Description
Michelle Good is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working with Indigenous communities and organizations for 25 years, she obtained her law degree as a 43-year-old single mom, and then spent 14 years advocating for residential school survivors. She earned her MFA in creative writing while still practising law. Her debut novel, Five Little Indians, became a #1 bestseller and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, and was nominated for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Giller Prize among other honours. Good’s bestselling book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada was shortlisted for the Basillie Prize for Public Policy. In 2025, she won the Indspire Award for Arts and was admitted as a member of the Order of Canada.
Sometimes I feel that I wasn’t born at all, rather sculpted and formed by the storms of my grandmother’s life.
When Eliza comes home from her first year at residential school, she is barely recognizable to her Nôhkom, Swan. Once bright-eyed and curious, Eliza is now stick-thin and silent, with roughly shorn hair and dull, listless eyes. Gathering bag in hand, Swan gently leads Eliza on long walks through untouched prairie grasses, harvesting medicines, certain that the power of the land will heal her. And as they walk, she shares stories of her own suffering when her traditional ways of being and living collided with the greed and violence of encroaching settlers. For Eliza, Swan's journey offers a master class on how to face unspeakable adversity and remain true to herself.
Decades later, Eliza and her daughter are at a crossroads. When Ella comes home from her first year at university wearing bell bottoms, braids and a beaded headband, Eliza is horrified. Eliza fought her whole life to be free of the oppression that comes with being Cree and she can’t fathom why her daughter would choose to proclaim her heritage so proudly, disregarding the consequences. With a steaming mug of tea in hand, Eliza follows in her grandmother’s footsteps, sharing with Ella the story of the adversities she faced in her own relentless pursuit of freedom.
But Ella's idea of freedom isn’t the same as Eliza’s. And when tragedy strikes, Ella must decide how to build her life in the aftermath, navigating how best to keep the stories of her family alive when the world around her seems to want them buried along with the legions of the missing and the dead.