Over a career spanning more than 30 years, Toronto-born actor and producer Jennifer Podemski has been a mainstay of Canadian screens, beginning at 17 with her breakout turn in Bruce McDonald’s Dance Me Outside, and later roles in acclaimed TV series such as The Rez, Riverdale, Degrassi, and Reservation Dogs. 

Since 1999 much of Podemski’s work has been behind the camera as a writer, director, and producer, where she has focused on stories that draw on her mixed First Nation (Anishinaabe) and Jewish (Ashkenazi) descent. She produced and starred in the 2013 film Empire of Dirt, which was nominated for five Canadian Screen Awards, including Podemski for best supporting actress; it went on to win for best screenplay, making Shannon Masters the first Indigenous woman to win a CSA in the category. 

More recently, Podemski co-created the celebrated 2023 mini-series Little Bird with playwright Hannah Moscovitch, based on the story of a First Nations woman adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop. She is currently the CEO of Redcloud Studios, an independent and Indigenous-owned production company based in Rama, Ontario. 

In September, Koffler Arts hosted Podemski for a talk on “Intersectionality and Representation” that drew on her experiences as a teen trying to navigate her emerging Indigenous and Jewish identities, and the challenges she faced later while pursuing a career in film and television.  

The following is an edited transcript of her talk.

My story is a very Toronto story. That’s where I was born, grew up, and made a life as a human being. 

My grandfather on my father’s side was originally from Łódź, Poland, and he was living in the Łódź ghetto when it was liquidated. He was sent to Auschwitz and later to Bergen-Belsen, where during the week of its liberation he met my grandmother, who was working as a volunteer for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She was British with a German background. They fell in love and moved to Israel. That’s where my father was born, and when he was eight years old the family moved to Canada. 

That’s my father’s side—very Eastern European. My mother, on the other hand, is from Muscowpetung First Nation in Saskatchewan, which is about a 45-minute drive from Regina. Muscowpetung is a Saulteaux reserve, though Saulteaux is a French name given to those people in that area. We like to refer to ourselves as Anishinaabe, which is the Ojibwe word for “the people”. Her lineage comes from Lenni Lenape and Delaware peoples in what is today the northeastern United States, but like many Métis, Ojibwe, and Cree they migrated to the prairies. 

People always ask me how my parents met—I guess it’s an important part of the story but it’s actually very random. All I need to tell you is that it was the early seventies, 1972 or ‘73. 

My mom is a product of the legacy of the residential school system. Both of her parents were sent to a well-known residential school that was extraordinarily devastating called Lebret. They had seven kids. Life was very difficult—is very difficult—for children of residential school survivors, with the loss of culture and land and identity. My mom was definitely impacted by all of those things. At a very young age, she left home and wound up in Toronto.

My parents were young when they met—and then I was born, with two more Podemski sisters to come, each of us five years apart. Things became very difficult for my parents, and that’s probably why I say I had a lot of shame about who I was, my identity, the way I looked, growing up at Bathurst and Wilson. Being looked at like I was different, like I didn’t belong; I never really felt like I was part of the group. I had some connection to the Indigenous community from going to the Native Centre that happened to be close to the JCC, but I grew up with a lot of identity issues and crises while my mother was herself battling a lot of issues resulting from the trauma she had experienced. 

When my parents separated we stayed with my dad, which was a very difficult thing for three young girls. We were very immersed in the Jewish life of the neigbourhood. My career as a dancer began at the JCC on Bathurst when I was in grade seven. I volunteered at Baycrest, I would do the makeup for elderly women for Shabbat dinner. 

On the other side, with my mother, we would do the powwow trail and go to powwows all over Ontario. It was very much a life where I compartmentalized, I became a very good code switcher. Depending who I was with, I knew how to behave more like that group of people. But living with the sort of duality really deepened the identity crisis I was feeling.

Fortunately for me, those two identities, or those two cultures, are so richly and deeply connected—to survival, to legacy, and to continuity. Those concepts became very important to me, so I never wanted one of those identities to disappear. 

It was as I got older that I began to recognize you couldn’t really be half of anything, that I just had to be a whole thing. And as I started to step into that notion, I became a lot more comfortable, being able to move more fluidly between the different parts of myself. 

So many of the values that I continue to utilize in my work are very entrenched in the Jewish identity that I was raised within, and that has so much to do with my grandfather, who I was lucky enough to be very close to until he passed away at 99, only three years ago. He kept his Holocaust story very much alive in our family, it was a constant. He was not a religious person, we never went to shul, but he was very traditional in the sense that his whole idea of Jewish identity was about the way you act in the world, how you exercise your Jewish identity and your Jewishness. 

​​So during my early teenage years, I was far more distant from my Indigenous community. What brought me back to it was around grade ten when I started to work towards being an actor, and what I would consider my purpose in life, which is to bridge divides, not just for myself but in the world. But at the time, because of how I looked, I realized that being an actor meant I could only be Native, or play Indigenous characters. That was all that was open to me. And even then, I didn’t really look Indigenous enough for some people, so I would lose a lot of parts to people from Asian backgrounds. 

