Five Little Indians

“‘I just don’t know what to do.’ Bella squeezed Kenny’s hand. ‘It’s like most of me is gone and I can’t get it back.’”

Bella tries to explain to her son why she’s having so much difficulty coping with life even though he has returned. His absence for so many years and the uncertainty of ever seeing him again have damaged her psyche permanently. Now, she believes she can only numb that chronic inner void through alcohol.

“Behind the card she found five well-worn five-dollar bills. Lucy tucked the bills back into the envelope and carefully placed it in her new purse. An impermeable darkness filled her in the face of this appalling kindness.”

Sister Mary has just sent Lucy out into the world with a holy card and money. Lucy is stunned that the nun is capable of any act of kindness after so many years of casual cruelty. The hypocrisy of the gesture only increases Lucy’s confusion.

“She smiled at me, with her sad Lucy eyes. I remembered watching her sitting with the little girls but always by herself. Quiet. Always alone. Almost invisible.”

Maisie is observing Lucy shortly after she arrives in Vancouver. At the Mission, Lucy tried her best to remain invisible. This was a defense mechanism against the vicious attentions of Father Levesque and Sister Mary. Her invisibility also suggests the degree to which she has been drained of life during her years in school so that she almost resembles a ghost.

“To be little again, living without fear and brutality—no one gets that back. All that’s left is a craving, insatiable empty place.”

Maisie is talking about her own childhood. She is also unconsciously explaining the motivation for her risky behavior in the present moment. Her sexual encounters with the old white man, cutting her skin, and her drug addiction are all intended to distract her from that endless emptiness.

“When I first got out of the Mission, I only had to go out maybe once a month, sometimes once every two months even, and I would be fine.

That unbearable panic and urge to scream that I could barely suppress would ease. But now, it seemed like every day all day, it was all I could think of.”

Again, Maisie is talking about her inability to control the emotional instability that began during her years in school. Her condition deteriorates once Lucy comes to live with her. Maisie is reminded of her terrible experiences at the Mission but doesn’t seek help to confront her demons. Instead, she numbs herself to them and dies. 

“When I get sick of people telling me what to do, I think of those bells. Man, if you didn’t get where you were supposed to be when those bells rang, shit, there was hell to pay.”

Wilfred is talking about the regimented existence at the Mission. Every moment of the children’s lives is regulated by a bell. Once Wilfred mentions the bell, Kenny finally recognizes him. The two have been apart for years, but they remember one another because of their shared trauma.

“In the evenings, the Manitou’s neon sign filled her kitchen with a soft red light. She often sat at her kitchen table, smoking, calm in the red hue, even though it reminded her from time to time of the illuminated exit sign in the dorm. Sometimes she wondered if it was there just to taunt them, to remind them there was no exit, no escape.”

Lucy has now taken an apartment directly across the street from the motel where she works. In a sense, she has recreated her imprisonment at the Mission by living in such proximity to a place that exploits her as the nuns and priests did. Lucy acknowledges that there was no escape from her childhood prison, but she fails to draw the parallel to the adult prison she is building.

“Not a day without fear. Through it all, she had relied on Kenny. Not just for his encouraging notes and shy smiles, but because he ran and ran and ran. He would not let them beat him. And he believed in her. He even told her so. He was not as hollow then as he was now.”

Lucy has just reconnected with Kenny in Vancouver. Ironically, she admires him for the one quality that will make her own life so difficult in years to come. Though Kenny loves her, he will also end up running from Lucy.

“Clara watched as the leaves of the little tree captured the light, shining silvery and soft. The old woman looked at her with eyes as black as night and placed her hand over Clara’s. ‘The power of Creation is everywhere. In the tree, in you, in all of them.’ She gestured to the others. ‘Never forget.’”

Clara is in jail for the night and believes she is having a conversation with another inmate. In reality, she is receiving a vision of Mariah, whom she hasn’t met yet. In years to come, she will value the old woman’s advice. The tree in the prison yard is echoed in the trees in Clara’s yard at the end of the novel, where she will hang wind chimes and assert that she has come home.

“Weeds. She remembered George telling her once that Indians were like weeds to the white people. Something to be wiped out so their idea of a garden could grow. He told her weeds were indigenous flowers.”

George and the other activists at AIM are instrumental in inspiring Clara to view herself differently. Growing up surrounded by white people, Clara defined herself as an aberration. Among Indigenous people, she sees herself as a natural part of their world, not something that needs to be uprooted or transformed.

“Clara felt the same way she had back then, with those lilting songs dancing among the shimmering birch leaves. Something that had been gone a long time filled her again, like her heart had suddenly started beating again after a long silence.”

Clara associates trees with life and an authentic sense of self. She makes this statement after hearing the Indian speakers at the Friendship Centre talking about AIM. Their focus on activism dispels her lifelong feelings of helpless rage.

“‘We all know you shouldn’t be in here, but you got to help yourself. You gotta play the game, say the words.’ ‘I can’t. Don’t you get it? That would be like saying that it was okay for that monster to do what he did to us. I just can’t.’”

