Debut novel delves into residential school stories

Five Little Indians is Michelle Good’s debut novel.

Good, a member of Saskatchewan’s Red Pheasant Cree Nation, is a poet, lawyer and political activist. She is the daughter and granddaughter of residential school survivors.

The story tells us about five children, Kenny, Lucy, Maisie, Clara, and Howie, and how they came to be at the same residential school on the coast of British Columbia. All five arrive and leave under different circumstances but their paths while at school and in the city intersect and crisscross throughout the rest of their lives.

The subject matter of the story is very dark, but Good tells it without judgment. She lets the reader know what happened to these children and the parents who were forced to let them go, but she doesn’t give graphic accounts of abuse.

She tells us five stories with compassion and insight in a way that makes you feel deeply for them and hope they’ll be able to live with the trauma of their residential school experience.

Before I read Five Little Indians I would have said how they overcome the trauma. But the book made me understand the residential school experience is not something that can be “overcome;” it will always be with them and affect who and how they are in the world.

Reading the stories an hearing the pain of their childhood gave me a much better understanding of the destructive actions they partake in after being released from school.

Good has used her characters and their stories to humanize something, that for me and perhaps many others, is so hard to picture that we struggle to relate and fully understand.

The five characters are fully fledged people, not statistics, as we watch them struggle and root for them to find a sense of home. Five Little Indians gives the reader a face, name and life story to go with the headlines and news reports about forced assimilation and the Indian Residential School crisis in Canada.