What they need to be doing is providing the resources, the expertise and the support. "So when I hear the prime minister speaking about how 'all children matter' and flying the flags at half mast, it's a lovely symbolic gesture. But it does nothing. I would bet you my bottom dollar, you're going to find one of these grave sites virtually at every residential school. "Murray Sinclair and the other commissioners basically gave the federal government a roadmap for how to address this issue through those calls to action. "But the thing that really, really bothers me - and it actually infuriates me and I try to stay away from being infuriated - is in 2015, when the Truth and Reconciliation report was issued, there are six calls to action, 71 through 76, that are up here under the heading of 'missing children and burial information.' But there's never been any support to resolve this, to do what the band has done themselves. We did know. People have been talking about this for years and years. I told a friend of mine that I felt catatonic after that announcement. "That first weekend after the Kamloops announcement was really rough. The news has had an emotional effect on Good, who is currently based in southern British Columbia. She spoke with Shelagh Rogers about why she wrote Five Little Indians - and why the legacy of Canada's residential school system stays with her. In May 2021, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in B.C., uncovered the remains of 215 children on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem and on CBC Books.
The novel has also been optioned by Prospero Pictures to be adapted to screen as a limited TV series.įive Little Indians will be championed by the journalist and author Christian Allaire on Canada Reads 2022.Ĭanada Reads will take place March 28-31. Released after years of detention, the five teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn't want them.įive Little Indians won the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Good's debut novel Five Little Indians is a bestselling book that chronicles the quest of five residential school survivors - Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie - to come to terms with their past and find a way forward. Her poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada.
Michelle Good is a writer, retired lawyer and a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. WARNING: This story contains distressing details. This interview originally aired in June 2021.
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