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.
Themes
The Failure of the Assimilation Theory
The principle that drove the creation of the residential school system was assimilation. It was once believed that removing Indian children from their traditional context and indoctrinating them with the ways of the larger culture would make it easier for them to blend into society as adults.
Good’s novel illustrates the reality of children released from the system. During their time in school, they learn no useful skills, and their education is barely rudimentary. Instead, they are generally exploited as a source of free labor to keep the institution running when they aren’t being emotionally or sexually abused by the staff.
Lucy’s confusion is evident during her initial journey to Vancouver after being set free at the age of 16. Her experience is analogous to releasing a tame animal into the wild and expecting it to survive independently. The instructors at the schools ingrained docility and obedience into their pupils. These traits are useless to an innocent in an urban environment: “Wide awake now, Lucy pressed her face against the window, astounded by the lights, the endless flow of traffic, stores and malls and gas stations, things entirely new to her. Her life in the outside world ended abruptly when she was five years old” (38).
Without Lucy’s single tenuous connection to Maisie, she might have been forced into sex work before her first day of freedom was over. As it is, her lot in life is initially little better. She spends her days cleaning a transient motel for less than minimum wage. She doesn’t know how to cook for herself because all her meals, such as they were, were provided by the school. Eventually, Lucy finds a way out of poverty by educating herself and attending nursing school, but the Mission did nothing to improve her chances of surviving in a white world.
Although Howie escapes the school at the age of nine, he finds himself thrown back into the system as an adult after he attacks Brother. He spends seven years in prison, and his exit from that institution is just as tentative as Lucy’s. Howie, too, is an innocent who is cast out on the streets of Vancouver to make his own way. He takes a bus ride to cash a check, and even this small action is fraught with difficulty: “I got off, not sure if it was the right stop. I had about an hour before the banks closed, and the guys back at the institution had warned me that it would be hard to cash the cheque issued on my release with no bank account” (168). Like Lucy, Howie learns to depend on a network of Indian friends instead of government institutions to find shelter and a job.
Post-Abuse Coping Strategies
People who have lived through an experience of abuse are often regarded as survivors. While this description is intended to emphasize the courage that it takes to go on living, Five Little Indians makes it clear that living is not the same as surviving. Clara tells Mariah, “We were children, me and Lily, and neither of us survived, even though I’m still walking” (198). Though Clara has made it to adulthood, she still carries the trauma of the Mission inside her mind. Lucy makes a similar comment later in a conversation with Kenny: “Lucy leaned back in her chair, hands folded in her lap. ‘They call us survivors.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I don’t think I survived. Do you?’” (251).
Those who endured abuse at the Mission find a variety of unhealthy coping strategies to deal with their chronic psychological pain. Lucy has developed an obsessive-compulsive disorder and aggressively cleans her house or counts objects whenever she grows anxious. Maisie has a toxic sexual relationship with an anonymous old white man, and she cuts her skin to induce bleeding whenever her self-loathing becomes too intense. She also uses drugs to escape her demons: “The needle slid in, he drew back blood and then he pressed the plunger in all the way. The peace. No pain. No jitters. I puked and then slumped into the euphoria. I barely registered their laughter” (72). Lucy’s arrival at her apartment reactivates Maisie’s suppressed memories, and Maisie’s coping mechanisms can no longer relieve her pain. She believes that her only solution is to overdose on heroin to escape completely.
Kenny suffers similarly to Maisie and uses alcohol to soothe his self-hatred. In choosing this coping mechanism, he follows in his mother’s footsteps because she turned to alcohol after he was taken away. Kenny doesn’t exhibit the same tendency until much later. Initially, he tries to outrun his demons by fleeing whenever people start to crowd too close around him. In the end, he needs to supplement his panic escapes with alcohol, which eventually kills him. Kenny’s mother speaks to him after his death: “When you fought so hard to get home and I couldn’t crawl out of the bottle for you. My heart was so broken with you gone. But I should have been stronger” (260). The coping strategies of all the Mission children suggest that while they had the strength to live, many of them didn’t have the means to survive.
Finding Home
Part of the reason for the residential school system was to disrupt the transmission of Indian culture from one generation to the next. Some survivors left the system with no memory of their native language, so they could not even communicate with their remaining family members.
Five Little Indians emphasizes that the disruption of normal kinship ties had catastrophic effects on the mental health of the affected families. Although Kenny reunites with his mother after four years at the Mission, the two cannot seem to connect like they used to: “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. Kenny started spending more time at the docks, visiting the fishermen and making friends” (23). The consequence is that Kenny’s mother develops an alcohol use disorder, and Kenny flees.
Even though Howie was rescued by his mother after three years at the Mission, the two are separated later when he goes to prison for assaulting Brother. His mother dies while he is still incarcerated, leaving a gap in Howie’s family history as well. When he finally does return to his mother’s home, it no longer seems familiar to him:
An emptiness overtook him as he drove back to his mother’s little house. The shed out back, grey, weather-beaten and distinctly listing, looked as though it might collapse at any moment […] In fact, the day of his arrival, he’d had to ask for directions to the house because it had changed so much from his boyhood memories (271-272).
Clara is the only one of the Mission children who succeeds in establishing an inner sense of home. Her healing results from a connection with traditional Indian culture through Mariah, who says, “Remember, this is a place of healing. I am your family now and this place is yours forever. When things get tough, remember the medicine and never forget, you will always have your angels” (203).
Clara’s connection to Mariah undoes the damage of Clara’s childhood. Mariah’s cabin represents a physical space where Clara can feel grounded once more. She even brings Lily’s remains back to Mariah’s property so her deceased friend can rest in land that belongs to Indigenous people:
‘We found you, Lily. We brought you home,’ Clara whispered. Kendra put an arm around her. ‘I couldn’t leave you there after what they did to you. We finally got to go home. You and me both’ (3).
Clara not only finds a safe haven for her friend but a place to build a future life with Howie on the Red Pheasant Reserve in Saskatchewan. When she ties her bottle wind chimes to a tree in their yard, the act symbolizes her claim to a real home of her own at last: “She stood back, arms folded, watching them glint in the moonlight, the defiant poplars dancing ever so slightly […] the tinkling her song of home” (292).
