Two brothers, both preschoolers, are seated at a counter in the kitchen, quietly munching on syrup-soaked pancakes and drinking milk. Meanwhile, Smith — not her real name — stands patiently to one side, tightly embracing a sleepy little girl in her arms.

A new day is beginning in Roddickton, a picturesque town on the eastern side of Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula, and Jane Smith's home is slowly coming to life.

They are foster children from Aboriginal communities in Labrador, taken from a situation deemed unfit by social workers, and they depend on Smith for everything.

Shelter. Safety. Food. Love.

“It’s our way of pouring a little love into something that we can do,” Smith says.

Meanwhile, in Nain, an Inuit community more than 1,600 kilometres to the north, an Inuit father is feeling the absence of his children.

"I'm just waiting for my children to come back and for a court to agree," one Nain father told me.

His drinking led to losing custody of his children. He has quit and says he is following the steps to responsibility, but he is not there yet. However, he feels empty while his family is not whole.

"I want them to come back home,” he tells me.

“The family is destroyed."

This is the story of two places, home to different people with different lives, different emotions and different perspectives, but deeply connected by the children born in one place, but being raised in another.

In Nain — and in other Inuit communities along Labrador’s remote coast, as well as in Labrador’s Innu communities of Sheshatshiu and Natuashish — there is tension, pain and anxiety. Occasionally, there is the joy of reunion, of families brought together under a single roof. But there are other feelings, too, including a sense that Indigenous communities must do more themselves to provide safer homes for their most vulnerable citizens.