Limited Series 'Little Bird' & 'Coming Home' Land on PBS in October

While most of the content PBS tends to pick up from overseas tends to come from the U.K. with the occasional title from Australia, New Zealand, or France, sometimes a show comes wandering down from our neighbor to the north, which is still part of the Commonwealth and even managed to remain so despite the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. While most of us think of Canada as the Land of Free Healthcare, Hot Prime Ministers, and occasional Mystery Series Worth Watching, it’s also lately had to reckon with its own colonialist past and how it treated the Indigenous populations over the last two centuries.

Part of that reckoning has been to confront the “Sixties Scoop,” which occurred both in Australia and Canada just over 50 years ago, where Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their parents and adopted out into middle-class white families some misguided effort to “give them better lives.” Recently, Canadian broadcasters Crave and APTN, in partnership with Fremantle, Rezolution Pictures, and OP Little Bird, broadcast a six-part, one-hour limited series, Little Bird, starring Darla Contois (Dhaliwal’ 15) as Bezhig Little Bird, hunting for her birth family and her family history, dramatizing that story from the perspective of the Indigenous people who lived through it.

PBS has now picked up the rights to the series and the 90-minute documentary Coming Home, which explores the real lives affected by the Sixties Scoop. Directed by Erica Daniels (Run as One), it explores “the connections between the ground-breaking movement for Indigenous narrative sovereignty and the impact of the child welfare system as experienced through the series’ creatives, crew, and advisors.”