SaskatoonThe fictional story was inspired by Birth of a Family, Tasha Hubbard’s documentary about four real siblings who managed to find each other decades after the Sixties Scoop tore their family apart.Tasha Hubbard’s film, Meadowlarks, based on group of siblings who reunited after decades apartCBC News · Posted: Sep 08, 2025 5:34 PM EDT | Last Updated: 4 hours agoFrom left to right, Carmen Moore, Michael Greyeyes, Alex Rice and Michelle Thrush in Meadowlarks by director Tasha Hubbard. (BOAF Films EFF Inc.)A dramatic film with a strong Saskatchewan connection premiered over the weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival.Meadowlarks was inspired by its Cree director Tasha Hubbard’s previous documentary, Birth of a Family, which told the real-life story of a group of four Dene siblings who were born in Saskatchewan and taken from their mother during the Sixties Scoop.Saskatoon journalist Betty Ann Adam, who is one of those siblings, conducted painstaking research to find and reconnect with her brother and two sisters after decades apart. She and Hubbard co-wrote Birth of a Family, which centred around their first in-person reunion as a group. Released in 2017, the documentary earned multiple awards at film festivals.Betty Ann Adam, co-writer, associate producer and subject of Birth of a Family. (Tasha Hubbard)Meadowlarks is not a retelling of the documentary, Hubbard told Saskatoon Morning.”So the actors didn’t play the real people. We actually, in consultation with Betty Ann Adam … we said, you know, we’d like to start fresh so that nobody feels like their story is being told without them. So the four siblings are completely new characters.”A focus group with survivors of the Sixties Scoop led to the creation of an additional character, Hubbard said, “because they said, ‘You know, some of us have siblings who aren’t here with us anymore or who because of their terrible experiences are maybe incarcerated or dealing with that however they can.’ … And we really took that direction and created the fifth sibling.”Hubbard was surrendered by her mother when she was a baby and later reunited with her. She said some moments from her own experience made it into the new film, “but then it, you know, it’s not my story … it’s really just trying to be representative because we haven’t seen very many films around this experience.”Adam served as executive producer of Meadowlarks. In a Monday interview with CBC’s Darla Ponace, she said the film is dedicated to one of her sisters, who died earlier this year on Mother’s Day. Her sister’s son and daughter attended the premiere in Toronto on Sunday and were “filled with joy and emotion,” Adam said.”I’m so excited about the making of this film, to bring the story of the Sixties Scoop to a wider audience. When we decided to make the original documentary, it was because we had a sense that this was a historical thing,” she said.Because Meadowlarks “will likely have a much greater international audience, we can help to spread that information and that history, that Canadian history, and put it in a moving, heartfelt story,” Adam said.The fifth sibling in the film is representative of the many Sixties Scoop survivors who feel “great ambivalence, even fear” about the idea of reconnecting with their birth families after growing up separated from their Indigenous roots, and choose not to “open that door,” she said.”That reality continues today.”Director Tasha Hubbard and actor Michael Greyeyes on the set of Meadowlarks. (Elora Braden/El Nina Productions & Design)Michael Greyeyes, who plays Anthony in Meadowlarks, told The Canadian Press the Sixties Scoop remains little-known and “tragically” misunderstood today, more than a generation after 20,000 Indigenous Canadian children were put into foster care or placed for adoption with white families as a matter of government policy.”There are various things that we talk about in our culture and people are familiar with them, like MMIW (missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls), things like intergenerational trauma — this kind of stuff, people have an understanding of it. And when I go, ‘It’s about the Sixties Scoop,’ even people who are pretty versed are like, ‘Hmm, what’s that?'” Greyeyes said.”This is not something that either Canada or the United States are proud of, and they buried it. And part of our job as Indigenous artists is to make sure that the world knows our stories.”Michelle Thrush, who plays Gwen, said it wasn’t hard to forge a connection with Greyeyes and their co-stars, Carmen Moore and Alex Rice.”The characters, as siblings, they lost so many years together. And I felt like working with these three actors and Tasha as our leader, that was our mission, was to fill in that beauty and that love and that light for so many of our community members who are finding their way home,” she said.”And how incredibly courageous that is for so many people in our communities.”Meadowlarks is set to play at film festivals in Calgary and Vancouver this fall, followed by a theatrical release in November. Hubbard said it will also air on CBC, Crave and APTN in the future.With files from Darla Ponace, Saskatoon Morning and Canadian Press
Cree filmmaker’s movie based on Sixties Scoop family reunion premieres at TIFF
