Morgan Howard (X’agatkeen) is a Tlingit writer, storyteller, filmmaker, and communications professional from Yakutat, Alaska. He is Eagle moiety, Teikweídi clan, of the Drum House. His great-grandfather, Olaf Abraham, was the last recognized hereditary chief of the Aantlein River Teikweídi.
Morgan was raised between Yakutat and Kodiak, where he spent summers commercial fishing aboard the F/V Cornelia Marie, the boat later made familiar to television audiences through “Deadliest Catch.” He began working on deck at age eleven and continued fishing through college, helping pay his tuition with what he earned on the water.
His path to writing ran through journalism and television. Morgan earned degrees in broadcast production from Northern Arizona University and film production from Columbia College Hollywood. While attending film school in Los Angeles he worked on many video and film productions below the line before a film shooting in Juneau brought him home to Alaska for work.
He founded Morgan Howard Productions, a communications and storytelling company that has worked with tribes, Native organizations, and Alaska Native corporations across the region. He also worked as a producer, writer, cameraman, and reporter, covering Native communities throughout Alaska and the Pacific Northwest for Northwest Indian News. His essays on Alaska Native corporations, Indigenous identity, and contemporary Native issues have appeared in the Anchorage Daily News. A shareholder of both Sealaska and Yak-tat Kwaan, Morgan has spent much of his professional life working at the intersection of Indigenous advocacy, communications, and community development, including service with Native organizations and tribal institutions focused on strengthening Native communities and preserving cultural traditions.
As a writer, Morgan is drawn to stories about family, place, leadership, belonging, and the tensions between tradition and modernity. His work is influenced by Tlingit history, oral tradition, and the lived experiences of Indigenous people navigating contemporary life. He is particularly interested in stories that challenge stereotypes and portray Native people as complex, fully realized human beings.
His first feature screenplay GREENHORN gathers those threads aboard a halibut longliner working the Gulf of Alaska. Max, a young Tlingit boy, is hired onto his father’s boat to become a fisherman, and discovers that what he really wants is the love of his father.
Morgan lives and writes in the Seattle area with his family. Through screenwriting and storytelling, he hopes to contribute to a growing movement of Native creators telling their own stories in their own voices.