CONTENT WARNING
This post discusses trauma, including physical and sexual abuse.
I write a lot about media that tackles trauma because, well, artistic works have helped me realize and come to terms with a lot of my own trauma. It’s not a subject that you can easily broach with others and, often, something that is buried instead of confronted. The works that do reckon with trauma can be a provocation or a balm or both.
Michelle Good’s FIVE LITTLE INDIANS was certainly both for me.
FIVE LITTLE INDIANS scrutinizes five Indigenous youths who were forced into the same Canadian Indian residential school. If you’re unfamiliar with the practice, Canadian Indian residential school system was a program instituted by the Canadian government and overseen by church members. At the age of six, one is cut off from your parents and hauled off to a boarding school. You’re taught European and Christian ideals until you’re 16 years old. You’re then booted out, left to fend for yourself in an unforgiving world.
The intent was to indoctrinate and assimilate by whatever means deemed fit by their institutional headmasters. Instead it cut thousands off from their culture and heritage and ruined lives. This government-mandated cruelty lasted for over a century, well into the 1960s.
Good’s five Indians — Kenny, Maisie, Lucy, Howie and Clara — are have overlapping stints in the 1950s at the Mission School. All five of them are starved, humiliated, and suffer physical and sexual abuse from their overseers. Both Kenny and Howie manage to separately run away, whereas Maisie, Lucy and Clara serve all ten years.
All five of them, one way at one time or another, find their way to the slums of Downtown Eastern Vancouver and into each other’s lives, bound together by what they endured at the Mission.
While FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is specifically about the trauma inflicted by colonizers and how it was specifically enacted to bulldoze cultures, the ways the characters confront or cope or ignore their trauma are easy to identify with.
For example, take this exchange between Kenny and Lucy as they discuss reparations the government is preparing to make:
“They call us survivors.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think I survived. Do you?”
“I just don’t know. I’m so tired, Lucy.”
Kenny later states:
“Sometimes I think I did die, I’m just still walking around.”
Reading the two of them reflecting on the label of ‘survivor’ rattled me, as I’ve had the same exchange with my therapist when they have labeled as a ‘survivor’. The only difference? I stated that all I did was ‘continue to exist’. They responded:
“That’s surviving. A lot of people who have been through the same did not…”
That’s undeniably true, especially in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS, as all five of them have been affected by those who did not survive what the Mission had wrought. All five feel like they’ve survived nothing, that there’s no glory or satisfaction in having made it to another day.
Empathizing with the thoughts and sentiments expressed in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is why I write about works that focus on lesser-discussed topics such as abuse and traumatic experiences. These topics that are rarely discussed outside of physical and mental health offices and are assumed to be verboten and off-limits, even to those closest to you. It may make others uncomfortable, it may make them view you differently, or you simply might feel that it’s unworthy of sharing.
All of the above are touched on in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS, as they don’t have any kind of template or guide to help them process what they’ve lived through. Similarly, the Canadian government is also struggling with addressing the abuse these people endured. Mostly, it’s financial reparations, but also through acknowledgement that these acts occurred and that these acts were acts of cruelty and abuse and physically and mentally devastated so many.
It’s this recognition, not just in the past by those who have lived it, those who have inflicted it, those who were complicit in it, and Good for weaving this tale to bring attention not just to the acts, but the acts and the fallout, that is so important.
The power of words, of phrasing, of articulating, of airing these matters — both personal and sociopolitical — can help to heal, even if it hurts at first. Some may say it can bring closure. Frankly, I don’t believe that; for many reasons I know I’ll never have closure for the acts done to me, despite finally confronting it. It’ll always be there; so much of who I am, how I interact — or fail to interact — is entangled with that history that … there is no hope for closure, but that isn’t the point — that isn’t the endgame — of acknowledgement and recognition of abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
This may come across as rudimentary or obvious but reading stories like these, fiction centered around fact — be it historical events or simply lived experience woven into a tale — can elicit awareness in a number of a ways, from those who have experienced it, those who can empathize, those who can sympathize, those who can relate, and those who were previously oblivious.
FIVE LITTLE INDIANS works on all of the levels while also unfurling an engrossing multi-generational arc of nuanced characters. It might be a book you can read for some insight on the crimes of the past, or it might be something that’ll open your eyes to events others may have endured, or it might trigger you, or it might make you feel slightly less alone in the world, it may help someone talk to you or to talk to others about trauma, or maybe it’ll do all of the above as it did for me.
FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is available through Bookshop. Support indie bookstores!
