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Chapter 11: Kenny
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
The story returns to a year or so earlier, when Clara left Mariah’s place with George and Vera. They take her to Vancouver, where they are due to give a presentation at the Friendship Center. After months at Mariah’s, living with the simple rhythms of nature, Clara finds the speed of the outside world overwhelming. She wonders what she will do with herself when she gets back to the city—she’s certainly not going back to the Manitou. George and Vera drop her and John Lennon off at Lucy’s house, where Clara is surprised to find Kendra already walking. There’s new furniture, too, provided by Kenny on one of his short visits. Clara neither likes nor trusts Kenny, but Lucy sticks up for him.
Like Kenny, Clara has her own episodes of wandering—and also like Kenny, she always comes home to Lucy and Kendra. Their tiny family unit becomes the anchor for the five of them as they navigate the world and try to deal with the trauma they’ve each experienced. The book thus highlights the importance of having a family and a home, even when people must figure out how to cobble them together for themselves without help or a solid pattern to go by. In many ways, by dint of her geographic stability, Lucy becomes the mother to everyone in her chosen family, not just Kendra.
Themes
Two days later, when Clara goes to the Friendship Center for George’s presentation, she discovers a sign on a bulletin board advertising the Native Courtworkers’ Society. The Courtworkers provide free services for Indigenous people in the legal system. Clara copies down the number, calls the Society and soon, she has embarked on the six-month training course necessary to be certified under the mentorship of a woman named Rose.
Clara’s time with Mariah gave her an opportunity to heal some of her physical and emotional wounds. She’s now ready for the next step in her journey, which the notice on the bulletin board provides. The Courtworkers advocate for and protect vulnerable Indigenous people in the court system, and starting a career as one gives Clara the opportunity to use her protective instincts proactively instead of reactively or destructively.
Themes
Clara struggles to understand how Rose can adopt—and maintain—such a calm and polite demeanor despite the way that some judges treat their Indigenous clients. Rose explains that it isn’t her job to change the world or to confront individual prejudice, but to keep Indigenous people out of jail. Mouthing off will threaten that mission. And it won’t help their clients. This is a tough pill for Clara to swallow at first, but over the months of her training, she eventually realizes that Rose is right. Lucy helps Clara study in the evenings, when Kendra is asleep, and although she nearly freezes on test day, Clara passes and is soon hard at work advocating for others. Her first client is a teenager just released from residential school at 18, who shoplifted some apples from a grocery store because the school sent him away with neither food nor money.
Like Mariah, Rose takes on a maternal role as Clara’s mentor. She helps Clara to understand how to channel her feelings toward making the world better rather than wasting her energy in useless destruction. Clara’s actions still emphasize the injustices and cruelty the residential school system visited on Indigenous people and the racism which created and sustained those injustices and cruelties, though. Her first client is a victim like Clara, Lucy, and the others, kept at the school for as long as he was useful, then abandoned arbitrarily—the school system, it’s clear, has no real concern for the client’s wellbeing. Nor does the criminal justice system which would, without people like Clara, simply lock him up again, further victimizing him.
Themes
