New USask Resident Storyteller Hoping to Open Doors to Careers in Television

Ryan Moccasin has built a career on making people laugh.

In his latest endeavour, he is teaching others to embrace traditional storytelling and their own comedic sensibilities while merging with with modern, popular media.

From February to late April, Moccasin, a television producer, writer, and stand-up comedian from Saulteaux First Nation, will serve as the Indigenous Storytellers in Residence at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) Library.

“It’s a really fun and exciting program. It’s that creative bridge between the University and the wider public,” said Moccasin.

“In this series I want to showcase Indigenous storytelling and how they can share their stories through the screen,” he said.

The USask Indigenous Storytellers in Residence program, which began in 2021, aims to create and promote intercultural understanding and story-sharing among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. It culminates in a presentation of a project during the University’s Indigenous Achievement Week.

Moccasin’s residency features a variety of workshops, programs, and lectures. On March 4, Moccasin is leading a workshop for USask staff on humour in the workplace, focusing specifically on the importance of humour in Indigenous culture.

During Indigenous Achievement Week, which will be held March 9 to 13, Moccasin is partnering with the Gordon Oakes Red Bear Student Centre to host a stand-up comedy show on campus.

Later in the month, Moccasin is planning on hosting a writing workshop that provides an insight into television-industry writing.

“I want to teach students how a writer’s room in television actually works. We will be simulating a writer’s room and getting them to help me write an episode of The Feather News,” said Moccasin.

“I want them to get a sense of what sort of writing mediums are out there, besides just novelists and academic writing, which some people find boring. It’s a way to mix it up and open some eyes to the other kinds of jobs out there.”

Finally, over a weekend in April, Moccasin will be hosting a film masterclass series, which will provide an overview to the fundamentals of filmmaking, including short script writing, how a camera works, how to operate sound, and how different departments like wardrobe, hair, and makeup work. The class is open and free to anyone in the public.

“They’ll get to understand how a set works. It’s a lot of moving parts but it’s fun.”

Just a handful of years ago, Moccasin took himself into a crash course in filmmaking.

In 2018, he began a comedy blog called The Feather, a satirical new-site motivated by the way he saw Indigenous people represented in the media and Hollywood. He met two local comedians, Danny Knight and Shawn Cuthand, who jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with Moccasin to start making videos for The Feather.

After gaining traction during the pandemic, the team behind The Feather entered the imagineNATIVE + APTN Lumi Web Series Pitch Competition in 2021, which they won. It granted them the opportunity to produce their satiric comedy show for APTN.

“We were celebrating over Zoom, and at the end of it I was like, ‘wait, how do I make a TV show?’” said Moccasin.

Moccasin started reaching out to organizations for mentorship opportunities and eventually found the National Screen Institute, who accepted Moccasin into their producer’s lab program.

“The people there really helped me understand what it means to be a producer and run an actual business and team,” said Moccasin.

“When I was growing up, I never really considered that there would be a whole industry behind TV and films. I never thought there would be career in putting this all together.”

On screen or on stage, using humour to explore culture, tell stories, and comment on current events can lead to unity and deeper understanding, said Moccasin.

“Once you laugh with someone, I think it disarms them and sort of humanizes them – you connect on a deeper level,” he said. “You can start having difficult conversations about a tough subject in which you otherwise wouldn’t have had.”

Using the Indigenous Storytelling residency, Moccasin hopes to open doors for young people in Saskatchewan to explore a career writing and sharing their own stories.

“You can start writing now. You don’t have to be in the industry, you don’t need to be hired in a production,” said Moccasin.

“I want students to know that they can start sharing their stories and not be hindered by the gatekeepers of the industry. That’s what we did with The Feather News – we started telling our own stories and the industry came to us.”