Lucy leaned back in her chair, hands folded in her lap. “They call us survivors.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think I survived. Do you?”
Five Little Indians tells a tale of the unbelievable challenges that haunt survivors of Canada’s Residential School System; an indefensible chapter in our history that saw Indigenous children torn from their families and sent to live in often abusive boarding schools whose aim was to “kill the Indian in the child”. As a country, we are trying to face this history, trying to reach for reconciliation with our First Nations people, and books like this one do a great service to bring this history to breathing life (I read this novel on the occasion of Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation). Although author Michelle Good’s subject matter is undeniably important and my heart is open to hearing her take on the intergenerational trauma resultant from these cruel actions, I found the writing to be lacking in artistry. There were moments that moved me, but for the most part, I was too distracted by clunky writing to lose myself to the narrative. Should still be widely read.
It was an unspoken agreement between them: the past was the past. It’s hard to run from the past, but once stuffed away, they knew it couldn’t be allowed to poison the present. They couldn’t be who they were now, with their lipstick, paycheques and rooms, if they were also those children, or the children who’d left the other children behind. Lucy looked at her hands and willed them to stop shaking. Kenny, the one we believed in. He was the one who never lost his taste for freedom. The stories of his escapes were legendary, his exploits spiralling into epic accounts in the whispers of the children in their dorms. She laid her head on the table and cried.
Perhaps my biggest problem with Five Little Indians is how flat and basically interchangeable the five main characters are: After escaping or aging out of the Mission, the main characters all find their way to Vancouver’s Lower East Side; a dangerous neighbourhood long known for its sex workers, drunks, and drug overdoses. But the five former residential school students of the title — although admittedly broken and disconnected from family and community — pretty much don’t succumb to the dangers that their neighbourhood is known for. The three women characters (Maisie, Clara, and Lucy) express their brokenness as the one who self harms, the angry one, and the one with low self-esteem and OCD (but pretty much interchangeable voices), and the men (Kenny and Howie) are the guy who drinks too much and can’t stay in one place too long and the guy who went to prison (but who should probably have been sent to a healing lodge instead; I think Howie’s was the most interesting story in the book and I could read a whole novel on him.) The timeline jumps around in confusing and unpredictable ways and the reader eventually learns how each of the children was stolen from their family (but I couldn’t now say with confidence whose story was whose; it's all kind of jumbly in my mind), and while there are scenes set in the school and memories that are shared later, abuse is inferred rather than shown. (I definitely don’t want to read an account of a child being sexually abused but I got the sense that Good cared for her characters too much to get explicit, like, “Don’t make me say it, I know you know what I mean happened there.” There’s even a scene where Lucy — an unwed, unemployed young woman with no family or community ties — has a baby, and at the height of the time when government agencies were taking newborns from their Indigenous mothers to place with white families, she escapes the hospital before meeting with a Social Worker: the Sixties Scoop isn’t even mentioned, as though Good could almost bring herself to write about it but couldn’t put Lucy through it.) I don’t want to belabour the negative, but while I could forgive a novel for writing that’s not quite to my tastes, the bigger problem was just how confusing this narrative is.
There are no English words to describe how one woman walked into that lodge and another walked out. All Clara knew was that it took her back. Back to the birch grove and the angel songs. Back to who she was before Sister Mary, before the school, before they tried to beat her into a little brown white girl. She felt a certainty, from then on, that all the ones who had come before walked with her. Life was no longer just survival. It was about being someone. An Indian someone, with all the truth that was born into her at the moment she was placed in her mother’s womb.
Again, there were moments that touched me; none of these children should have been taken from their families — even without the unthinkable abuse that so many of them suffered, this was a racist practise bent on cultural genocide — and it was moving to watch these characters try to rise above their broken childhoods, even when they stumbled.
