From the Academy Award-winning writer and director of Spotlight comes ABC’s latest drama, Alaska Daily, starring Hilary Swank as Eileen Fitzgerald, an award-winning journalist whose career suffers a nearly fatal blow. Desperate to keep her career alive, she relocates to Anchorage, Alaska to help a local outlet with a number of unresolved cases related to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), a very real issue among the indigenous community across North America.

Series star Grace Dove joins us on Multicultural TV Talk to talk about her role in the series as the headstrong young journalist Rosalind “Roz” Friendly who is assigned to open MMIW cold cases alongside Eileen and the two have different investigative tactics and don’t exactly see eye-to-eye. Grace talks about the importance of showcasing these storylines in mainstream media, how she relates to her character, and working alongside one of her childhood heroes, actress Irene Bedard who recurs on the series as Sylvia Nanmac, the mother of a recently deceased young Indigenous woman whose case is being reopened.

“This has been something that is very prevalent, sadly, in my life, my family and community,” she shared. “This isn’t just in one area. It’s just Alaska, or Northern British Columbia. This is across all of North America and Indigenous territories. We’ve been, unfortunately, living this our whole lives so, it’s not shocking, it’s not new or anything I haven’t heard of. But to be able to showcase it on a network television show and be on the TVs of people who have never heard of this? It matters. It matters that non-Indigenous folks will have an opportunity to educate themselves and to show compassion.”

“I really hope that audiences can take it upon themselves to be curious and to start educating themselves on the true history of the territories that they now live on.”

Alaska Daily airs new episodes at 10pm ET on ABC and is available to stream on Hulu