Five Little Indians

In taking on this short novel, you know what you are getting into: residential schools in Canada, another nightmare brought to you by the Catholic Church, and the fallout on just a few of its victims. So you brace yourself of course. I had seen it around the library, drawn and repelled, cowardly procrastinating it despite the accolades, and did not pick it up until it was a book club choice.
There are many pages laden with suffering, but the primary focus is from an adult point of view. Even when the characters are young and they are narrating their own stories, the sense is one of recollection rather than direct confrontation. A six year old remembers his last birthday at his aunt's house, before he was forcibly kidnapped by the RCMP and torn from his mother's arms. His memories of this party and his mother are vivid, but you feel in the details an adult narrator imaging this last bit of youthful joy, which only adds to the sense of loss- he does not have any more happy memories for a long while. Time with family is long and slow, but the dull pain and horror of being abused, starved, sick and lonely in a residential school is touched upon only at its worst moments. For this I was grateful, because avoiding the day-to-day indiginities allowed for less heart-wrenching.
I appreciated the character of Clara, a brave dog lover who pushes for justice and comes out of it all swinging, fighting her way to peace, ready to upheave all of the nastiness. Her moral is that finding your roots and defending your culture bring about purpose and self-worth.
The character of Kenny also has a fighting spirit, but he is overwhelmed. Lucy is healed by love and loyalty. Maisie is lost in self-hatred. In each of them, we find facets of how humans cope with trauma, and each of their reactions is relatable to anyone with half a heart.
However, the uniqueness of why they suffered is something that stuck in my teeth for days, like a piece of grapefruit when you have no dental floss, rotting away. It is beyond gross, the crimes, perversions and destruction that are the calling cards of the Catholic Church. Perhaps we can muse, that people genuinely thought they were charitable, that they were blind to the self-serving interests behind their do-gooding and sought only to help children integrate into the world. Yet there is such contempt behind this pity. The automatic dismissal of all First Nations cultures as irrelevant at best, the lack of real education in these schools, the coldness, the sexual abuse. It seems hard to believe that these things would have happened in a spirit of charity. And how could the general public not know about this? That is also problematic.
There is something about taking children from their crying parents that would strike anyone the wrong way.
On a positive note, despite the rage, I left this book happy to have met this characters, and hopeful. I hope that the US has a similar day of reckoning like the Canadians have.

I read this just after Jonny Appleseed, which was probably a mistake. This is a brilliant account of the ways residential schools affected generations of Indigenous peoples, even decades after they'd left the horrors of the schools. But while this was a powerful series of stories, it also lacks some of the rawness I'd felt from Jonny Appleseed. Sometimes it feels a little contrived, a little convenient, which is something I didn't get from my previous read.

But that's only by comparison, and it does nothing to invalidate the truth in these stories. The stories of these five former residential school students are distinct yet interconnected. They all went to the same school but left at different times, sometimes linking up with each other and sometimes not. The vignettes of their lives focus in on aspects where we can see the continued traumas that affect them, and while some can find peace later in life many don't get that chance. We see their struggles in school, their struggles in life after release, the struggles of their families after they're taken and after they return, the struggles of the families they find and create... This is, first and foremost, a story of Indigenous people struggling to deal with the effects of residential schools, regardless of whether they actually went to them.

Other than my comparison of tone to Jonny Appleseed, my only real gripe is that the pacing of this book is very uneven. The timeline lurches around and we don't always see characters starring in their stories often enough to really follow how their life goes. It's common for someone's POV to end on a bit of a cliffhanger and then jump to someone else, somewhere else, possibly sometime else, and it's not always a clean jump back into their story. 

Still, if you haven't read a book like this, or at least heard stories from people who experienced the residential school system, you should absolutely read this. It's a powerful, emotional account of just how the Canadian government's policies, along with the Church's methodologies, caused misery for so many people.