‘Five Little Indians’ by Michelle Good wins CBC’s Canada Reads
Advertisement
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Monthly Digital Subscription
$0 for the first 4 weeks*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*No charge for 4 weeks then price increases to the regular rate of $19.95 plus GST every four weeks. Offer available to new and qualified returning subscribers only. Cancel any time.
Monthly Digital Subscription
$4.99/week*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*Billed as $19.95 plus GST every four weeks. Cancel any time.
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Add Free Press access to your Brandon Sun subscription for only an additional
$1 for the first 4 weeks*
*Your next subscription payment will increase by $1.00 and you will be charged $16.99 plus GST for four weeks. After four weeks, your payment will increase to $23.99 plus GST every four weeks.
Read unlimited articles for free today:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/03/2022 (1379 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
TORONTO – “Five Little Indians” by Cree writer and lawyer Michelle Good has won CBC’s Canada Reads contest.
The book, published by Harper Perennial, traces the intersecting paths of five residential school survivors in east Vancouver as they try to rebuild their lives and come to grips with their pasts.
CBC’s annual battle of the books brings together five high-profile panellists to argue why their favourite homegrown title should be crowned the ultimate must-read.
Good’s book was championed by Ojibway journalist and Vogue fashion writer Christian Allaire from Nipissing First Nation in Ontario — the grandson of a residential school survivor who says it’s important that Canadians understand this history.
Other titles in contention were Catherine Hernandez’s “Scarborough” from Arsenal Pulp Press and championed by actor and activist Malia Baker; and Esi Edugyan’s “Washington Black” from Patrick Crean Editions and championed by Olympian and LGBTQ advocate Mark Tewksbury.
Also in the running were Clayton Thomas-Müller’s “Life in the City of Dirty Water” of Allen Lane and championed by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard; and Omar El Akkad’s “What Strange Paradise” from McClelland & Stewart, championed by entrepreneur and former Syrian refugee Tareq Hadhad.
Good, a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, won the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
“The awards are nice and are deeply satisfying as an author but most important to me, awards elevate the profile of the book so more hearts and minds are exposed to the story that I felt compelled to tell,” Good said Thursday in a release.
“I wrote this book to expose the truth of intergenerational trauma, and how there is so little support in Canada for survivors to truly be able to heal, both on an individual level and at a community level. The primary relationship in this country is the one between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada, and this relationship must be reconciled before we can really consider Canada the country we want to be.”
The week’s debates are available to stream on CBC Gem and CBC Listen.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 31, 2022.