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Chapter 9: Howie
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Five Little Indians, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Resilience and Redemption
Cruelty and Trauma
Family
Finding Home
Summary
Analysis
Returning to Clara’s escape from the law a few years earlier, she wakes in the unfamiliar darkness of the remote countryside. She’s disoriented, but she hears John Lennon howling nearby. When she tries to bring him inside the cabin she finds herself in, the Old Woman (later identified as Mariah) tells her that dogs stay outside. If Clara must be with him, she can build a fire in the stove on the porch and sleep with him there. That’s just what Clara does: John Lennon refused to abandon her on the night of the car crash, and she won’t abandon him now.
The previous chapter ended with Howie getting a chance to redeem himself. Now the novel turns back to Clara, who began to redeem her troubled past after she got involved with the AIM. But thus far her involvement has been fueled by her rage and pain. Mariah offers Clara a lesson in compromise that foreshadows what she has to teach the younger woman about finding strength in peace, not pain.
Themes
The next morning, when John Lennon and Clara wake up, Mariah isn’t in the cabin, so they investigate the surrounding woods. They discover the sweat lodge woven out of live willows in a nearby clearing. structure. John Lennon won’t go near it, and this unnerves Clara. The woods around the cabin are filled with a tinkling noise that reminds her of the sounds of her childhood. Eventually, she sees that Mariah has hung old glass bottles in the trees and they act as windchimes.
Mariah’s cabin and its environment suggest a deep connection with the land. This, in turn, offers a sense of home: the very thing that Clara and all the other residential school kids have been denied their whole lives. By staging important episodes of Clara’s growth here, the book not so subtly suggests the necessity of having a stable place in the world—the very thing the residential school system denied to its victims.
Themes
It’s late afternoon when Clara and John Lennon return to the cabin, and soon afterward Mariah reappears, too. She makes some fresh bannock bread for Clara, then begins to prepare venison stew, putting Clara to work peeling potatoes. Her ease in the kitchen reminds Clara of her own mother. Mariah explains that her grandmother raised her in this remote cabin; after her mother’s death her father brought her there to keep her out of the residential schools. She’s been there ever since, surviving on what she can hunt and trap and what her friends bring her.
The feeling of comfort and safety Clara gets from working in the kitchen with Mariah reinforces the importance of home and family in life. Mariah becomes a surrogate mother figure for Clara, something she can do easily because she was nurtured by her own family. The book suggests that people truly learn to help others only through being in this kind of foundational, family relationship.
Themes
Mariah is a healer. She inspects Clara’s wounded (and now infected) shoulder and expertly cleans and dresses it. She’s a spiritual healer, too, but Clara doesn’t think she needs spiritual healing, even after she found out that Vera made arrangements to spirit her here from the reservation. Mariah invites Clara to visit the sweat lodge and encourages her to pray and rediscover her connection with her ancestors. Clara balks at the idea: neither the Catholic God to whom she prayed nor her ancestors saved her or Lily from residential school.
Clara’s reckless behavior has already proved that her emotional wounds are just as serious as her physical ones. In a symbolic sense, these emotional wounds are infected and are poisoning her life, preventing her from reaching her full potential. Although she resists the idea of the sweat lodge for now, it’s clear that she will end up there eventually.
Themes
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Nevertheless, Clara settles into a peaceful routine with Mariah over the winter. Mariah cooks, tends to Clara’s healing shoulder, and teaches her to work the trapline. Clara makes sure that there’s enough wood for the woodstove. Mariah also introduces Clara to the people who come to visit the sweat lodge. But Clara still resists joining in. One night, Mariah askes Clara to present gifts of food to the ancestors in preparation for the rituals. Clara takes a plate of food to the sweat lodge, but even with the encouragement of another participant, she refuses to offer a prayer of thanks.
The winter is healing to Clara because she’s finally involved in the rhythms of nature and of family life. Importantly, she’s also involved in the spiritual life of Indigenous people—something she’s never had access to before. Remember that even before she was taken to the residential school, she and her mother attended the Catholic church on their reserve. Clara lost her faith in that institution and in its God when Lily died. But Mariah quietly and insistently suggests that this doesn’t mean that her spirituality is inevitably lost, too. She just needs to open herself to other ways of experiencing it.
Themes
The next morning, Mariah finds Clara out on the trapline. She warns the younger woman that unless she seeks healing for her spiritual wounds, too, she will suffer needlessly. Later in the day, Clara finally tells Mariah about Lily and the guilt and anger she still feels over her friend’s death. She also tells Mariah about her happy childhood and how sure she was of her connection with the spiritual realm—before residential school. She says that although she walked away, she doesn’t feel like she survived it any more than Lily did. Mariah gently tucks an exhausted Clara into bed, and in the morning, Clara finally agrees to go to the sweat lodge. She emerges a changed woman.
It takes a long time before Clara feels safe and secure enough to admit her pain to another person. Like many of the other victims, although she physically left the school, the emotional wounds she carries with her trap her in the past. Indirectly, she thus answers the question Jimmy posed in an earlier chapter. She doesn’t move on because she can’t—not without a lot of effort, time, and support. And not everyone has the opportunities for healing that Mariah offers Clara.
Themes
In the spring, George and Vera come to bring Mariah more supplies and to collect Clara. Their reunion is a joyful one—for months they’ve wondered what happened after they parted at the border. Clara invites Mariah to come back to Vancouver with her, but Mariah refuses. Her life is in this cabin, where “broken wings” come to be healed. Before Clara leaves, Mariah blesses her and reminds her that she will always have access to spiritual guidance and a safe place to return to if she ever needs it.
Clara wants to take Mariah—her new surrogate mother figure—back to the city with her, but Mariah knows that there are many more people like Clara out there already who need her too. And now that Clara has had some healing of her own, she becomes, like George and Vera, the kind of person who can inspire and help others.
Themes
