‘SAFE SPACE’ STORIES
Five Little Indians follows fictional stories of kids from their time in residential schools and beyond
REGINA Michelle Good got used to being bossed around during the near-decade it took to write her first novel.
Clara especially made clear what was what: “I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t do that,” Good recounted.
Kenny was the first to introduce himself. He enters the story as a 13-year-old boy, attending a residential school in B.C.
He’s kind-hearted, hardworking and resourceful, even through daily abuse.
When he leaves the school after seven years and returns home, among the first things he sees is the playground, quiet and dilapidated.
“Not a child in sight,” said Good. “Communities all over the countryside were bereft of children.”
That was devastating for First Nations across the country.
“Your whole purpose in a community is of course to bring along the next generation, and for them to just be lifted wholesale is just traumatic at the community level, at the family level, at the extended family level, at every level you can imagine.”
In Five Little Indians, Good follows Kenny and four of his classmates from their time in residential school and beyond.
Good, a lawyer who wrote her first book for a master of fine arts degree at UBC, was inspired to address the persistent “societal response” to residential schools, “where people still considered this something to be in the deep dark past, or wondering why people can’t just move on and let it go. ‘Why can’t you just get over it?’”
But she didn’t want her book to be an attack; she wanted it to be a safe space where people could gain insight.
“It’s not an argument; it’s not a political position; it’s a story,” said Good.
“There’s a cognitive dissonance between Canada, the nice country with the great history in every regard, and then this, and just feeling that so many people did not have a clue what it meant to attend one of those schools and to survive them,” she added.
Good’s characters each make their way to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and take varied paths from there — whether resorting to drug abuse and alcoholism, pursuing education, joining advocacy and protest movements, or reconnecting with Indigenous culture. She strove to write them as “fully rounded human beings that are loving and resilient and strong and capable and responsive and all of that, while carrying all of this baggage that they’re stuck with for the rest of their lives.”
Good wanted her book to be a tribute to the survivors — of the schools and the intergenerational
So many people did not have a clue what it meant to attend one of those schools and to survive them.
trauma that ensued — “that lets them know they’re heard, that lets them know that their experience has not gone unnoticed, in a meaningful way.”
Even for children who didn’t experience outright abuse, Good points out how traumatic it was for any young child to be ripped away from their family, and their parents powerless to stop it: “How can you ever feel safe in the world?”
Good’s characters’ stories are rooted in the experiences of real-life residential school survivors, including Good’s mother, grandmother and cousins.
Good’s mother Martha (Eliza) Soonias was from the Red Pheasant First Nation, southeast of North Battleford.
Though Good grew up in Kitimat, B.C., where her dad William Stiff had found work, they spent every summer on the reserve when
Good was a child.
Martha would sometimes speak of her time at “boarding school.”
In one memory, she refused to eat a piece of bread drenched in cat urine.
“They dragged her up to the principal’s office. She was 12 and he told her that she was nothing but an Indian slut and she would never be anything but an Indian slut. She was 12.
“So, those kinds of experiences that would occasionally seep out the edges if you will.”
A classmate’s death inspired the character Lily in Good’s novel.
When Martha left her “boarding school,” she achieved a scholarship to learn to be a nanny in Toronto. Assigned to a wealthy family, she travelled the world, then trained as a midwife and nurse in New Zealand, and returned home to more scholarship opportunities, said Good.
“For her to accomplish that in those times was just simply unheard of,” said Good.
Martha’s was “not an unusual response to those kinds of abusive experiences, to try to prove that you’re as good as anybody, to overachieve, in an effort to be seen as the human being that you are.”
Good hopes readers of her book acquire “understanding, compassion, a willingness to step back from what they’ve been led to believe. And to understand that, as a people, we were intentionally targeted.
“I just hope that people choose to broaden their horizons, to broaden their understandings of things, and that hopefully this book will help with that.”
Five Little Indians is published by Harper Collins and is scheduled for release April 14.
Good, who lives near Kamloops, plans to schedule POST-COVID-19 readings in Saskatchewan.