Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Little Bird’ On PBS, About A Woman Searching For Her Indigenous Family After Being Forcibly Removed From It As A Kid

If you’ve never heard of the “Sixties Scoop,” then you definitely need to watch a new PBS series that was originally created for Canada’s Crave streaming service. It involves a woman who was caught up in the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families by provincial child protective service agencies; most of these kids went into the child welfare system and were often adopted by non-Indigenous families. In this story, a woman in a Jewish family from Montreal wants to find the family she was taken from, and sets out to do just that.

LITTLE BIRD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: After an explanation of the “Sixties Scoop,” a Canadian policy where Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families, we see bucolic scenery. “1968. Long Pine Reserve, Saskatchewan.”

The Gist: The Little Bird family is sleeping in their tiny house, the three youngest of the four children sleeping in bed with their parents. One of the girls wakes up, puts on boots, and runs to the outhouse to go to the bathroom, and is mesmerized by the sun shining through the slats.

The kids’ mother, Patti (Ellyn Jade) is going to do her usual chores while her loving husband Morris (Osawa Muskwa) goes out to hunt for deer with their oldest son Leo (Braeden Clarke). It’s Leo’s first hunt, and he knows that it’s something that he needs to learn in order to help feed his family.

We cut to 1985 in Montreal, at an engagement party at a huge house. Esther Roseblum (Darla Contois), a law school student, is getting married to her fiance David (Rowen Kahn), and his family is throwing them a lavish to-do. Esther’s mother Golda (Lisa Edelstein) is off by herself, smoking. Everyone from their synagogue is there, and she feels they have nothing in common with any of those boring people. David’s parents talk her up — his mother calls her “exotic” — as does Esther’s father and his current wife. It’s a pretty typical engagement party upper-middle-class Jewish families would throw in the ’80s; David even helps Esther relax by taking her to a back stairwell and fingering her.

Back in 1968, while Morris and Leo are off on that hunt, 5-year-old Bezhig (Keris Hope Hill) and her brother Nizh (Gideon Starr) are on the side of the road, while their mom is doing laundry back home. Nizh slings a rock toward the road that hits a police car. The police officer stops, chases the two kids and grabs them both. They meet two case workers from Child Protective Services, a veteran case worker named Jeannie (Janet Kidder) and an idealistic young case worker named Adele (Alanna Bale), at the Little Birds’ house.

As Adele goes through the house and notices there’s no plumbing or electricity — neither of which are available on the reserve — she drums up charges of parental neglect in order to take Bezhig and Nizh, along with their little sister Dora (Charlotte Cutler), whom Patti tried to hide, to a boarding school far away from the reserve.

Meanwhile, back in 1985 Montreal, Esther overhears David’s mother bemoan the fact that her son is engaged to “one of them”, an Indigenous person adopted into a Jewish family. The only saving grace for her seems to be that Esther isn’t into “the drugs.” Of course, this upsets Esther and she tells her mom she wants to go home. Golda calls David’s mom “an idiot,” but it’s not a stretch to think that this is far from the first time Esther has heard people say these things about her.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Little Bird, created by Hannah Moscovitch and Jennifer Podemski, has very few parallels. There might be elements of a show like The Fosters in there, but given that the series is based on a pretty despicable real-life policy regarding Indigenous people, that’s a stretch.

Our Take: Moscovitch and Podemski take their time to set up Esther/Bezhig’s story in the first episode of Little Bird, showing just how different the environment she was adopted into was than the one she was taken from close to 20 years prior. In the series, Esther wants to go back to being Bezhig, find her birth family, and find out more about the Indigenous community she was forcibly taken from by the provincial government.

It’s certainly a cautionary tale about how the poor treatment of Indigenous populations continues to this day, as a graphic at the end of the first episode points out. But the way the Little Birds’ three youngest children were taken from them on very shaky legal grounds really points out just how tragic the “Sixties scoop,” as it came to be called, actually was.

The attitude of the CPS case workers can be seen in the contrast between Jeanine and Adele; as the cops chase down a screaming Patti, who knows exactly what is about to happen, Jeanine lights a cigarette and leans on the hood of her car. This is certainly not her first time seeing this, and her goal is to get these kids a “better life”, at least what is defined as a better life by white government officials who don’t live on the reserve.

It’ll be interesting to watch the grown up Bezhig leave the life she’s known since she was five, and likely put her relationship with David on hold despite the fact that she called him “my beshert“, in order to find her birth family. Contois strikes a powerful figure as Bezhig/Esther, seemingly so solid as she makes her way through that engagement party, but brought down by words she’s heard her entire life. As she goes out to find her birth family, we expect to see her confidence rise as she gets closer to what her true self really is.

Sex and Skin: Like we mentioned above, David fingers Esther as they make out in the stairwell.

Parting Shot: Five-year-old Bezhig gets ordered back to bed at the boarding school, even though she tells the woman supervising them that her sister Dora is still coughing. After hearing the nasty remarks from her future mother-in-law, Esther lies down on her bed and remembers that day. The camera turns to show both versions of Bezhig lying vertically.

Sleeper Star: We enjoyed Lisa Edelstein as Bezhig/Esther’s mother Golda. Now divorced from Esther’s father, she doesn’t seem to be the typical white parent who adopted Indigenous children without any kind of concern about how the adoption happened. Will she support her daughter’s journey? We hope she does, and we’re thinking that the reason why Edelstein was brought in to play Golda is that she’ll be a significant factor in Esther’s search.\

Most Pilot-y Line: When David tells Esther he wants to show her something, Esther’s friend goes, “What’s that? Your dick?” He scoffs at it, but guess what?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The first episode of Little Bird progresses a bit slowly, but sets up a powerful story about an Indigenous woman who wants to find the family she was forcibly taken from when she was a child.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.