Good hopes the discovery, as well as her book, encourages the federal government to take actions, which she says hasn’t happened since the Truth and Reconciliation findings were released in 2015.

The book’s elevated status comes on the heels of 215 children’s bodies being found on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. “I’m not sure that I would’ve had the resilience or the strength to rise above that.” I don’t think I’d be here today,” she said. She would have as well, but her mom lost her status when she married her father, a non-Indigenous man. Good’s entire family, including her mother, attended a residential school. It doesn’t just stop with the person that attended the school.” “I want them to obtain a personalized and a meaningful understanding of the half life of trauma and how it continues and will continue to resonate through the generations. “I want them to stop asking the question: ‘Why can’t we just get over it?’” she said. However, more than the accolades, Good is hoping people will be encouraged to pick up the book and learn about her peoples’ devastating history. The book has received national acclaim, earning the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Good’s poignant account of her mother’s friend and her mother’s own experience at residential school is encapsulated perfectly in her book Five Little Indians. That’s the first thing my mother told me about her experiences at the residential school,” noted Good. “Lily was my mother’s friend and my mother watched her die, my mother watched her hemorrhage to death from tuberculosis. While the book is fictional, Lily is a real person. Five Little Indians is about five young Indigenous students who struggle to overcome the trauma they faced during their time at residential school.

Five little indians a novel