I finished rereading Métis writer Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 novel The Marrow Thieves yesterday–good thing, since I’m teaching it next week. I taught it seven or eight years ago, and at some point during that semester I met Dimaline, who was here giving a talk. I’d forgotten about that, or that I got my copy signed, but when I saw the inscription, I remembered telling her I was teaching the book and that her bank account was $35 richer as a result. On the book’s title page, she wrote, “For Ken–the light in my bank account.” Without that inscription, I might not have remembered that conversation. Why I forgot about it I don’t know. I remember liking her quite a bit–her confident energy and her friendliness were appealing.
Such recollections might be all I’m capable of today. I feel drained of insight, but I started this post, so I need to say something halfway intelligent, if that’s possible. The Marrow Thieves seamlessly brings together post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and young-adult fiction. It’s set in the 2050s, after war, the ongoing climate catastrophe, and other forms of pollution have rendered large parts of Ontario almost uninhabitable. Since the polar ice caps have melted, it rains constantly, but there’s little to drink, because much surface water has become toxic sludge. As a result of this apocalypse, the majority of the population–descendants of settlers–have lost the ability to dream. Literally dream, that is, not imagine the future or fantasize. First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, though, have retained that capability, and it’s somehow connected to their bone marrow. Without dreams, people are going crazy. The government’s response: to recreate something like the Indian Residential School system, except this time, instead of trying to eliminate Indigenous languages, cultures, and ceremonies, it is harvesting their bone marrow so that settlers can regain the ability to dream. The government’s Recruiters are everywhere, rounding up likely looking suspects. They’re dressed like gym teachers, with running shoes, shorts, and whistles, except that they also carry pistols. Like the people responsible for residential schools in our past, they’re remorseless.
The narrator of almost all of the book is Frenchie, a 16-year-old Anishinaabe boy with the usual problems a 16-year-old boy has, along with new ones that go along with the way settler colonialism has metastasized in his lifetime. He’s become separated from his family and is on the run in northern Ontario with a small group of Indigenous people, mostly children and teenagers, shepherded by Miigwans, who teaches the kids how to survive, and Minerva, who has other essential abilities. They constantly watch for the Recruiters and snitches that seem to be everywhere in the forest. In two chapters, the narration shifts to two other characters, Wab and Miigwans, who tell their stories about how they found themselves part of the group. That’s an interesting writing decision, and I wonder why more of the characters don’t also get to tell their “coming-out” stories, and why the focus is on those two. If I had to speculate, Miigwans is included because he’s central to the story, and Wab’s experience is perhaps the most difficult of the group, although nobody has had an easy time. It’s hard to say, though, because we don’t get a lot of detailed information about the rest.
The Marrow Thieves was a big success, winning a Governor General’s Literary Award and being made into a feature film. I like the book better than the movie (of course), mostly because the movie stays close to Toronto, as I recall, while the book shows the characters on the run far from the big city. Given the omnipresent danger of the Recruiters, heading for the woods is more believable and frankly more sensible than going underground in the south.
The adolescent narrator makes this a young-adult book, but it works for older folks, too, particularly the ending, which is quite moving. I like the touches of the fantastic: the way that First Nations languages become weapons against the colonizers in a literal fashion, which echoes their essential role in what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls resurgence and resistance, and the way the ability to dream is rooted deep in the body. The dystopian framework feels all-too-possible, sadly. In interviews, Dimaline talks about the easy fit between Indigenous experience and the notion of an apocalypse. “We have survived our apocalypse. I thought of the worst thing I could write about and it was stuff that had already happened,” she told The Globe and Mail in 2017. True enough. If the world were to come to an end, as more and more it seems to be doing, given the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, I’d want to hang out with people who had some experience with such catastrophes. For Dimaline, our current world is already post-apocalyptic. The notion that some limited form of collective survival is possible is oddly cheering. So too is The Marrow Thieves. I’d like to read more of Dimaline’s work. Maybe when this semester is finally in the rearview mirror.