In PBS Series ‘Little Bird,’ a Jewish Woman Uncovers Her Traumatic Indigenous Previous

Shira Li Bartov

When Jennifer Podemski’s Indigenous mom gave delivery at 17, social staff eliminated Podemski from a Toronto hospital and put her into the foster care system. It was solely via the efforts of 1 social employee, who was retiring, that she was reunited along with her mom at 3 months old.

The social employee had saved Podemski from the notorious “Sixties Scoop,” a coverage in Canada between the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Eighties that tore hundreds of Indigenous kids from their households and put them into the kid welfare system.

Growing up in a Jewish space of Toronto, Podemski discovered extra about her Israeli father’s aspect of the household due to the Jewish tales she was surrounded by — together with some imparted from her paternal grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.

Now a filmmaker, Podemski has drawn closely on her expertise in co-creating “Little Bird,” a six-part collection concerning the Sixties Scoop that debuted in Canada earlier this 12 months and got here to the United States on Oct. 12. Weekly episodes air on PBS via Nov. 16 and are available to stream on all PBS platforms, together with PBS Masterpiece Prime Video.

“I wanted to humanize these experiences,” stated Podemski, who’s Indigenous to Saskatchewan on her mom’s aspect. “They haven’t yet been humanized because they haven’t been told.”

The present begins with Esther Rosenblum (performed by Darla Contois) at her engagement get together in 1985, having fun with almost-clichéd Jewish success — regulation faculty, a health care provider fiancé named David and a big home shared along with her tough-love adoptive mom. The mom, Polish-born Golda Rosenblum (Lisa Edelstein), survived the Holocaust and got here to Canada as a teen, having misplaced her whole household in Auschwitz.

Although Esther’s life seems nice, she tiptoes round a relentless simmer of discrimination. She is shattered to overhear David’s mom fretting about him marrying “one of them,” referring to an Indigenous person adopted right into a Jewish household. The future mother-in-law questions how their household is meant to consider that Esther is a “regular Jew” who can turn into “a mother of her own — and that’s just going to go fine?” Another visitor factors out that David acquired “one of the good ones,” including: “I have a cousin who adopted one of them and he’s into the drugs and all that stuff.”

A parallel storyline unfolds in 1968, when Esther was 5 and her title was Bezhig Little Bird. Bezhig was kidnapped alongside along with her brother and sister by youngster welfare brokers and police, who handcuffed their hysterical mom and beat their father, when he protested, to the brink of loss of life. The collection follows Esther/Bezhig on the journey to search out her delivery household and perceive the roots she was torn from.

Like Esther, Podemski was raised in a Jewish group with a tenuous connection to her Indigenous ancestry. Her maternal grandparents had been victims of the residential faculty system in Canada, which forcibly separated kids from their households for lengthy intervals between the Eighties and the Nineteen Nineties. The colleges stripped kids of their tradition and native language, with the nominal goal of giving them a Euro-Canadian Christian training. The colleges turned infamous for bodily, sexual and psychological abuse and excessive loss of life charges.

Podemski needed to search out info on Indigenous historical past as a teen when she started finding out the atrocities dedicated towards her folks. She chafed at discriminatory remarks inside her childhood Jewish group, even after they had been unintentional, and struggled to really feel at home.

“I grew up in a Jewish reality, one that I didn’t really fit into, the way I look,” Podemski stated. “I never felt really like I belonged in either [Jewish or Indigenous] places.”

Podemski’s 30-year profession has spanned each performing and producing, with a break-out position in Bruce McDonald’s 1994 movie “Dance Me Outside” and award-winning credit for the 2003-2006 collection “Moccasin Flats” and the 2013 movie “Empire of Dirt.” Frustrated with the illustration of Indigenous folks in movie and TV, she based Big Soul Productions and Redcloud Studios Inc. to amplify Indigenous views. Between 2021 and 2023, she appeared reverse her sisters Tamara and Sarah Podemski within the acclaimed FX collection “Reservation Dogs.”

“Little Bird” locations a premium on illustration, with Indigenous Canadian actors enjoying the Little Bird household and Edelstein, who starred within the well-liked medical drama “House,” as Esther’s Jewish mom. The creators consulted advisers from Raven Sinclair, a Sixties Scoop survivor and University of Regina professor, to rabbis who accepted scenes of Jewish ceremonies.

Edelstein stated that she reached into her household recollections to play Golda Rosenblum, conjuring photos of her Jewish grandparents who immigrated from Eastern Europe.
“I was really excited to get to play a Jewish woman and to represent that story with dignity,” stated Edelstein. “She reminded me a lot of my grandparents, so I definitely was remembering the gestures and feelings that I got from them.”

At the time of Esther’s fictional adoption, middle-class mother and father had been usually suggested to erase the previous of their adopted Indigenous kids, who had been introduced as mistreated or deserted. Golda is at first defensive of her choice to assist obscure Esther’s origins, however her love for her daughter finally makes her a hero of the story.

“When I first met you, you were all dressed up in a nice dress but you didn’t smile,” she tells Esther within the collection. “I thought, she has lost everyone, I have lost everyone, this is a good match. But it wasn’t true — you had a family.”

Co-creator Hannah Moskovitch stated she felt a heavy sense of accountability, as a Jew, approaching a narrative concerning the close to annihilation of a tradition. Although the histories are fully totally different, some parts of state-executed plans to destroy the Indigenous folks in North America and the Jews in Europe seemed just like her — from the meticulous paperwork and dutifully law-abiding foot troopers to the dehumanizing language of “solutions” to Indigenous “problems.”

Yet regardless of these parallels, Moskovitch had by no means heard of the Sixties Scoop earlier than beginning work on the collection.

“It’s shameful that I didn’t know,” she stated. “I grew up with the injunction from my community, ‘Never forget.’ And then there was a genocide that had happened in my country that I didn’t know about.”