Accolades

Milestones

1999

2002

2006

2007

2020

- Graduated with distinction with a Bachelor of Laws from the University of British Columbia - Joined Rush Crane Guenther, a boutique Aboriginal and labour law firm that was involved in many Aboriginal rights cases in Canada

1999

Joined Justice Canada to help develop the first alternative dispute resolution process for residential schools claims

2002

Joined Fulton & Company in Kamloops, BC, with Leonard Marchand, now the first Indigenous person on the British Columbia Court of Appeal

2006

Launched Michelle Good & Company, Legal and Mediation Services in Kamloops, BC

2007

Published Five Little Indians, a novel that focuses on five survivors of the Canadian Indian residential school system

2020

From legal advocate to award-winning author

Michelle Good should by now be used to winning awards. Her novel Five Little Indians recently won the CBC Canada Reads competition, but the awards list is very long. However, one particular accolade that struck home for Good was an honorary doctor of letters degree from Simon Fraser University. Good says the award was deeply meaningful because SFU made it very clear the award was not just for her novel. It was because of her life of advocacy and support for Indigenous residential school survivors. Good’s advocacy goes back many decades before the release of Five Little Indians. She has worked as an activist, teacher, and lawyer fighting on behalf of Indigenous communities since the 1970s. Good is of Cree ancestry, a descendent of the Battle River Cree and a Red Pheasant Cree Nation member. Her mother lost her Indian status when she married a non-Indigenous person. Good thus saw how the law could result in injustice for Indigenous people from an early age.

Good was born in Kitimat, British Columbia and moved to Vancouver when she was a teenager. She lived in the Vancouver area until her early 20s, when she started working with First Nations communities throughout BC. Good says seeing how Indigenous issues were deeply wrapped up in the law inspired her to want to pursue a legal career. “It was because of an erroneous conflation between the notion of law and the notion of justice. I had a profound sense of justice early in my life.” When she eventually started her legal studies at UBC in the late 1990s, “it was kind of a shock to take a closer look at the whole paradigm and to realize that really, law is about order … Even though it is presented as seeking justice, it’s not. It is seeking compliance with the rules in the name of social order.” Good says she had good experiences at law school, but was also subject to a lot of racism, which was surprising and frustrating. She applied in the Indigenous and mature student categories, which she says had a more rigorous entrance requirement than for other students.

She stayed for two years with Rush Crane Guenther after her articling. The firm was involved in some of the very early Aboriginal rights cases. The first file that she handled herself was representing the claims of five survivors of residential schools. The Department of Justice then approached her to discuss alternative approaches to resolving these claims. Good accepted their offer and joined Justice Canada in 2002. She stayed until 2004, when, she says, she was constructively dismissed. “I was accused of not being objective. My life was made miserable the entire time I was there,” says Good, who says she settled out of court and that the settlement amount is confidential. Good says she was in a difficult position when she left, since she had to explain in job interviews what had happened. So she decided to leave legal practice and teach at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan.

Eventually, she joined Fulton & Company in Kamloops in 2006. Leonard Marchand, who recently became the first Indigenous person appointed to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, was a partner at the time. “He knew that there had been issues [with Justice Canada]. But he also knew how good I was at resolving residential school claims,” says Good. She was then able to focus her entire practice in this area. While Good speaks very positively about her time at Fulton & Company, she knew she wanted to launch a law firm, which she did in 2007. “My clients were all survivors. I did almost exclusively residential school cases. And they were just the most wonderful, amazing people who taught me a tremendous amount in different ways.” By 2013, Good decided to wind down her practice to focus on other things, and she also began to think about writing a book. “I was always writing, from the time I was a prepubescent child. It was just a part of who I am that I observe, consider, and record that.”

Eventually, Good enrolled in the MFA program at UBC in 2014 and began to write. It took her nine years to write Five Little Indians. The novel tells the story of five residential school survivors. She says it is entirely fictional, but drew on her personal experiences. “My mother’s a residential school survivor, my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle. When I went to work with Indigenous organizations, basically everybody that I was working with was a survivor. So this was just my life.” Good says that even though there is no connection between her legal work and her fiction, the skills she uses are similar. “When I stand up in the courtroom, I’m telling my story. And my colleague, on the other side, is telling their story. And I’m hoping that my story is going to be the more persuasive. It really is storytelling in that way.”

Spotlight

Despite that, many law students “would claim that the only reason that Indigenous students were admitted was because they were filling seats named for Indigenous students. Which, of course, is just so racist and absurd.” Good split her articles between what was then Fraser Milner and Rush Crane Guenther, a labour and Aboriginal law boutique. She says it was challenging to find an articling position as a mature student. She was asked “outrageous questions” like what she would do if she were representing a company where there was a conflict with an Indigenous group. The question assumed “that you wouldn’t have the professionalism or the understanding of your ethical obligations to your clients, that my indigeneity would trump that.”

Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention. Alone and without any skills, support, or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn’t want them. The paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they endured during their years at the Mission.

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About the book

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2017 - Present

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Toronto, Ont.

Fast Fact

“Tracing the lives of residential school survivors, Good's Five Little Indians is a triumph of braided narrative, and a document on strength and resilience.” – Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings

Michelle Good

Author, Five Little Indians

Michelle Good’s novel Five Little Indians is just the latest example of her dedication to advocating for Indigenous residential school survivors and highlighting the trauma they endured

Read on

“My clients were all survivors. I did almost exclusively residential school cases. And they were just the most wonderful, amazing people who taught me a tremendous amount in different ways”

Michelle Good, Five Little Indians

“My mother’s a residential school survivor, my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle. When I went to work with Indigenous organizations, basically everybody that I was working with was a survivor. So this was just my life”

Michelle Good, Five Little Indians

Accolades

Milestones

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2011

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2011

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Winner, 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction

Honorary Doctor of Letters, Simon Fraser University

Canada Reads Winner, 2022, for novel Five Little Indians

Winner, 2021 Amazon First Novel Award