Five Little Indians - Michelle Good

 

Title: Five Little Indians

Author: Michelle Good

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2020 (Paperback)

Length: 293 pages

Genre: Adult; Historical Fiction

Started: April 15, 2022

Finished: May 6, 2022

Summary: 

From the inside cover:

Taken from their families as small children and confined at a remote, Church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released, with no money or support, after years of detention. 

Alone and without skills, support or family, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn't want them. The paths of the five friends cross and criss-cross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they each endured during their years at the Mission. 

With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians chronicles the bonds of friendship between this group of survivors as they help each other to reinvent their lives and, ultimately, find a way forward. 

Review:

This book has accolades galore and they are all warranted. I picked up this book not only for the numerous awards it has won, but because my school board is finally rolling out an Indigenous literature course and this book was on the list of recommended texts. 

Five Little Indians opens in the late 1960s and follows five Indigenous children as they leave the Mission, the Residential school in BC where they've spent their childhoods. A few leave by escaping, either on their own or aided by family; a few leave by aging out and returning to family, or making it on their own if they have no family remaining. Lucy's (and by extension Maisie's) story was especially poignant: aging out at age 16 with no family to go home to, sent off with a bus ticket to Vancouver and no life skills or advice on how to make it on her own as a sheltered, traumatized teenager in a big city. All the children are traumatized by what happened to them at the Mission, and they struggle to cope throughout the following decades amidst the added racism and discrimination they face. 

This book does a wonderful job of making the history of residential schools and survivors so intensely personal and vivid since the reader experiences events both at the school and the aftermath through the eyes of the children themselves. Though this book isn't necessarily a piece of nonfiction, the children's stories echo first-hand accounts from survivors, so it's pretty close. The chapters alternate from each of the characters' points of view, but it's not in a consistent pattern. For example, we hear about Howie from the other characters early on but we don't get a chapter from his point of view until later in the book. 

As a heads up, this book is incredibly hard to read, especially for sensitive readers. I actually had to put it down for a few days after one main character dies. I'd argue that a lot of people need the level of immersion this book provides to understand and empathize with residential school survivors, but for those who are already aware of the history and empathize with survivors and what they endured and continue to struggle with (or are survivors themselves), reading this novel might be a triggering experience. 

Recommendation:

Rather than just covering what happens to the main characters during their time in residential school, this novel goes a step further and shows how their experiences continue to affect them well into adulthood. This is a must-read for Canadians, especially for anyone working in public service. 

Thoughts on the cover:

The use of negative space to make the children's shadows on the ground is clever here.