Truth and Resilience in the Downtown Eastside | Free Community Gathering

Join YWCA Metro Vancouver for a free community gathering featuring Michelle Good, writer and member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation. The gathering will include a reading from her book Five Little Indians, followed by a community discussion in honour of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.

The emerging truth of residential schools is awakening Canadians to the colonial brutality that has been visited on the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. This is good progress. However, Canadians need to understand that the residential schools were in effect the coup de grâce of the colonial venture – the Canadian Genocide. Michelle Good dips deeper into what she terms the myth of Canadian history and asks us all to revisit and recharacterize what we understand as the historical underpinnings of the creation of Canada as a country.

Noon - Doors open for mingling, food and gallery show

1:00 pm - Opening / Territorial Acknowledgement

1:10 pm - 2:40 pm - Reading and Q&A: Michelle Good

2:40 pm - 2:50 pm - Closing Ceremony/Song

2:50 pm - 3:30 pm - Book signing and mingling

- Refreshments will be served.

- Indigenous artwork and books will be available for sale, cash only.

This event will take place at Firehall Arts Centre, located on the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil Waututh) territories.

About Michelle Good

Michelle Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years. Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practicing law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award, and Canada Reads 2022. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes.  On October 7, 2022, Simon Fraser University granted her an Honorary Doctor of Letters. 

Do you have accessibility needs? Let us know in the registration form.