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A review by more_books_than_days
Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
5.0
Five Little Indians is fiction, but it's stories are echos of real lives. Michelle Good has given life to five voices who communicate the reality of a living hell that was centuries of state and church run residential schools in Canada, and the deep scars imprinted on generations of indigenous people.
These schools claimed to be saving the very fabric of 'savage' souls when, in fact, children were shorn of safety, torn from community, ripped from the outstretched arms of their families; their bodies ravaged, starved from their ancestors, and stripped bare in a cruelty that continues to shock me breathless. Children were imprisoned in boarding schools that twisted religion into the claws of cultural genocide, and if they lived to adolescence, these same children were carelessly abandoned to a system ingrained to oppress, and judged without mercy by a society comfortable in the armchairs of ignorance and privilege.
This book left me with tears in my eyes and an ache in my heart. Each of the characters comes to life within devastatingly well written and tender prose. Good brings her readers to her side, sits us close, and reveals five journeys, often interwoven, finding their way to peace.
If you are looking for more understanding on what the residential school system was, and it's continuing impact for all of us living on unceded land, known first as Turtle Island, read this book.
These schools claimed to be saving the very fabric of 'savage' souls when, in fact, children were shorn of safety, torn from community, ripped from the outstretched arms of their families; their bodies ravaged, starved from their ancestors, and stripped bare in a cruelty that continues to shock me breathless. Children were imprisoned in boarding schools that twisted religion into the claws of cultural genocide, and if they lived to adolescence, these same children were carelessly abandoned to a system ingrained to oppress, and judged without mercy by a society comfortable in the armchairs of ignorance and privilege.
This book left me with tears in my eyes and an ache in my heart. Each of the characters comes to life within devastatingly well written and tender prose. Good brings her readers to her side, sits us close, and reveals five journeys, often interwoven, finding their way to peace.
If you are looking for more understanding on what the residential school system was, and it's continuing impact for all of us living on unceded land, known first as Turtle Island, read this book.