New Indigenous media studio launches Festival of Stories

Indian & Cowboy Creative Media will preview five new original podcast series this weekend with live tapings in front of 50 audience members.

Indian & Cowboy Creative Media, a new Indigenous-owned storytelling studio based in Hamilton, is honouring National Indigenous History Month this June with the inaugural Festival of Stories.

The event features an exclusive three-night preview of its five new original podcast series.

“Think of it as upfronts for the independent Indigenous storytelling world,” reads a press release from Indian & Cowboy. “Five original podcasts, heard live before they are available anywhere else. Comedy, true crime history, reconciliation, and a paranormal night.”

The studio’s founders, the husband-and-wife team of Ryan McMahon and Madeline Wilson Shaw, plan to make the Festival of Stories an annual Hamilton tradition.

The festival will provide an intimate and up-close look at podcast creation, with only 50 seats sold per show.

“This inaugural Festival of Stories is about bringing our community into the creative process,” said Wilson Shaw, president and executive producer at Indian & Cowboy. “It establishes a powerful annual moment in Hamilton where the public can get a front-row seat to the Indigenous-led content we are building before it goes out to the rest of the world.”

McMahon, who is CEO and chief creative producer at Indian & Cowboy, was the host of the acclaimed Thunder Bay podcast in 2018 and the producer of the Canadian Screen Award-winning Crave 2023 docuseries of the same name.

“It is officially upfront season in Canada and it should be no surprise to anyone that Indian & Cowboy is putting our spin on how we announce projects to the world,” he said. “That’s who we are. We are independent, we are scrappy, and story for story, we have a world-class slate we can’t wait to share.” 

Up first at Festival of Stories, on Thursday, June 11, at 7 p.m. is Tom Wilson's Best F'kn Story.

According to the show description: “Wherever Tom Wilson goes, a story follows. The man behind Canada's most-misbehaved '90s rock band, Tom is an iconic Hamilton musician, author and visual artist who has spent a lifetime in the wrong place at exactly the right time — rock legends in broom closets, gang members in Santa Monica hotel rooms, perfect strangers who turned out to be anything but. This is the debut live taping of Indian & Cowboy's new intergenerational podcast, launching this fall.”

McMahon, an Anishinaabe comedian and writer, opens Friday, June 12 at 7 p.m. with a solo conversation about what reconciliation has actually delivered, what it has not, and what comes next.  According to the show description, this is the “question Canada has been avoiding. Ten years of land acknowledgements, calls to action and national promises, so how did that go? Unflinching, funny and deliberately uncomfortable.”

That will be followed at 9:30 p.m. with We're All Mad Here.

“Ryan McMahon and Madeline Wilson Shaw share a home, a couple of kids and a lot of big feelings. A live taping of a podcast dedicated to transforming anger and rage into something better. Spoiler: it never quite goes that well.”

The Festival of Stories continues Saturday, June 13 with two more podcasts.

City of Thieves at 7 p.m. will take listeners to Timmins, Ont., 1909 to 1945. “Deep in the gold mines of Northern Ontario, workers were stealing from the most powerful mining companies in the country and they were good at it. City of Thieves is a true-crime history podcast about high-grading, the underground economy it built, and the world it left behind.”

This is the first look inside one of Indian & Cowboy's most ambitious productions.

The final show of the festival at 9:30 p.m. is S.N.I.P.E. — Ghost Hunters of the Grand River.

The stars of the APTN show that follows group of Six Nations ghost hunters known as S.N.I.P.E. who gather evidence from the world of ghost stories, paranormal encounters and the unexplainable. They have investigated haunted locations across the country, including Auchmar Estate and the Germania Club, right here in Hamilton. They will close the festival with “experiences too dark and too strange for television, shared out loud, in the room, for the first time.”

Festival of Stories takes place at Indian & Cowboy Studio, Suite 204, 62 King St. E., Hamilton (King John Building, Gore Park). Tickets are $30 per show and available here.