When she is forced into the residential school, they teach her that her traditional spirituality is sinful and wrong. As a child, Clara forms a spiritual connection on a walk through some birch trees. Take one of the novel’s protagonists, Clara, for example. Good’s characters show the lingering effects of residential schools and the various approaches survivors have taken while trying to deal with their trauma. “I really wanted to be sure to cover a lot of the trauma-related injuries that continued throughout the rest of their lives.” “What I did was, I looked at the kinds of abuses that students experienced while they were in the schools, and I looked at what were reasonable outcomes of those injuries, what a person could expect, and then how their lives would unfold after that,” Good said. Fictional characters based on real experiences The UBC alum’s novel features five protagonists, and while the characters are fictional, the traumas they display are very real.

“That’s who my cohort is, that’s who my community is made up of - those people.”Īs a Cree lawyer, poet and writer, Good’s representation of residential school survivors and intergenerational survivors in her novel, Five Little Indians, comes from lived experience. “This isn’t something that I really needed to research or study … because I’ve been living with survivors and intergenerational survivors,” said Indigenous author and advocate Michelle Good in an interview with The Ubyssey. “Trauma is like radiation: it has a half-life that goes on and on and on and on.”Ĭontent Warning: This article contains descriptions of violence and trauma within the residential school system which may be distressing to some readers.

5 little indians michelle good