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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
On the night of Lucy’s “best day ever,” Clara stays at the bar long after Lucy and Liz leave. A white man tries to proposition her, saying that he heard “all you Indian chicks [are] easy,” and when he refuses to leave her alone, she attacks him like she attacked Harlan. The bouncers escort her out. A police officer on the street warns her to get out of the neighborhood if she wants to avoid arrest. She tells him she’s going home, but instead she wanders back to the Manitou where she spends a few hours sitting across the street at the bus stop, watching the sex workers and their johns come and go. She ruminates on Harlan’s cruelty—not just the way he insulted Lucy, but also the times he’s tried to coerce Clara into having sex with him.
Clara entered Lucy’s story as a dogged protector. This episode at the bar shows readers where some of her protectiveness comes from. But her anger arises from her own terrible residential school experiences and the ongoing racism, prejudice, and predatory behavior she’s had to endure since. The book forces readers to confront the uncomfortable fact that many of the Indigenous women considered “easy” by people like the white man experienced abused at the hands of the adults charged with taking care of them when they were children.
Themes
Then Clara’s memories return to the mission school, and her friend Lily. She remembers waking up on a brutally cold morning, then Lily succumbing to a coughing fit during morning prayers. Instead of worrying about Lily’s ill health, Sister rebuked her for failing to “contain [herself],” then assigned her and Clara the unenviable chore of cleaning out the goats’ enclosure. Only a few minutes after they started, Lily began to cough again. She collapsed with blood trickling from her mouth. Although Clara spent all day pleading with God to heal her friend in one “epic prayer,” Lily died in the night.
Some of Clara’s trauma arises from her perceived inability to protect her friend Lily, who died of tuberculosis. This and other highly contagious diseases circulated widely at residential schools thanks to poor nutrition, poor sanitation, and overcrowding. Sister’s callous disregard for Lily’s health—she seems to view the girl’s illness as an attempt to shirk work—speaks to how inhumanely the staff at the mission school treated the children supposedly in their care.
Themes
Clara sees Lily’s face in her mind’s eye as she heaves a softball-sized rock through the front window of the Manitou. Its alarm sounds as she runs away, trying to get out of the area before the police respond. But the same officer who warned her off earlier catches her and throws her in the drunk tank. Clara finds a spot to sit between an old Indigenous woman and the window. The old woman points out the window at a small birch tree planted in the verge between the street and the sidewalk. The woman gently touches Clara and tells her that “the power of Creation is everywhere,” even in her.
Like Kenny and Maisie earlier, Clara perceives the relationship between her actions in the present and the things she suffered in the past. Smashing the window of the hotel owned and run by a white man she dislikes represents her attempt to fight back at the systems of oppression that victimized her and Lily by declaring that their Indigenous identities were unworthy of participating in white society. Clara is rewarded with a night in jail to sleep off the effects of her alcohol binge. Again, society sees—and punishes—the behavior without understanding its causes. But this marks a turning point for Clara. Seeing the birch tree from the jail window is a spiritual experience for her because it reminds her that there is more than just pain and suffering in the world.
Themes
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Clara goes back father into the past in her mind, remembering the walk home from church on her last day with her mother. As a child, Clara loved going to church, hearing the Bible stories, and singing the songs she learned in Sunday School. The homeward path wound through a grove of silver birch trees, and on that day, Clara thought she heard angels playing among them. The next morning, she and other children from the reservation were loaded on trucks and sent to the mission school, where Sister cut off her braids and forced her into a school uniform.
Although this memory is as tinged with loss as that of Lily—the absence of Clara’s mother from the novel’s present implies that she’s dead—it also reminds Clara that she has the capacity to forge meaningful relationships with other people. And her memory speaks to the violence of the school; although it was a religious institution, it destroyed Clara’s sense of connection with the divine.
Themes
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Clara shakes herself from her reverie and turns to speak to the old woman. But the old woman isn’t there. In the morning, Clara asks the guard where she went, and he says that there was no old woman in the tank. He thinks Clara hallucinated it in her drunken stupor. Leaving the station, Clara bums a cigarette. She stands smoking it with her hand on the birch tree.
The school might have compromised Clara’s spirituality, but it did not destroy it completely. Her mystical vision of the old woman proves that she can recover and heal that part of herself, if she chooses to. And the fact that she visits the birch tree on her way home hints that she will choose to, eventually.
Themes
