Michelle Good says while trying to establish where the stories of Eliza Sunshine were coming from – who was telling them, and why – she decided to inhabit multiple voices over generations.Adam Delmar Moser/Supplied
Historical records – their events smoothed over by time – have a way of abstracting consequence. Removed from contextual specificity such as testimony from the Indigenous people affected, existing 19th-century photographs displaying visual evidence of the buffalo’s decimation in North America often have little impact on 21st-century viewers beyond the fascination of the grotesque. In Saskatchewan and Montana and Michigan, for example, those photos show endless piles of buffalo bones, usually with a white man posing in front of them, ready to be hauled off and turned into fertilizer, glue or bone china. Statistics reveal the horror: between 30 and 60 million buffalo in North America were systematically whittled down to around 450.
Unfathomable as those numbers are, statistics are still abstractions. Cree author Michelle Good’s second novel Eliza Sunshine provides further context, drawing from historical events and her own family history to emphasize the truly apocalyptic nature of the decimation and the genocide it set in motion.
Over the phone from her home in Maple Creek, Sask., near the Cypress Hills (or Manâtakâw in Cree), Good notes there’s a Cree word – ohtāpamihowin – often used as a “reverent descriptor” of buffalo that is sometimes translated to English as “nourishment,” but could also mean something along the lines of, “everything we need.”
“Just imagine everything gone, all of a sudden,” Good says. “Food, clothing, shelter, medicine, tools – everything suddenly gone. How would you survive in the world? How could you possibly survive?”
Supplied
Eliza Sunshine poses that question through a multi-generational story that spools out from an idyllic way of life in late 19th-century Saskatchewan before contact with European settlers into the turn of the 21st century. It begins from the perspective of Swan, a Cree girl coming of age inspired by Good’s great-grandmother Cimacês. The story shifts into that of Swan’s granddaughter Eliza, who navigates a tumultuous 20th-century dense with vicious racism and a lengthy illness while striving for a career amid joy and death. It then ends through the lens of Ella, Eliza’s daughter, a university student inspired by family and community stories to organize a women’s group and advocate for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
While trying to establish where the stories of Eliza Sunshine were coming from – who was telling them, and why – Good decided to inhabit multiple voices over generations. “It made it as much about the importance of storytelling as a social institution that passes on the history and traditions of the people as it is about these three women,” she says.
“Everything I’ve written, I could have written as non-fiction,” Good says. “Every single thing, every book. The reason I chose not to is because I think fiction – or the guise of fiction, because I don’t think anything is truly fictional – gives a broader sense of what these characters are experiencing, learning, responding to. It makes it more alive.”
Good’s award-winning debut novel, Five Little Indians (2020), centred around five residential school survivors, also drew from her mother and grandmother’s lives. There’s a natural depth and richness that comes from Eliza Sunshine’s proximity to family history (Good is a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, which also figures prominently in the book).
But her experience as a lawyer also bolsters the story with an incisive sense and illustration of cause and effect. The impacts of large-scale atrocities carried out by the government against Indigenous Peoples, including the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop, trickle down into individual-level violent acts such as rape and murder, the aftershocks of which are endured by families and small communities. Good makes plenty of room for joy and never yields to despair, building complex portraits, and that makes all the difference when it comes to making readers feel the true weight of history: “I want characters, not caricatures,” she says.
“I really hope people experience this in a very personal way,” Good says. “That they experience the characters as people, and that they can imagine themselves trying to survive those circumstances. I hope it causes them to question what they think they know.”
It took substantial effort to get to that place. Good was meditating on traumatic events from her mother and grandmother’s lives; in the case of her great-grandmother, who died two decades before Good was born, she imagined, nearly out of whole cloth, going through the near extinction of the life-sustaining buffalo.
“I had to take a little break because it was so painful, actually, to think about that,” Good says. “Not only the truth of it, but what it must have felt like to witness, when you consider these creatures to be a sacred gift, them being treated in that way.”
In the novel, many years after the buffalo are wiped out, Swan assumes a bird’s eye perspective on the consequences of that senseless violence and greed. The buffalo – “our brothers,” she says – made divots that filled with water for other animals to drink from, spread seeds with their beards and fertilized the prairie grasses. Swan understands that the loss may be most acute for her people, but that it will affect all living things: “The loss to the earth was as profound as the loss to us.” There is nothing abstract about that.
“Until we are able to come to grips with Canadian history as experienced through the lens of Indigenous people, we won’t even get to the starting point,” Good says. “That’s the starting point – where we share the same understanding of what happened in this country and why.”