Howie is talking to a sympathetic prison guard after his most recent parole hearing. Despite the guard’s misgivings, Howie will benefit from telling the truth. If he agreed that assaulting Brother was wrong, he might still be in prison. By remaining true to himself, Howie ultimately convinces the authorities that his complaints are legitimate.

“Every night now I woke, unable to breathe, choking on memories and the irrational fear that I was back there, a child again, Brother stalking me in my bed.”

Howie has recently been released from jail and is now trying to build a life for himself in Vancouver. As all the other children have discovered, being physically free does nothing to liberate them from their internal prisons. Howie doesn’t start to have nightmares until after he is out of jail, suggesting that he still needs to confront the figurative prison within his mind.

“How many lives, besides hers and mine, were broken down like garbage in the name of this cross? I wrapped the cross in one of the hotel towels and stuck it in a paper grocery bag, pulled my jacket on and headed for the pawnshop.”

Howie has just broken into a Catholic cathedral. He hopes to steal enough costly religious paraphernalia to finance a new start away from the city. By choosing to rob a church, Howie is expressing his rage at the atrocities committed in the name of religion against himself and his mother, not to mention the other unnamed victims of the same corrupt system.

“Clara, the separation between us and all who have come before us, that long line of ancestors, is nothing more than perception. Our teachings, the sweat and other ceremonies, they show us how to open our spirits so we can perceive and be open to the guidance of the ancients. You are so filled with rage. It will eat you alive, child. That is not our way.”

Mariah is trying to give Clara an understanding of the value of ancestral connections. The elderly healer feels connected to all of her people who have lived and died before. Clara has been raised in isolation from those principles. She needs to reestablish her own connection with her people to avoid the self-destructive consequences of her rage.

“Sister Mary would’ve knocked her on the head if she saw a return to such savagery. It pleased Clara, thinking of that evil woman and how she would see her Christian mission as failed, seeing Clara in the hands of this pagan.”

Clara initially resists the idea of participating in a sweat lodge ceremony because her Christian upbringing has convinced her that it is evil. After months in Mariah’s company, Clara is ready to embrace her native culture. In the process, she takes some satisfaction in thumbing her nose at the Mission and its failed mission.

“Life was no longer just survival. It was about being someone. An Indian someone, with all the truth that was born into her at the moment she was placed in her mother’s womb.”

Having completed the sweat lodge ceremony, Clara feels reborn. A vital part of her psychological healing is the recognition that she belongs to the Indian people. She doesn’t have to pretend to be white. Her Indian heritage is more than enough to make her worthy of a happy life.

“It was just a matter of days when he was home last before those restless urges were on him. It was not for a lack of love, but something inside him that drove him, something he could never explain to Lucy, much less himself. A pressure that only eased up if he was on the move.”

Kenny is feeling the urge to flee even after he has established a stable, long-term relationship with Lucy. He fails to realize that he is really trying to escape himself and the negative messages about his worth that were imprinted on him by the abusers at the Mission. Rather than confronting these lies, Kenny spends his life fleeing from them.

“This was about those people standing helpless before the law, often for just trying to get by in a world they’d been abandoned to, entirely unprepared.”

Clara is angry at the legal system and the diplomatic games she needs to play to function within it. However, she realizes that indulging her sense of rage won’t help the people she is trying to protect. She also keys on the fundamental reason why lost Indian children end up in jail. Nobody prepared them for the outside world.

“Lucy leaned back in her chair, hands folded in her lap. ‘They call us survivors.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I don’t think I survived. Do you?’”

Lucy is having this conversation with Kenny. By the end of the novel, neither character has really escaped their internal prisons. Other characters voice the same sentiment at various points in the story. As Clara and Howie learn, the only way to escape the inner abuser is to stand up to it. Then, survival becomes possible.

“‘Lucy, maybe if I can say what I need to say, things will be better. Maybe this is the way to get it out of me once and for all.’ He looked at her and took her hand, stuck it in his jacket pocket and held it tight. ‘Maybe we could have a future if I could get over the past.’”

Kenny understands the therapeutic value of telling his story to a lawyer. He hopes to purge himself of his self-hatred. However, because of his tendency to drift, he never formed a solid enough connection with his own people to ground him. His conversation with the attorney will only reactivate the worst of the memories he has tried to suppress. 

“Child, he loved you more than life. Me too. It was himself he couldn’t love. They did that to him. Whatever they didn’t break in him, they bent. They beat him and beat him so many times I couldn’t even count.”

Lucy is trying to explain to Kendra why Kenny is always on the run. Kendra hates her father because he is absent from her life. Nobody takes the time to explain to her how Kenny’s abusive childhood shaped his perception of himself as worthless.

“It’s not even the money, Clara. It’s about telling my story. Having my say after all these years. Not just me, but for the ones who can’t speak out. Like Kenny. Like my mom.”

Howie goes through the same interview process as Kenny did, but the outcome is different. He finds the conversation with his attorney freeing. The difference is that Howie has already grounded himself in Indian culture by returning to his mother’s home. He has also formed a bond of emotional support with Clara. If Kenny had the means to ground himself instead of running, his outcome might have been different.