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Few dramas will enrage you as much as Little Bird. Not because it’s in any way hokey or problematic. On the contrary. Based on the real story of the Sixties Scoop – a period in Canada from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, when an estimated 20,000 First Nations children were forcibly removed from their families and adopted by non-Indigenous families – this heartbreaking tale is restrained and carefully measured. Melodrama is swerved, letting the injustice at this story’s core slowly metastasise.
Spread across six episodes, the series juggles two timelines – 1968 in Saskatchewan; 1985 in Montreal – tracking one family’s rupture; and the decades-long reckoning that follows. We meet Esther Rosenblum (Darla Contois), a first-year law student, at her engagement party, where her fiance David (Rowen Kahn), a doctor, mingles with his wealthy Jewish family. When his mother describes her as “exotic”, the word lodges like shrapnel. She was transplanted when she was five from the (fictional) and raised in the Jewish faith by a Canadian family.
She flees to Saskatchewan without warning, clutching a newspaper clipping – a classified ad from the Adopt Indian and Métis programme placing First Nations children up for adoption, displaying each with a photograph and a brief description. On this scrap of paper, she discovers her real name is Bezhig Little Bird. From there she begins an odyssey that takes her across the reserves to find the family she barely knew. When she returns to Montreal, to David’s world, she realises just how isolated she feels. “There’s a reason why your mum tries so hard to let me know that I don’t fit in,” she sobs. “It’s because I don’t.”
Meanwhile, in flashbacks to 1968, we see how we got here. Triggered by a rock hurled by a young girl at a passing police car, officers arrive at the Little Bird family home. There, they walk through rooms with no electricity or clean water, deciding, there and then, that Bezhig’s mother is unfit for parenting. They set about “apprehending” her children – “apprehending” being the verb used by these child welfare agencies to mask their atrocities. Later on, we cut to the father coming home to find his wife handcuffed to the wall, their children gone. When, grief-stricken and apoplectic, he squares up to the cops outside, they beat him to death.
Little Bird, co-created by Jennifer Podemski, a writer of First Nations descent, arrives as proof of a larger reckoning: that Indigenous voices are ready to tell their own stories, their own way. Plaudits must go to both Podemski and to Contois, who carries the series so masterfully.
Her performance conveys the fractures at the heart of this story, slipping between steeliness and vulnerability, between lawyer and lost child. Contois shows Bezhig’s spiralling internal angst with her face often completely still and silences allowed to linger, which only amplifies the moments when the pain really comes to the surface.
While the series is keen to teach – at the beginning and end of each episode, an epigraph reminds us that more Indigenous children are in the care system than ever before – it doesn’t have the fusty feel of a history lecture. As Podemski and her co-writer Hannah Moscovitch understand, tragedy and hope are real-life bedfellows. There’s a suggestion, too, that Bezhig, her adoptive mother Golda (Lisa Edelstein) and her birth mother Patti (Ellyn Jade) are different sides of a singular shared experience. Throughout the series, right up to the unpredictable and cathartic final episode, the writers work overtime to humanise their experiences.
Yes, there is the odd caricature – most notably a welfare officer whose stock villainy is a rare lapse into cliche – and the show’s score feels at times overwrought. But giving voice to characters who have previously been sidelined, Little Bird is an impressive and heartfelt work, tender and moving. It cleaned up at the Canadian Screen Awards, winning 13 gongs, including for Contois. For it to be ignored globally would be a crime.
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