Five Little Indians by Michelle Good

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
Harper Perennial, April 2020

How do residential school survivors cope with the trauma they've experienced? In this heartbreaking, hopeful novel, Michelle Good brings five characters to life to answer that question. 

Kenny, Lucy, Maisie, Howie and Clara have grown up in the same church-run institution on the northern coast of Vancouver Island. They were forcibly taken from their families at a young age, then kept from them until they either succeeded in escaping, or were aged out on their 16th birthdays. At that point, they are given a bus ticket to Vancouver and left to fend for themselves.

Chapters shift between the five, following them forward through decades as they move in and out of each other's lives. People who haven't had a similar experience cannot fully understand them.

        She looked at me and reached for my hand. "I knew you had a story. You know, my dad went to one of those places. He would never talk about it. Not to anyone, not even my mom. She was Metis, so she didn't have to go. My dad gave up his Indian status so they couldn't take me there.

In their later years, Lucy and Kenny talk about what will later become the largest class action suit in Canadian legal history, which was on behalf of residential school survivors.

        "They call us survivors."
        "Yeah."
        "I don't think I survived. Do you?"

Human beings are amazingly resilient, but trauma leaves scar tissue, and the effect is intergenerational. My heart opened to these wonderful characters. I feel like I've been given insight into the challenges that the real people who survived residential schools continue to face.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - I hope this important book makes the longlist, and is promoted to readers through other methods too. Pick it for your book club! Settler Canadians like me have much yet to learn about the contextual realities of Indigenous lives in this country.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.