Five Little Indians by Michelle Good - March 25, 2024

Carla hosted this evening’s meeting with Beth, Marilyn, Shirley, Linda, Colette, and Betty in attendance. We were treated to our first ‘butter board’ along with a hot artichoke dip and a variety of nibbles. Dessert was a fresh fruit salad with mini lemon tarts.

Marilyn’s book choice this month was Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. Michelle Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years. Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practising law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the Harper Collins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award, and Canada Reads 2022. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

It was unanimously felt that while this was a difficult, grueling, and emotional book, it is also a well-written, important book that should be required reading and made part of school curriculum. For those of us who have never undergone the horrors of residential schools, this book gives a glimpse, better understanding, of what we, as a society, our government and our religious orders, did to those who were here in this land before us.

Michelle Good has written a fictional story that is based on true events. She has taken what happened to thousands of indigenous children and given us an account through five children who have been isolated from family and society since they were very young and follow them as they are released from the school to face uncertain futures with no life skills, no money, no support network, no family but with the memories of the trauma they underwent at the school. 

We see how the quiet, sensitive but strong Lucy escapes the hospital with her baby before the Social Worker could claim it and survives by channeling her emotions into counting and cleaning. We see Kenny trying to be a good partner and father but hides his trauma in drink. Howie, the quiet one, spends time in prison for beating up one of his tormentors and refusing to say he was sorry for it. Maisie seemed as if she had her life together, but she was living a falsehood and a double life; she committed suicide. We feel the anger Clara channels into her work with various Indigenous movements but after meeting with Maria and her sweat lodge, she becomes a court worker and is able help some who would otherwise spend many years jailed.

There was mention of the writing style as being simplistic and difficult to follow. But is this not a reflection of the five we are following? The education that was lacking in their upbringing? It may also be that Michelle Good wanted this book to be readily available to all, including young children, so that there can be no excuse for not understanding the trauma that was faced by those who attended residential schools. And perhaps Good was forward thinking in making this book suitable for inclusion in a school curriculum as our group believe should be done.

Five Little Indians was a hard book to read, particularly for those of us who grew up in the vicinity of residential schools but with no knowledge of the trauma that was being brought to bear on the children. It is an embarrassment to white society, our government and religious orders and, as Michelle Good undoubtedly wished, it was felt by all.

Thank you, Marilyn, for your enlightening book choice; an historical novel filled with truths that are hard to accept