Little Bird (Episode 1: Love Is All Around)

A Canadian mini-series which, through the life story of a girl named Bezhig Little Bird, powerfully explores how Canada systematically removed Indigenous children from their parents, for example to put them up for adoption. We are showing the first episode to mark Ernie Webb’s visit on 26 November.

Esther, whose real name is Bezhig, is a young Indigenous lawyer who, as a child, was torn from her parents along with her siblings on the Long Pine Reserve in Saskatchewan. As part of the policy of forced assimilation of the Indigenous population, she was placed in a children’s home by social services and adopted by a Jewish family. From then on, Bezhig was known as Esther and suppressed her past until the day she became engaged to David, a doctor from a wealthy family in Montreal.

The six-part series gives Bezhig’s story the space it deserves. Flashbacks take us back to the era of the ‘Sixties Scoop’, when, as a result of new legislation, a particularly large number of Indigenous children were torn from their families and put up for adoption. In the present day, Bezhig – played with sensitivity and expressiveness by the Cree actress Darla Contois – sets out in search of her three siblings – and in doing so realises that not all of them were lucky enough to find a new home with their adoptive families. LITTLE BIRD is an Indigenous family saga about loss, trauma and social hardship, but also about the healing power of rediscovered community and the long-overdue reckoning with an injustice whose effects are still felt today.

In collaboration with NONAM