“They call us survivors. …I don’t think I survived. Do you?”
One residential school survivor asks another this poignant question in Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians. After 250 pages of following five native Canadians who had been through the residential school system, I finally broke down. I am not a crier, but this book moved me to tears a half a dozen times.
If you want to understand the human side of Canada’s efforts to culturally integrate the indigenous population, you could do worse than read this book. If every Canadian read it, perhaps the work of reconciliation would have more chance of success. Michelle Good, herself of Cree ancestry, has crafted, through fiction, a penetrating view into truth. Tracing the lives of five residential school survivors, she illuminates the raw facts in personal terms and evokes our empathy.
This book is a window into how the experience of residential schools reverberates through Canada and how it will always be with us. The five characters are concrete embodiments of trauma and its aftermath. Yet, they are emblems of the endurance of the human spirit, resilience and hope.
This is storytelling at its best, using fiction to open a window on truth. This is a read that will move you. It is an elegant and engaging narrative that absorbs you into itself. You will learn, and you will see indigenous peoples with new eyes. The lost children will be more than numbers. You will see how others are also lost among those who lived there.
Michelle Good's authentic characters bring to life our shared humanity. However happy and privileged our own lives may have been, they connect us with the victims of the misbegotten and poorly executed residential school system project.
I urge you to read this book. It will change you for the better.
