Author of Five Little Indians hoping her book encourages better understanding of residential schools

KAMLOOPS — “Clara cried and cried for Lily, for herself, for her lost angel.”

Michelle Good also cries for Lily, one of the book’s characters who dies of tuberculosis at a residential school in Mission.

“Clara told her about Indian school and how Lily had hemorrhaged to the brink of death in front of her, how Sister Mary had let her die alone and helpless,” Good said, reading a passage from her novel Five Little Indians.

Five Little Indians is about five young Indigenous students who struggle to overcome the trauma they faced during their time at residential school. While the book is fictional, Lily is a real person.

“Lily was my mother’s friend and my mother watched her die, my mother watched her hemorrhage to death from tuberculosis. That’s the first thing my mother told me about her experiences at the residential school,” noted Good.

Good’s poignant account of her mother’s friend and her mother’s own experience at residential school is encapsulated perfectly in her book Five Little Indians. The book has received national acclaim, earning the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

However, more than the accolades, Good is hoping people will be encouraged to pick up the book and learn about her peoples’ devastating history.

“I want them to stop asking the question: ‘Why can’t we just get over it?’” she said. “I want them to obtain a personalized and a meaningful understanding of the half life of trauma and how it continues and will continue to resonate through the generations. It doesn’t just stop with the person that attended the school.”

Good’s entire family, including her mother, attended a residential school. She would have as well, but her mom lost her status when she married her father, a non-Indigenous man.

“I am very grateful. I don’t think I’d be here today,” she said. “I’m not sure that I would’ve had the resilience or the strength to rise above that.”

The book’s elevated status comes on the heels of 215 children’s bodies being found on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Good hopes the discovery, as well as her book, encourages the federal government to take actions, which she says hasn’t happened since the Truth and Reconciliation findings were released in 2015.

“Lowering the flag to half-mast is a symbolic and lovely gesture, but it doesn’t do a thing to protect these sites that likely exist at every residential school site, or to support those communities in bringing their kids home. It doesn’t do any of that and that’s what we need to see.”