That’s also when my eyes were first opened to the legacy of the residential school system, through the TV movie Where the Spirit Lives on CBC. It was paradigm shifting—the first thing I ever saw on TV featuring Native people and the first time I heard about the residential schools, not knowing that both of my grandparents spent their lives in one. 

Because of that, I realized how powerful the media is—literature, movies, TV. It was a really slow burn, but I started to wake up to racism and anti-Indigenous propaganda, and the inequity in an industry where I could only do one thing and I could never be seen as anything else. Up to that point all of my experiences as a performer and dancer, the things I wanted to do, were in the Jewish community. My whole world as a performer was ignited by my dance training at the Koffler Centre of the Arts, which was then a part of the JCC. Yes, there was racism and there were definitely people who made fun of me, and I got bullied quite a bit by specific people just because of the way I looked—I wasn’t Jewish enough. But generally, that was a safe space for me, a very safe space. When I went to Camp Shomria in the summers until I was too old to go, that was also a safe space for me. And as I moved into working in the film industry much later, I was able to find some safe spaces when I was with other Indigenous people.

So I kind of moved between these safe spaces, and everything else outside of that was unsafe.  My whole sense of self was expressed within this Jewish or Indigenous basis. As I got older I realized I could make something of this.

This is about memory, this is about legacy, this is about trauma, this is about survival, this is about continuity, which my grandfather always talked about. 

I‘ve been a searcher my whole life, like why are we here, why did this happen, why is life so hard? Why do these people I care about go through such terrible things? And why did I end up this way? Maybe because I was programmed or hardwired to, or I was taught to care about where I come from. 

It was through my work as an actor that I started to recognize the impact of anti-Indigenous propaganda since the onset of colonization that has erased Indigenous people from history and the media. And when we weren’t erased, we were misrepresented.

It bothered me to the point that I wouldn’t work on a particular project because it was perpetuating ideas that are harmful. And I would fight back. I attended York University for a little bit, where I fought with my film professor. I was writing a paper on the director John Ford, and I identified how the way he used lightning was racist, where he was always putting Native actors in the dark or shadows, whereas the white person was bathed in bright light. And Native characters were always the villain or a victim. And I was just like, this is terrible. I failed the class because of that. I fought the dean to fix my grade with no luck. Then I signed onto a movie that changed my life trajectory and never ended up finishing school.

There came a time when I was very lost, and I wasn’t sure of my path. And I really prayed to all of those who came before me—all of the people we lost in the Holocaust, all of the people we lost in residential schools, and before that, in the genocide that happened here, right on my mother’s territory. All of those people who fought and survived or didn’t survive, what do you need to do? Because it probably isn’t, “I need you to get famous.” Because that felt like a losing battle. 

What I heard, and I think of it as a calling, was to stay the course but shift the role—I would make my own stuff, and tell the stories I wanted to tell. So at 25 I created my first production company, which was really focused on telling Indigenous stories, mostly because I felt like those were the most critical and urgent stories to tell. 

With Little Bird I’m very lucky to have had the opportunity to create something that is intersectional, for the most part, and do it with the support of all the people at Crave and APTN, and of course, others like our executive producer Jeremy Podeswa, in whose Holocaust movie, Fugitive Pieces, I appeared. Jeremy’s father is also from Łódź. Then there’s my co-creator Hanna Moskovitch, who has a whole different world view and experience from mine as a Jewish woman. Together we built this show that became the first entirely Indigenous and Jewish-led series.

The series is about the Sixties Scoop, which is a story that not many people know about. How a pocket of these sixty Indigenous kids, mostly from the prairies, ended up in Jewish Child Family Services in Montreal. A lot of those kids were my age, I grew up with and knew some of them. It’s a very hard story to tell because not everyone’s story is a happy story. You can’t take a kid away from their family and just expect, because you’re a Jewish family with values, that they’re gonna fare well. 

The story was sort of my love story to both of my grandparents—and if I never make anything again I’ll be okay with that. Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away two months before it came out, so he never got to see it, but we dedicated it to him. I think that the series has resonated with audiences all over the world because they see themselves at that difficult intersection where it’s so difficult to undo so much of the historical trauma and grief, but you have to work through it to be able to find a place where you belong in the world.

I feel very privileged to have been able to carve a career for myself, despite how completely impossible it seemed at the beginning of my career 30 years ago. And I’m grateful that I get to talk to people and bring people together, build bridges of understanding, even if it’s just between two people. These are not easy conversations, typically, because it’s hard to move beyond rage and grief. It’s hard to move beyond the darkness. But I hope I will continue to do work that contributes to helping to fix the world, and instill in my children that legacy.

Both of my children identify as Jewish and Indigenous, and they’re very close to both of my parents. My parents are now like the grandparents I never had, passing on all of their goodness, all of their stories, and history. My daughter had her bat mitzvah during the pandemic. Meanwhile, my son turns 13 in a few weeks. When his bar mitzvah coach asked him, “What  does your Jewish identity mean to you,” he said it’s about “Saba Saba”, which is what he called his great-grandfather. [Saba means grandfather in Hebrew.] Meaning to him it’s about ancestors, it’s about where Saba Saba comes from.