Name: Onyeka Dike

Course Code: ENGL 680

Course Title: Canadian Literature

Course Instructor: Professor Robert Lecker

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Death and Resurrection in Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians

Dysfunction. This best describes the survivors of the Indian residential school system, a network

of boarding schools established by the Canadian government for the Indigenous peoples. And

that is what stares at every reader of Michelle Good’s debut novel, Five Little Indians. It is the

story of five Indigenous children, Clara, Lucy, Kenny, Maisie and Howie, who are forcefully

uprooted from their families and placed in a residential school in British Columbia, simply

known as the Mission. These children are exposed to all forms of physical, psychological and

sexual violence by the priests and nuns. The devastating effect of their experiences at the

Mission follow them even after they leave the school, as they find themselves imprisoned by

trauma. For the rest of their lives, they constantly try to return to the innocence and harmony of

their early childhood.

As we read the novel, we get to learn about Lily’s death. She is a young girl at the Mission who

falls sick and finds herself coughing uncontrollably during their morning prayer. She is punished

for it by Sister Mary, the nun in charge, and the cruel punishment leads to her death. But beyond

the physical death of Lily and the tens of other nameless people at the Mission, it is the

psychological death of the survivors that takes centre stage. When Howie recounts his experience

at the Mission, he admits: “I think I would have died there if I had stayed.” But Kenny has a

more poignant perspective: “Yeah. Me too. Sometimes I think I did die, I’m just still walking

around” (255). This motif of psychological death continues with Clara when she says, “We were

children, me and Lily, and neither of us survived, even though I’m still walking” (198).

The significance of this psychological death reechoes on across the novel, as these children find

it difficult to fit into the society. While they were still in the residential school, the only thing

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they looked forward to was being reunited with their parents. Maisie talks about this potential

reunion with her mom:

I had so many dreams at the Indian School about going home to her.
Dreams about sleeping safe in my own room, playing on the beach at ease
and without fear, and cooking with her. What I so desperately needed was
to be standing on that stool by the stove, carefully stirring under her
watchful eye like when I was little. To be little again, living without fear
and brutality... (59-60)
But when she finally comes home, she feels a strong sense of estrangement and alienation, as she

reenters her old world with a resurrected figure; a strange body that can no longer relate with the

love her parents have for her:

No matter how hard I tried, this place, their house, was no longer home, and
these people, though kind and loving, were like strangers pretending to be
family. (59)
She is not the only one who feels that way. Kenny’s experience is even more painful. He comes

home to his mother, only to meet her figuratively dead and absent: “Neither of them spoke of

their years apart, and over time the truth of their separation grew between them, like a silent

wound, untended and festering” (23).

But losing his mother is not the greatest tragedy of Kenny’s life. It is his inability to live in the

present; his inability to survive in an ordered world. His life thrives in chaos and any form of

beauty makes him uncomfortable. After he finally starts building a family with Lucy and Kendra,

“[n]o one would have guessed that the old restlessness was so loud in Kenny that he could barely

hear the baby coo or Lucy laugh” (210). He abandons his beautiful family, despite loving them

so much, because:

It was himself he couldn’t love. They did that to him. Whatever they didn’t
break in him, they bent. They beat him and beat him so many times I
couldn’t even count. He never told me this, but I know Brother was

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 bothering him too. That creep went after so many of those little boys.” (262-
63)
The many years of physical and sexual molestation end up making Kenny loathe himself, despite

loving everyone else around him. He sends money to his mother from his wages until she dies,

and even in death, leaves behind a huge insurance package for his family.

Maisie experiences this inability to love too. Faced with the prospect of charting a new course

with his boyfriend, Jimmy, she rather settles for a masochistic romance with someone she refers

to as Old Man:

I heard his zipper as he pulled up my skirt. He stuck it in me, hard and deep,
each thrust with all his weight bashing me against the wall. His breath, short
and foul.
“Say it,” I told him again. “Say it or I never will come here again.”
“Slut. Savage. Filth. Stupid. Cunt. Whore. Slut. Savage.”
These were Father’s words. They took the rhythm of his thrusts. And I
couldn’t breathe without this. I didn’t exist without this. (63)
The dalliance with Old Man only reminds her of the sexual molestation she experiences in the

hands of the Reverend Father at the Mission. Her whole existence had come to be defined by it,

and she ruins her relationship with Jimmy because of that. But it does not stop at that. She takes

her own life too, uniting her physical body with her soul that died at the Mission.

The only person who experiences true resurrection is Clara. She meets Mariah, an old Cree

woman who shelters her from the law. During her stay with Mariah, Clara reconnects with her

ancient tradition and experiences a form of psychological rebirth she never imagined was

possible:

There are no English words to describe how one woman walked into that
lodge and another walked out. All Clara knew was that it took her back.
Back to the birch grove and the angel songs. Back to who she was before
Sister Mary, before the school, before they tried to beat her into a little
brown white girl. She felt a certainty, from then on, that all the ones who

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 had come before walked with her. Life was no longer just survival. It was
about being someone. An Indian someone, with all the truth that was born
into her at the moment she was placed in her mother’s womb. (199)
It is this resurrected Clara, free from bitterness and any form of vengeful feeling, that goes on to

build something emotionally significant with Howie.