Five Little Indians by Michelle Good tells the stories of Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie, taken from their families as young children to be placed in a church-run residential school. Eventually discharged at different times and sent away on the cusp of an adulthood they are in no way prepared for, their journeys converge in the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver where they each struggle in different ways to settle and fit in; some more visibly, some behind closed doors. The repercussions of the abuse and trauma suffered during the formative years of adolescence ripple through these characters’ lives for years after, shaping the decisions they make and impacting their abilities to have healthy relationships. Good beautifully captures the pull between the past and the present as, each in their different ways, the characters try to move forward with their lives but remain torn at relentlessly by their past; some move forward more successfully, while others don’t fare so well. She also beautifully develops the dynamics between them, showing the different ways these people with a shared history try to support each other; while some are softer, kinder and more gentle with each other, others are more abrupt, more insistent that this is behind them and it’s time to move on; a universal and very human meditation on the way different people will deal with the same experience and trauma in very different ways.  

Through alternating chapters, moving between the characters’ perspectives, some in first person narrative and some in third, we get a rounded sense of these characters; showing us both inside their minds and as observed from the outside. The devastating impact of family separation and long term effects of institutional abuse are explored with sensitivity, candour and heart. Michelle Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, who worked for Indigenous organisations for 25 years, advocating for residential schools survivors. This is not an easy listen but, like all difficult stories based on real histories, it’s one that needs to be illuminated, so that what people endured isn’t lost in silence.

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Five Little Indians was published by Harper Collins Canada in 2020.

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Michelle Good is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After three decades of working with Indigenous communities and organizations, she obtained her law degree. She earned her MFA in creative writing at UBC while still practising law. Her novel, Five Little Indians, was nominated for the Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It received the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Five Little Indians was also chosen for Canada Reads 2022. Michelle Good’s poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada.