Five Little Indians Study Guide

Michelle Good was born in British Columbia to a Cree mother and a French and English father, both of whom had roots in Saskatchewan. Through her mother’s side, Good is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Her family tree includes Big Bear, a 19th-centuy Cree chief notable for his resistance to signing a treaty by which the Canadian government extended its claim on Cree Nation lands, as well as for his participation in an armed rebellion against the Canadian government by Cree and the Assiniboine in the late 1880s. Although Good escaped the Canadian residential school system herself, both her mother and her maternal grandmother were survivors, and at the age of 13, Good was taken from her parents and placed into the foster care system as part of efforts in the 1960s to assimilate Indigenous children. After finishing her high school equivalent, she spent many years working with Indigenous organizations before pursuing a law degree in her early 40s. In her career as a lawyer, she advocated for and represented residential school survivors for 14 years—while also pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. She earned her MFA in 2014 at the age of 58. In addition to Five Little Indians—which won multiple awards on its publication—Good has published a book of essays about the experiences of Indigenous people in Canada, as well all as many individual poems, essays, and articles.

The Canadian residential school system was officially established in 1894, when the Canadian government mandated that all Indigenous children had to attend day schools, industrial schools, or residential schools, although white settlers—frequently Catholic missionaries—had been operating boarding schools for the purpose of destroying Indigenous culture and assimilating Indigenous children since the early 17th century. So many Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and placed into the residential school or foster care systems in between the late 1950s and early 1980s that the period has subsequently been named the “Sixties Scoop.” During this time, the encroachment of welfare workers onto Canadian Indian reserves, in conjunction with poor training and racist assumptions led to the government taking thousands of children from their families. The last residential school closed in 1996, and as survivors’ stories began to circulate more and more widely, the Canadian government established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008 and the 2013 establishment of Truth and Reconciliation Day on September 30th.

An avid reader for much of her life, Michelle Good cites Ethel Wilson’s 1954 Swamp Angel as one of her personal influences. This classic of Canadian fiction shares themes of feminism, resilience, and female redemption with Five Little Indians. Michelle Good’s work also shows the influence of Louise Erdrich,  another Indigenous North American author whose stories often deal with the fraught history of settler colonialism. Erdrich’s 2008 novel Plague of Doves braids together the stories of multiple narrators to tell the story of a community haunted by its racist history. Fundamentally about the very real harms inflicted the Canadian residential school system inflicted on Indigenous people, Five Little Indians joins an impressive list of novels, memoirs, and children’s books penned by Indigenous authors about the abuses perpetuated by the society and government of Canada through the school and foster care systems. While there are too many to list here, a few notable examples are Beatrice Culleton’s 1983 In Search of April Raintree, about two mixed-race sisters separated by the foster care system; Eden Robinson’s 2000 mystery-thriller Monkey Beach, which touches on the lingering, intergenerational effects of the schools; and Bev Sellars’s 2012 memoir, They Called Me Number One, which describes the experiences of the author, her mother, and her grandmother at the same residential school.