Michelle Good wins major award for her first novel but says instead of celebrating she's mourning

An Indigenous author has just won a major award for her first novel which tracks the paths of five residential school survivors living in east Vancouver but Michelle Good says instead of celebrating she's mourning the children whose deaths at residential schools are just now being acknowledged.

Good who lives in Savona near Kamloops but is a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation west of Saskatoon, was awarded the 25,000 dollar Governor General's Literary Award for fiction today for her work ``Five Little Indians.''

She won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award last week but the lawyer-turned-author whose mother was forced to attend residential school says she's not feeling like partying.

Good says it's ``petty and selfish'' to think about literary prizes while grieving the 215 children that the Tk'emlups First Nation says are buried on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.