Five Little Indians
“Residential schools will always be the sorrow in Canada’s bones,” Richard Van Camp says in his cover endorsement of Five Little Indians, Michelle Good’s debut novel (Harper Perennial, 2020).
Five Little Indians tells the story of five friends who survive a church-run residential school to which they refer as Indian School or Mission School. While Michelle Good uses actual place names, in most cases in the novel, such as Port McNeil and Vancouver, B.C., the location of the Indian School isn’t given.
There were at least twenty-two residential schools in B.C. The abuse that went on in the school of the novel, part of a school system for First Nations children that was created by the Canadian government in the mid-1880s, could be said of any of the residential schools across Canada.
Michelle Good is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. She’s a lawyer who worked with Indigenous communities and organizations before she got her law degree. Michelle also earned her MFA in creative writing at UBC while practising law and lives and writes in south central British Columbia.
Five Little Indians is a beautiful, heart-opening novel that won the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction in 2018. Michelle has taken her knowledge and woven it into a fictionalized account of five First Nations people who find their way following their early lives at the same Mission School in B.C. In her acknowledgements, Michelle pays tribute to her mother, Martha Eliza Soonias Stiff, “who lived through the hell of one of these schools.”
The five children taken from their families as small children are Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie. Most are released from the school with no support […]