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Chapter 17: Clara
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
After giving his testimony, Howie goes home and settles in for the winter, with some help from Maggie. Months later, a letter arrives from the lawyers, telling him how much compensation he will receive. It takes him four days to even be willing to open the envelope.
For the first time in his life, Howie has a safe place to go after he gives his harrowing testimony. He sinks into his house through the winter, letting the quiet and peace there work on healing him. It’s good that he has found this peace, too, because although the monetary compensation is a bonus, it can’t truly redress the harm he suffered.
Themes
In the spring, Howie thoroughly cleans and spruces up the house before Clara’s arrival. She approves of the hard work he put in finishing the corral. And she likes the two horses he keeps there—one for him and one for her. That night, after he’s fallen asleep, Clara sits at the kitchen table thinking about Maisie’s death, Lucy’s obsessiveness, and Kenny’s compulsive need to run away. When she thinks of Lily, she now sees the happy girl from her dream. She digs into her bag to retrieve the three glass bottles Mariah gave her at the end of their first winter together, so many years earlier. She carries them to the three poplar trees which stand next to the house and suspends them from the branches with their hide ties. Then she slips back into Howie’s bed and falls asleep as the bottles’ tinkling sound welcomes her home.
Howie’s home isn’t complete until he has someone—Clara—to share it with. And for the first time in her life, Clara feels like she’s truly ready to put down her own roots with Howie, so she hangs up the windchimes and welcomes the spirits which used to sing to her in her childhood (and at Mariah’s cabin) back into her life. But Clara’s and Howie’s happy ending is balanced against the tragedies of Maisie’s and Kenny’s deaths—and the many smaller ways in which survivors of the residential schools endure ongoing trauma, like Lucy’s obsessive counting. Thus the book holds out hope for redemption while also reminding readers that it isn’t an easy—or assured—path. This, in turn, keeps a focus on the guilt of those who created, perpetuated, and tolerated the systems of oppression that touched so many Indigenous people’s lives, It also pointedly reminds readers that there are some crimes that cannot be recompensed, but only acknowledged and honored.
Themes
