Little Bird on PBS

Four episodes dropped so far out of six. We have watched all. Very powerful.

This is set in Canada though the practices occurred here as well, covered in a recent USSC opinion. The determination by the state that native parents were unfit and the children removed for adoption, often feeding an industry.

From Wiki


ICWA was enacted in 1978 because of the disproportionately high rate of forced removal of Native children from their traditional homes and essentially from Native American cultures as a whole.[3][4] Before enactment, as many as 35 percent of all Native children were being removed, usually forcibly, mostly from intact Native American families with extended family networks, and placed in predominantly non-Native homes, which had no relation to Native American cultures.[5][6]In some cases, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) paid the states to remove Native children and to place them with non-Native families and religious groups.[7]

Testimony in the House Committee for Interior and Insular Affairs showed that, in some cases, the per capita rate of Native children in foster care was nearly 16 times higher than the rate for non-Natives.[8] The tribes said that such removal demonstrated lack of understanding by child welfare workers of the role of extended families in tribal culture, and threatened tribal survival by removing children at such a high rate. The process also damaged the emotional lives of many children, who lost touch with their people and culture, as adults testified who had been through the process. Congress recognized this, and stated that the interests of tribal stability were as important as the best interests of the child.[9] One of the factors in this judgment was a recognition that, because of the differences in culture, what was in the best interest of a non-Native child was not necessarily what was in the best interest of a Native child. The latter traditionally have larger extended families and tribal relationships in their culture



Little Bird is a dramatic depiction of one family’s pain and subsequent course. Highly recommend. Looking forward to the final 2 episodes.

 

LA Times review

'Little Bird' review: A powerful exploration of the 'Sixties Scoop' and Indigenous assimilation