39 pages • 1 hour read
Michelle GoodFive Little Indians
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Three native American women gather for a ceremony at a cabin on the Red Pheasant Cree Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the 1990s. The eldest, Mariah, is a healer. Clara is an Indian activist who has survived the experience of growing up in a residential school. Kendra is her best friend’s daughter, now a doctor. They have come to Mariah to participate in the burial ceremony for another of Clara’s classmates named Lily, who died at the school. As they bury her remains, Clara says, “I couldn’t leave you there after what they did to you. We finally got to go home. You and me both” (3).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Kenny”
The story goes back in time to the early 1960s in coastal British Columbia to follow the experiences of 10-year-old Kenny. Like all his classmates, he was torn away from his family at the age of six to attend a government-mandated Indian Mission School, where the students are supposedly assimilated into mainstream culture. The children are denied contact with their birth families for years at a time, and some never see their relatives again.
Kenny has formed a bond with a female student named Lucy. Both have been publicly shamed for their behavior by Father Levesque and Sister Mary, the two principal authorities who run their school. Kenny has tried to escape the abusive Mission many times. During a previous escape attempt, he tried to alert the authorities to the priest’s sexual abuse of the students, but the police didn’t believe Kenny, and he was sent back.
The Indian School is located on an island with no other access to the mainland, so Kenny steals a boat and slips away. He searches for his Uncle Clifford, who owns a fishing boat in the Vancouver area. Clifford takes Kenny home to find his mother. The boy learns that his mother repeatedly wrote to the school, but none of her letters reached him. In the years since Kenny left, his mother has fallen into despair and drinks heavily. Although the two are overjoyed to reunite, they can no longer connect as they once did: “Neither of them spoke of their years apart, and over time the truth of their separation grew between them, like a silent wound, untended and festering” (23). Eventually, Kenny’s mother develops an alcohol use disorder, and Kenny finds work on a fishing boat away from home.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Lucy”
The story now shifts to cover the life of Kenny’s girlfriend, Lucy. She is now 16 and is about to be released from the school, though she isn’t sure they will let her go. Many of the Indian children remain as modern-day indentured servants who do the maintenance chores for the Mission.
Lucy has already spent a fair number of years as an unpaid maid who does the laundry and cleaning at the school. Over time, she has picked up the obsessive habit of cleaning things and counting things:
Lucy counted, a habit she had never slipped out of since that first day in the classroom when Sister had hit her over and over with her pointer stick because she didn’t know her letters. Now she counted everything, especially when she was nervous, which seemed to be more and more often (31).
Much to her surprise, Lucy learns that she will be allowed to leave. Sister Mary gives her some money and instructions on how to get to Vancouver. Lucy is an orphan and has no remaining family anywhere, but a former student named Maisie has written and invited Lucy to stay with her.
Lucy manages to find her way to Maisie’s apartment with the aid of a man she meets on the bus, but he tries to exploit her sexually. She escapes in time and finds her way to Maisie’s apartment. To Lucy’s great relief, Maisie takes her in.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Maisie”
The point of view now shifts to Maisie as the narrator. Maisie has a boyfriend named Jimmy and a job as a maid at a dive motel called the Manitou. She agrees to get Lucy a job there too. When Maisie finds out that her neighbor tried to use Lucy for sex, she beats him to a pulp.
Although Maisie is initially pleased to see Lily, their reunion brings up bad memories of the Mission. Both girls were sexually abused by Father Levesque, and this has created an inner rage that is hard for Maisie to control. She says:
I felt the pressure building, the need to get out. As much as I wanted her there, her presence seemed to suck the air right out of the place. Being close was just too close. Those crowded dorms weren’t easy to forget (55).
Maisie makes an excuse to go out at night, dodging both Lucy and Jimmy to keep a rendezvous with an old man that she routinely uses for sex. He calls her vile names while they copulate, just as Father Levesque did. Maisie seems to need this emotional and sexual abuse as a kind of release for her self-loathing. She also cuts herself to induce pain and bleeding. Neither form of self-abuse works as well as it once did, and Maisie needs to act out her self-destructive behavior more frequently.
When Jimmy finds out about Maisie’s aberrant sexual activities, he leaves her. Afterward, she demands a large supply of drugs from the old man. No longer able to control her self-hatred, Maisie dies by suicide via a heroin overdose.
Prologue-Chapter 3 Analysis
Five Little Indians begins with a Prologue that is set decades after the events described in the novel. It might more properly be considered an Epilogue because it represents a conclusion of sorts. Clara has finally succeeded in recovering Lily’s body from the Mission and burying her properly on an Indian reservation. This symbolic act expresses Clara’s conviction that both of them have finally returned home. The author’s intention in placing this material at the beginning of the story rather than at the end might have to do with the notion that finding home for the lost Mission children constitutes a new beginning—a fresh start.
In Clara’s case, this is certainly true because she has made her home on the reservation with Howie and has succeeded in healing the psychological damage from her childhood. This introductory material has no context or grounding until the end of the book. Perhaps, the author’s intention is to convey some of the confusion and loss of context that all the Mission children experienced when they were uprooted from their homes and tribal culture at the age of six.
The book’s first three chapters continue exploring the themes of loss of home and failure to assimilate by following the early experiences of Kenny, Lucy, and Maisie. Even though Kenny succeeds quite early in returning to his mother’s house, he has lost his connection to her. After Kenny is taken, his mother becomes depressed and develops an alcohol use disorder, from which she can’t recover even after his return. Kenny also cannot seem to slip back into their previous mother-child relationship. He begins a pattern of flight that will persist for the rest of his life.
Lucy represents the failure of the Mission system to prepare Indian children for life in mainstream culture. Lucy is tossed out of the toxic cocoon in which she has spent her childhood to fend for herself on the streets of Vancouver. She almost becomes a sex worker, like many other girls the Mission cast off. In reconnecting with Maisie, Lucy stabilizes her life. Ironically, Lucy’s arrival sends Maisie into a downward spiral of self-destruction that results in her suicide. In this segment, it becomes obvious that none of the children succeeded in assimilating into white culture. Worse still, Kenny, Lucy, and Maisie never find their way back home.
