, the journey to executive producing Kin, their new web series, was all about community. Morgan, who’s Cree, Saulteaux and Métis and a registered member of Tootinaowaziibeeng First Nation, has published award-winning cultural criticism, curated Indigenous film and digital media exhibitions, published books and holds a Canada Research Chair in Digital Wahkohtowin and Cultural Governance. Their work focused on kinship, Indigenous narratives in film and television, Indigenous documentary cultures, Indigenous social media and internet, digital media, digital publishing, cultural heritage and governance and TransNDN thought… but, they’d never produced a show before. In fact, it wasn’t even on their radar until director Justin Ducharme pitched them on working together (in the time it took to smoke one cigarette, no less). The result of that short initial conversation is Kin, a heartfelt and funny exploration of the urban queer and trans Indigenous experience featuring a group of internet-obsessed friends. It premiered at the 2023 imagineNATIVE Film Festival in October and the team will be taking it on the festival circuit in 2024. Before that, though, Morgan chatted with Friday Things about the power of specific storytelling, how they’re seeking out unique funding opportunities and our collective desire for soft, joyful stories.
What’s your professional background, and how did you come to produce Kin?
I am an art historian by trade. I guess I got that way by collaborating with artists through forms of writing, so it just kind of came naturally. There aren’t a lot of people telling the kind of stories that we're trying to tell with Kin. I feel like we as creators will gravitate towards each other, and often collaborate together; it just happened very organically in our community.
What drew you to art history?
I decided I was going to do an MA in art history because I wanted to work with an Indigenous art historian. As it so happened, Canadian Art had an Indigenous art editorship that came up, and it was just timing. So, I stepped into that role, and something I tried to do was write alongside artists, as opposed to critically about their work.
Is Kin the first thing that you've produced under your production company, Sewing Circle Productions?
It's the very first thing we've done. I'm pretty excited about the attention it's gotten. We have some other things in development and in the works, but I feel really proud of Kin. I did it alongside Theo Cuthand, and Justin Ducharme, who I've worked with throughout my entire career. I feel like we got to tell the stories that we wanted to tell because we stayed really fiercely independent. And I don't know if we would have been able to do that if it weren't for my role as an educator, and there being this unique funding model to the production company itself, because it's also a hard time [to be] filming media.
I’d love to hear more about the funding model, because I think that is a very relatable problem. How we can pay for things impacts what we can do, and not just from a practical perspective, but also from a philosophical perspective.
Working as a writer and an artist in publishing, I've gotten very passionate about policy, because being [among] some of the first people who came in through Equity and Diversity Initiatives, I've also seen a lot of inequity in the industries where I work. So, I created this production model wherein I can apply for funding through institutions like SSHRC [the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council] for instance, and use those to fund media projects that I can then use to make media policy documents from. I think Indigenous artists are used to being extracted from in these kind of projects. I want to bolster their voices and their vision—I don't want to hinder them in any way.
How did Kin come to be?
I think it was in community again. For me, Kin started when I met Justin Ducharme, the director, outside of an industry party. There's a senior artist named Zachary Longboy, and I had never seen his work before. He said, “Let me convince you of the worth of his work in one cigarette or less,” and he made such a good pitch. And somehow Kin was ravelled into that pitch as well. I guess Justin's kind of brilliant that way!
I definitely meet people like that, too. It’s like, ‘Hi! It's been two minutes but I'm on board.’ Okay, so from this one-cigarette-or-less pitch, how did Kin come together?
I knew as a producer that I wanted to expand this vision of this community. I love Justin as a director and a writer, but there's so many diverse voices. There's queer, trans, lesbian, and Two Spirit community with Indigenous communities. We started pulling on writers such as Theo Cuthand, and Arielle Twist. At that point, we believed this could be something because that's a really cool roster of talent. We envisioned a couple of roles specifically for Ta'Kaiya Blaney, who is an awesome, amazing land defender doing great work right now. (Definitely check them out.) We approached APTN and imagineNATIVE and we got greenlit to do this project, but we didn't end up distributing through APTN. That was a personal choice that we made—we're going to do free, open shared distribution. It'll be online by January 2025, after we do a festival run.
What are the stories that can only be told when Indigenous people create their own media?
I mean, anyone can write a story about anything. But should they? I think that's the question. I think about this in the sense of Native community, and who can tell our stories and who should tell our stories. I can always tell when I, as a Native person, am watching media that is written by a non-Native person. There's this film right now that just came out called Killers of the Flower Moon; everyone's been so excited about it because it has Native representation, but there's a Native woman and she's just this passive victim to the narrative of the white men around her. That is how media written about Native women or queer folks written by non-Native people always comes out. But when Native people tell these stories, I think about things like Reservation Dogs that are able to balance humour, community, love and yes, grief and trauma, in a nuanced and really beautiful and respectful way. I think those are the kinds of stories that are told when Native people tell their stories.
I totally agree with the point that we can always tell. And, I think it’s can sometimes be really small things that make it obvious, even more than the larger thematic approach or if the story is told with sensitivity. This conversation makes me think of Kelly Fyffe-Marshall’s When Morning Comes, and how happy I was to see that the stove in a character’s kitchen looks like my grandma’s stove in Trinidad, you know? Or in Kin, I noticed different characters have different accents, which I don't think we always see in white-led representations of Indigeneity. How does it feel for you to be able to bring those specific stories to a wider audience?
I feel like I got this advice from a mentor once. I can't remember who it was but I wish I could cite them. They said, when you're young, don't wait for permission, just do what you want to do and work with your friends, because that’s the time you get to [do that]. We just had this crazy idea, and we just did it. I probably will never work that way again; I have to incorporate now that I've actually made something. But it was beautiful. It was just kind of crazy, messy. But I will have it forever, and I love it so much.
Another thing that I think is really interesting about Kin is the use of the Internet as a storytelling mechanism. Why was it important for you to integrate online spaces into the show?
I'm also a researcher, and I do a lot of research about digital media. That's where youth live—they live online. They're immersed in it constantly, all the time. I thought that with the younger writers on staff, too; they can't tell their stories without integrating some kind of digital interface. I think that's gonna be really interesting in how we talk about media generally, and social media on TV shows and in film moving forward, and how we're going to work with that as a new format. That's kind of cool.
It's totally cool. Is there any relationship between that philosophy of representing where young people are, where they live, what social spaces they're in, and your decision to format the show as a web short?
Yeah, absolutely. I think a web series is just more accessible. And, some of the first Two Spirit content was kind of raunchy so I won’t cite it right now! But we were talking about inspiration and a lot of it was digital web content, or things we'd seen online. We're just paying homage to that genre.
One of the things that I love about your approach in Kin is the humour, and the love and joy and softness. In a recent eTalk interview, I think it was writer Arielle Twist who said she wanted to write a love story that she wanted to experience—a soft, joyful love. And that's not the first time that I've heard that idea expressed, especially recently. So, why that was important for you to include in Kin? And big picture, why do you think that's so important right now?
Obviously, we can't look away from the horrific things that are happening in the world right now. It's difficult on a lot of us for a lot of different reasons. Maybe this comes down to who we're making media for, too, but I don't want to sit down and watch a really deep take on residential schools right now. It's gonna make me feel like crap, to be frank. But bringing a little moment of like joy to each other's life, I think is also really inherent of our teachings. When we're together, it's a moment of joy and happiness, because you don't know what's going to happen. You never say goodbye, because that's too finite. I think we can make space for us to heal, and also have joy in these very intense moments.
Follow Kin and Jas on Instagram, and look out for Kin in 2025.
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