The show, which premieres across the country on Monday, was written for children ages 4 to 8. It follows the spunky and inventive Molly Mabray and her friends as they solve kid-friendly problems, like earning enough money to buy an inflatable tube to ride on the water or finding ways to keep four-legged creatures out of their garden.

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It also represents what is perhaps PBS’s most ambitious effort yet to educate its young viewers about a distinct cultural group, while investing in making sure that members of that group are involved at every level of production.

The core narrative of the show involves Molly making new connections to her Native identity. But neither of the creators had Native roots, and they knew they would need to educate themselves about the cultural heritage of their main character. PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit that distributes federal funds to public broadcasting stations and programs, including “Molly of Denali,” urged the producers to find a way to intimately involve Alaska Native people in the making of the show.

In the past, one or two cultural advisers might have been considered sufficient for informing a children’s show about an Alaska Native family. But for a television show created in 2019, after years of reckoning with inadequate representation in television and film, there’s an understanding in the industry that Alaska Native people should be integral to the process of telling a story about themselves.

“For so long people have come in and literally just taken our stories and have done what they wanted with them,” said Princess Daazhraii Johnson, a creative producer and writer on “Molly,” who is Neets’aii Gwich’in. (The character Molly’s cultural heritage is from three Athabascan groups: Gwich’in, Koyukon and Dena’ina .)