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Chapter 13: 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
Kenny wakes up, massively hung over, in a flophouse with a strange woman. He digs a relatively clean shirt from the pile of clothes he keeps in a black trash bag, gets dressed, and stumbles to the Two Jays Café for some coffee. As he revives himself with caffeine, he peruses the newspaper. An article describing the lawsuit victims of the residential school system are bringing against the Canadian government catches his eye. He carefully tears it out, pockets it, pays for his coffee, and heads to a payphone to call Lucy. She tells him to come over, even though it means he’ll have to face his angry daughter Kendra.
The story skips forward many years, although it doesn’t reveal that until it becomes clear that Kendra is now an adult. In this way, it suggests how deep and lingering Kenny’s wounds are—they persist through time. But although some things have stayed the same, others have changed. The lawsuit suggests that public perspectives about the residential school system have shifted in the decades since Kenny and the others got out. The book’s final chapters will explore the promises—and limitations—of these attempts at finding justice.
Themes
Kendra berates Kenny for continually abandoning her and Lucy. Lucy protects Kenny by sending Kendra out for the day. She puts Kenny into a hot bath, brings him clean clothes, and cooks him food. As he eats, they marvel at how much time has passed. Kendra is now 23 and in college. Kenny shows Lucy the article about the lawsuit. She doesn’t think that it will change anything. It certainly can’t go back and undo the damage of the past. But Kenny is curious, and he plans to go to the Friendship Center to see if Clara knows anything about it.
Kendra’s anger points toward the long shadow cast by the residential schools. Kenny’s time there damaged him. It also damaged his mother Bella and his relationship with her. And it’s damaged Kenny’s relationship with his own family—Lucy and Kendra. Still, it’s not all bad. Lucy’s stability and Kenny’s financial support have given Kendra a much better childhood and opportunities than they had—even if it hasn’t been perfect.
Themes
That evening, Kenny and Kendra have a few minutes to talk privately when Lucy steps out of the house to buy cream. Kendra is still angry, but now she’s willing to talk to Kenny. She spent the day at the Friendship Center. While she was there, Clara told her some things about the residential school—and about Kenny’s escape attempts—that have given her more insight. She encourages her parents to attend a meeting about the survivors’ lawsuit.
Earlier, Lucy warned Kenny that he’d owe Kendra an explanation. Getting one—even though it comes from Clara, not her father—does soften her anger a little bit. She starts to see what readers already know, that Kenny has done the best he could despite the horrific things that happened to him—things that made him into the man he is now.
Themes
At the meeting one of the lawyers representing the survivors expresses his confidence that they will win. He invites anyone who wants to participate to speak with him privately afterwards. Kenny puts his name on the list. While he waits to be called, he wonders how many of the attendees he knows but doesn’t recognize from his time at the school. He remembers running into Wilfred. And then Howie comes up to him, drawing him into an embrace and struggling to hold back sobs.
Kenny and the others were taken from their families during a period of so many separations that it’s been retroactively named the “Sixties Scoop.” As Kenny looks around the room, his musings suggest both the breadth and depth of this communal trauma. So many kids were taken, it’s impossible for him to know them all. And some of them, like Kenny, were so changed by their trauma that they became unrecognizable to themselves and others.
Themes
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Clara, Lucy, Howie, and Kenny chitchat for a few minutes before the lawyer calls Kenny. He spends half an hour rehashing his most painful memories in detail with the lawyer. The experience is so upsetting that he vomits afterwards, and he can’t wait to get out of the Friendship Center. He declines Lucy’s offer to go home and puts her onto a bus before going out and drinking himself into a blackout.
As elsewhere, the book here hints at the trauma its characters suffered instead of putting it on full display for readers. The book, in short, asks readers to trust victims’ pain without tokenizing it. And it’s clear from his reaction that whatever Kenny isn’t saying directly in front of readers is truly awful.
Themes
In the morning, the sound of someone opening the door wakes Kenny. Surprisingly, he feels good. Better than good: he feels twenty years younger, and the incessant pain of his dying liver has vanished. But then he realizes his perspective is skewed. He seems to be looking down on himself as two paramedics put his body on a stretcher. Then Bella is at his side, explaining how he will pass into the afterlife. Kenny can see his village as it was when he was a child, before he and the others were taken. Then other scenes from the past begin to flash through his mind: memories of the Indian School, Kendra as a baby, the logging camps, and Lucy in her kitchen.
Like Maisie, Kenny dies without finding redemption. But this extended scene of his passage into the afterlife shows him finding peace, which comes through the restoration of everything that was taken from him when the authorities kidnapped him as a child. This isn’t to say that there weren’t moments of happiness and peace in his life. But this passage suggests that nothing in life could have been enough to make up for what the residential school from him.
Themes
When Kenny’s mind settles, he’s watching Lucy identify his body in the morgue. The authorities won’t let her touch him, but she insists on being given space to say goodbye. Kenny calls out that he’s okay, and she seems to hear him. After she leaves, Kenny turns to the spirit of his mother, Bella. She apologizes for the despair-fueled alcoholism that caused her to neglect him after he came home. He tells her that he never blamed her; they were all victims of the residential school system. On the fourth day, Bella instructs Kenny to turn back toward the village. It seems more substantial now. A line of drummers sing a travelling song for him there as he watches his funeral take place in the living world. He catches Lucy’s tears in his incorporeal hands and holds them in his hand as he departs.
Lucy must fight to claim Kenny’s—and her own—human dignity even after his death. The medical examiner’s staff treat her with suspicion rather than kindness. But she refuses to let them dictate who she and Kenny are allowed to be, and thus shows off her own strength and hard-earned sense of self-worth. Tragically, Bella didn’t find a similar sense of possibility until after her death but demonstrates her own strength by taking responsibility for how her actions harmed Kenny. Importantly, Kenny reminds her—and readers—that the true blame lies in the system that harmed both. She is a much a victim as him, or Lucy, or even Kendra.
Themes
