Creative Groundedness: Life through Brokenness and Breaking Through in Michelle Good's Five Little Indians

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Michelle Good's novel Five Little Indians (2020) with an emphasis on its representation of what I term "creative groundedness," or the capacity to generate a sense of collective and personal balance through communal and land-based forms of creativity. It draws on contemporary Indigenous scholarship by Glen Coulthard, Daniel Heath Justice, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, among others, to examine the characters' reinvention of their broken lives through solidarity, respect, and mutual support. The analysis also builds on the work of feminist scholars of affect Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant to explore how Good's message is often predicated on the creative power of the affective. Ultimately, I argue that the novel moves beyond proposing strategies of resilience and survival and promotes the value of situated, relational, reciprocal, and community-based practices to heal Indigenous lives on urban and rural land.