historical fiction
Five Little Indians focused on the lives of five indigenous Canadian people
who had been sent to “Indian School”, stolen from their families without
warning and sent to a Christian boarding school run by a violent staff. The
resulting trauma to both the kids and their bereft families was
significant. Those kids who made it to
age 16 were sent out into the world, with no real life skills and no tools for
finding their long-lost families. They all struggled to support themselves and
find their footing.
Michelle Good’s novel was a tragic one. The protagonists handled life after the
school differently, some better than others. All were haunted by their
childhoods at the hands of the church clergy who ran things. Some of them were
able to connect with other former classmates who became their family. The
terrible stories about the abuses these kids lived through were painful to
read. But there was hope for their future and many of them found some resources
to aid them in stabilizing their lives.
These Canadian “residence schools” were horrible. The
tactics employed to force the native Canadian children away from their homes
was inexcusable. And the abuses these children suffered at the hands of adults
charged with caring for and educating them was criminal. Many kids never made
it out alive. These facts were already known to me but reading about these five
examples really brought attention to this dark part of Canada’s past.
I attempted to listen to the audiobook first but I
could not take the narrAAAYtion! The
narrator was wooden and made the last word of every phrase emphasized and the
vowel sound drawn out and brEEEathy. It
was so annoying I couldn’t even pay attention to the stOOOry. So I abandoned it after about 30 minutes and
waited for the library’s e-book to arrive.
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