Peter:
Your suggestion is based upon two flawed assumptions:
1. That your Indigo Mac (or her eMac) will go on working indefinitely; and
2. That Pages' later updates will continue to import Appleworks files.
If the information is important to the OP, then she should convert them now, while she can.
In an analagous situation, last year I needed to access some financial information of mine from the mid-1980s. In that era I compiled my financial information on an Apple //-class computer in first Home Accountant and then Time is Money (a much faster program, but harder to export data).
Although I continue to have a functioning Apple //c and backup copies of all of my floppy data; I decided not to risk running these 5-1/4" 25+year old floppies through the many read cycles that would be necessitated by the original programs.
Instead, I purchased a hardware serial cable and some software that allowed me to connect my Apple //c's serial port to the USB port of one of my Mac Mini's and then convert each floppy to an image file on the Mac. I then purchased Virtual ][, an Apple //e emulation program for the Mac.
I was then able to access my Time is Money files for the mid-80s and "print" the necessary reports to the Mac in PDF files. I could then copy and paste this information into Microsoft Excel on the Mac and with some minor "cleaning" have a full spreadsheet of the financial data I required in a fully functioning spreadsheet.
I did not stop there: I converted all of my Apple // floppies (both 5-1/4" and 3.5") to Mac image files and to further "future-proof" myself, I went into each calendar year and "printed" a complete "detail" report of every financial transaction of that year into a PDF and converted that to a TXT file as well.
Although a little unwieldly, I now have access in today technology to all of my historical financial transactions and as technology continues to change, I can move them again to the next technological level.