Shirley McLean Shaaw Tláa
Shirley McLean is of Tlingit and Tagish descent and is of the Dakl’aweidi Killer Whale clan. She is a member of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation. When she was nine years old, she travelled with her aunt Dora Wedge and her mother Doris McLean from Whitehorse to Dawson on the Yukon River. They thought about Shirley’s distant cousin Kate Carmack Shaaw Tláa and her trip down the river before the Klondike gold rush. In 1979, Shaaw Tláa’s descendants decided to give her name (meaning Older Than Old) to Shirley, another Dakl’aweidi girl. Shirley’s family hired Johnny Taku Jack to conduct the ceremony and about 200 people came to the ceremony to sing Dakl’aweidi songs and watch the Skookum Jim Dancers perform.1)
Shirley met Tania Koenig-Gauchier, of northern Alberta Métis (Cree) heritage, when they were enrolled in the Native Communications program at Grant MacEwan College (now MacEwan University) in Edmonton. After graduation, and for the next twenty years, they worked together several times as production assistants and story producers – independently and for networks. In 2021, they were both working in Vancouver at Great Pacific Media when they decided to launch their own British Columbia-based production company, Wapanatahk Media, in partnership with Great Pacific Media. The first series was Dr. Savannah: Wild Rose Vet, and all of their stories will be Indigenous stories told from an Indigenous perspective.2)