Old Tropes, New Stories: Residential School Narrative and Urban Indigeneity in Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Cree author Michelle Good’s debut novel Five Little Indians (2020) engages with the familiar tropes of residential school narratives: mental, physical and sexual abuse, severing the ties with original families, and forced assimilation are narrated in a way that contributes to the large body of Indigenous voices which tell the stories of this collective, traumatic experience vis-a-vis settler forgetting. Yet, Good manages to extend and transcend these established tropes by focusing more on the resilience of the five survivors who after they are released from the residential school must find their own place in the world, in which going back to pre-colonial cultural integrity is not an option. The presentation focuses on the ways in which Good reworks one of the fundamental tropes of modern Indigenous writing, namely the role the city space plays in shaping Indigenous political consciousness. While in earlier Indigenous fiction, cityscapes were often depicted as a source of alienation, loss of cultural identity, segregation, poverty and homelessness, i.e. spaces in which Indigenous characters were lost, Good’s novel tells a different story: though Indigenous characters certainly struggle with racism, violence and poverty in the city, the urban setting of Vancouver is also shown to offer a place of education, political activism, inter-tribal alliances, and, finally, a home. |
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