Credit: Actor, director and producer Jennifer Podemski, who created the dramatic series, "Little Bird," with Hannah Muscovitch, spoke with ICT in this undated photo shortly before she received the ACTRA Award of Excellence in February 2018. (ICT screen grab)

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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.

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. READ MORE — Sandra Hale Schulman and Dan Ninham, Special to ICT

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Protesters in New Mexico decorated an empty pedestal last week with signs demanding an end to the monument for a Spanish conquistador who orchestrated countless atrocities against Indigenous people.

The crowd – mostly made up of Pueblo people – was celebrating a Rio Arriba County decision to postpone the resurrection of a statue of Juan de Oñate removed in 2020 and demand that it never go up again.

That’s when a shot rang out.

A gunman wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat shot Jacob Johns, a Hopi Pueblo activist and muralist who lives in Spokane, Wash. Johns survived and is in stable condition, according to friends. The shooter, who Underscore News and ICT are choosing not to name to reduce the likelihood that stories about the incident result in his glorification, was apprehended by Pojoaque Pueblo Police later that day. READ MORE— Nika Bartoo-Smith, ICT and Underscore News

LAHAINA, Hawaii — Shaun “Buge” Saribay felt like giving up. Hours of makeshift firefighting with garden hoses and buckets of water across Lahaina didn’t stop flames from consuming his house, his rental properties and thousands of other structures in his beloved hometown.

Drained, dirty and delirious, he continued anyway, pedaling a bicycle he found during the apocalyptic night of Aug. 8 to one Lahaina neighborhood he was determined to save as a symbol of enduring Hawaiian heritage.

Although Native Hawaiians including Saribay live throughout Lahaina, the Villages of Leiali’i is the only community in West Maui exclusively for Hawaiians. Part of a program Congress passed in 1921 to give Hawaii’s Indigenous people land to live on, Leiali’i and other so-called homestead communities have become not just key to economic self-sufficiency, but reserves of Hawaiian culture and traditions as well.

Just two of the neighborhood’s 104 homes were lost to the fire, an immense relief amid a disaster that destroyed more than 2,000 buildings and killed at least 97 people. Many of the homesteaders have taken in friends and relatives who lost homes nearby. Some homes suffered smoke damage. Water in the neighborhood, like much of Lahaina, remains unsafe to cook with or drink.

“So much of Lahaina went burn,” Saribay said in Hawaii Pidgin. “We no need lose Hawaiian homes.” READ MORE — Associated Press 

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The largest dam removal project in United States history is underway along the California-Oregon border.

The project will remove four dams on the Klamath River. Work has already begun on removing the smallest of the four dams. The other three will come down next year.

The project is part of a larger trend across the U.S. to remove dams blocking the natural flow of rivers and streams. Some things to know as the project gets going: READ MORE — Associated Press

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Kevin McCarthy is the first Speaker of the House to be kicked out of office in U.S. history. Oklahoma Representative Tom Cole, a Chickasaw citizen, and chairman of the Rules Committee, said the vote to remove McCarthy would result in “chaos.”

Chaos or not, Congress still must fund the government by November 17th.

So what’s next … and how do we make sense of all of this?

ICT’s regular contributor Holly Cook Macarro has some of the answers.

She is the founding principal and president of “The Angle” — and she is also a board member of “IndiJ Public Media,” the parent company that owns “ICT” and the “ICT Newscast.” WATCH — ICT

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We want your tips, but we also want your feedback. What should we be covering that we’re not? What are we getting wrong? Please let us know. dalton@ictnews.org.