There is a silence among the survivors that everyone-even the author-refuses to break. One of the greatest strengths of this book is its handling of intergenerational trauma, not just the trauma that is passed down to the children of residential school survivors, but the trauma of the parents who lost their children to the government and Church, and the trauma of countless generations of ancestors whose stories, traditions, and language cannot be passed on to children locked away from their communities. Together and alone, they learn to grow in the places they have found for themselves, to put down new roots in the soil of their ancestors, to experience the full spectrum of joy and suffering that comes with being alive. The lives of these five children intersect again and again as they grow into teenagers, young adults, parents. Howie, fresh out of prison after nearly killing the priest who abused the children at school, struggles to reenter a society he was never really a part of to begin with. Clara gets herself wrapped up in a dangerous mission for the American Indian Movement and is brought to a Cree elder’s house to heal. Lucy compulsively counts things and clings to the boy she used to pass notes to in school, even as Kenny can’t stop himself from running from her again and again.

Maisie turns to increasingly harmful coping mechanisms to hide her internalized pain. The scars on the outside can fade away, but the school has left each of them with a deep, ragged wound in the shape of a “craving, insatiable empty place” within. Their families have become strangers after 10 years of separation. The residential school has taught them nothing but how to scrub and clean, do laundry, and bear constant abuse. Those who managed to escape from the school still find themselves running, and those who were unceremoniously kicked out the day they turned 16 must find a way to get by in an unfamiliar city. Whether they survived-or will survive, as making it out of the school doesn’t necessarily mean a long life after that-is another matter. Brilliant, unrelenting, and ultimately healing, Five Little Indians tells the story of five residential school students in the 1960s.

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