Sandra Hale Schulman and Dan Ninham
Special to ICT
Indigenous actress and film producer Jennifer Podemski knows all too well the story of Little Bird.
The title character in Podemski’s latest film project was torn from her Indigenous family to be adopted by a Jewish family during a notorious period in Canada’s history known as the Sixties Scoop.
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Podemski, too, is split between two cultures, with an Israeli father and a mother who is Saulteaux/Ojibwe/Anishinaabe, Leni Lenape and Métis descent. So when former colleagues pitched the story of a Native-Jewish girl searching for her truth, Podemski knew right away it was a story that should be told.
“I had known the true story for a long time, that there were kids adopted into Jewish Family Services in Montreal,” Podemski told ICT by phone from her home in Berry, Ontario. “I had done different research and work and stories on that topic before.
“It was very important to me that we told this in a very deeply authentic way, where every single thing on the screen is exactly how it was.”
The result, the dramatic series, “Little Bird,” created by Podemski and Hannah Moscovitch, debuted in May 2023 in Canada on the Crave premium movie network and on streaming service APTN Lumi.
The program will now will air in the U.S. on Thursday, Oct. 12, on PBS, along with “Coming Home,” a 90-minute companion documentary providing historical context about the Sixties Scoop — a harrowing period in the 1960s when Indigenous children were taken away from their homes and placed in the child welfare system and into often-abusive foster homes.
Actress/writer Darla Contois, who is Cree-Saultreux from Misipawistik Cree Nation in Manitoba, Canada, plays the lead in the character-driven drama. It features a cast of many emerging Indigenous actors, including Ellyn Jade, Osawa Muskwa, Joshua Odjick, Braeden Clarke and Eric Schweig, as well as Michelle Thrush and her daughter, Imajyn Cardinal. Rounding out the cast is Lisa Edelstein, of “House, M.D.” and “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce,” who plays the conflicted adoptive mother, Golda Rosenblum.
“Little Bird” and “Coming Home” are joining a slate of Indigenous programming that PBS will broadcast this fall honoring Native heritage, including “The American Buffalo” by Ken Burns, premiering Oct. 16; “Next at the Kennedy Center — Embracing Duality: Modern Indigenous Cultures,” premiering Oct. 20; and “Native American Season Two,” premiering Oct. 24.
The programs will continue to stream on PBS.org, and the PBS app throughout Native American Heritage Month in November. Check local listings for broadcast times.
“PBS is proud to bring American viewers the premiere of ‘Little Bird,’” Maria Bruno Ruiz, vice president of program content strategy and scheduling at PBS, said in a statement.
“We aspire to bring authentic programs rich in culture and diversity to our audience and we’re thrilled to add the powerful ‘Little Bird’ story to our platforms.”
A search for identity
Podemski, the sister of actresses Sarah and Tamara Podemski, has acted in the acclaimed series, “Reservation Dogs,” as well as “Tin Star,” “The Rez,” “Riverdale” and “Moccasin Flats.” Her production credits include “Rabbit Fall,” “Moccasin Flats,” and “Empire of Dirt.”
She recently won the coveted Audience Award at the 2023 Series Mania Festival in Lille, France, and was presented with an Academy Board Of Directors’ Tribute Award at the 2023 Canadian Screen Awards.
She said colleagues brought the idea to her for consideration.
“The very loose concept was brought to me many years ago,” Podemski told ICT. “This was in 2015, by my colleagues at Rezolution Pictures who I had worked with over the years. They knew that I was a Jewish-Native mix and they thought that they would pitch me this idea of a girl who was adopted into a Jewish home because I’ve lived that intersection.”
She said the group began working on the project, developing scripts, and eventually received a green light to proceed from Crave.
“They really loved how we had created a story around one person’s journey,” Podemski said. “That makes it much more personal. I took the team to my reserve and met with elders and survivors and the community members, and then we brought on advisors that would help us tell the most authentic story that we could tell, important to me because of the legacy that this industry has for not telling our stories authentically and telling them through the essentially White gaze.”
“Little Bird” is the story of Bezhig Little Bird, played by Contois, as she follows the twisted path to find her Indigenous birth family and uncover the hidden truth of her family history.
