Few dramas will enrage you as much as Little Bird. Not because it’s in any way hokey or problematic. On the contrary. Based on the real story of the Sixties Scoop – a period in Canada from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, when an estimated 20,000 First Nations children were forcibly removed from their families and adopted by non-Indigenous families – this heartbreaking tale is restrained and carefully measured. Melodrama is swerved, letting the injustice at this story’s core slowly metastasise.
Spread across six episodes, the series juggles two timelines – 1968 in Saskatchewan; 1985 in Montreal – tracking one family’s rupture; and the decades-long reckoning that follows. We meet Esther Rosenblum (Darla Contois), a first-year law student, at her engagement party, where her fiance David (Rowen Kahn), a doctor, mingles with his wealthy Jewish family. When his mother describes her as “exotic”, the word lodges like shrapnel. She was transplanted when she was five from the (fictional) Long Pine Reserve and raised in the Jewish faith by a Canadian family.