Removed from her home in Long Pine Reserve in Saskatchewan along with two other siblings after her struggling mother is deemed unfit, Little Bird is adopted into a Montréal Jewish family at age five, becoming Esther Rosenblum.
Now in her 20s and engaged to marry, Little Bird longs to find the family she lost. Her search lands her in the Canadian Prairies, a whole new world. As she begins to track down her siblings, she finds they have met various fates. Her sense of identity shatters as she grapples with the overwhelming revelations.
As the story follows Little Bird, it uncovers the stories of each sibling as well.
‘It was really important that we saw a variety of situations and how the family was impacted,” Podemski said. “The parents, the kids, but seeing it all through the lens of this one character so that it was much more personal. There are backstories for all of the siblings, and we had worked on all of that. Each sibling gets an episode.”
Podemski’s quest for authenticity extends to the soundtrack, used in effective ways throughout the series.
“I knew from the beginning when I was creating the vision for the show that I didn’t want a soundtrack, I didn’t want to have a score,” she said. “It took a little bit of convincing to the people who couldn’t imagine having a show of this nature without a score. I had to share this very clear vision of building what I would call an acoustic ambient composition that was more about the land and how the land calls to her. I worked with the sound designer to really find the sound of the elements — the grass, the wind, the trees, the leaves and the natural environment of her experiences.”
The few songs played in the film are sourced from Indigenous Radio in Canada, which began in 1985.
“I worked with the first Indigenous Radio station there and I went through their top 10 in Saskatchewan at that time,” Podemski said. “I chose songs based on what was really playing on the radio in 1985. So, it’s authentic to the time period, including the song by Buffy Sainte-Marie.”
Along the way, Little Bird finds a brother, played by musician Jason Burnstick. The brother, who was also adopted out, is playing in a bar band called Native Son, and Burnstick performs some of his own songs in the film.
Burnstick is “a very established, acclaimed Indigenous musician up here in Canada,” Podemski said. “I listened to every single song he ever made and chose five songs that I wanted him to redo, so all of his music is actual songs that Jason wrote.”
‘A powerful narrative’
Podemski has her own family’s approval for the series. Russ Diabo, a member of the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake in Quebec, Canada, is Jennifer’s step-father and married to her mother, Jo Anaquod. Her father, Saul Podemski, lives in Toronto.
“Jennifer started in the arts as an actor when she was a teenager,” Diabo told ICT. “She started in small parts, and she had a breakout role in the movie ‘Dance Me Outside’ and the CBC spin-off series called ‘The Rez’ and her many roles on TV and the movies grew from there.”
He added, “Jennifer learned early on the film and TV business to get behind the camera as a producer in many productions … ‘Little Bird’ is an amazing series and the quality of the production and the sensitivity in telling the story in my opinion is the direct result of Jennifer’s decades of experience as both an actor and a producer.”
Diabo said Podemski’s grandparents on her father’s side survived the Holocaust in Europe, while the grandparents on her mother’s side survived the Lebret Residential School in Saskatchewan.
“Jennifer grew up knowing she was different from many of the kids she went to school with in Toronto,” Diabo said. “From an early age she liked performing songs and dances, going to an arts high school in Toronto … Jennifer’s core values of kindness, generosity, sensitivity and humility are a consequence of her identity development from childhood until adulthood, as her awareness grew about the horrors of genocide experienced by both sides of her family, in Europe and North America.”
Anaquod said Podemski’s breakout role” was in “The Diviners,” a 1993 Canadian TV movie based on a novel of the same name by author Margaret Laurence.
PBS officials have high praise for the series.
“It is a powerful narrative that not only engages and pulls on your heartstrings, but also educates on a profoundly disturbing time in North American history that is rarely portrayed.” said Germaine Sweet, managing director of content acquisitions at PBS Distribution, in a statement.
“In addition to the creative brilliance of Jennifer Podemski and Hannah Moscovitch, this series was delivered by a wealth of Indigenous talent both in front of and behind the camera.”
Podemski said she’s pleased to share her work in the United States.
“I couldn’t be happier about PBS broadcasting this show because it makes it accessible to the widest audience,” Podemski said. ‘It’s online too. It’s done very, very well in Canada, and I think it speaks to a lot of people. We’re constantly getting feedback about how critically important it is, but also what a beautiful journey it is to watch and participate in.”
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