Introduction
This exhibit examines Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 novel, The Marrow Thieves. The novel is set in 2050, a dystopian world where climate change has corrupted the health of the inhabitants of North America, causing them to lose the ability to dream. As a response, the settler-Canadian government restores the residential school system — except this time, it targets Indigenous people to harvest their bone marrow, which the settler government believes is the cure for the epidemic. The adventure of French and his friends unfolds in this dystopian epidemic world where settler-colonialism has been restored.
This exhibit tries to show two things. First, epidemics —plagues in general — as a literary medium through which body politics is revealed. Second, the very genre of the novel is a challenge to white Euro-centric narratives of futurism — the apocalypse discourse is not, contrary to common perception, universal. This exhibit will examine how the “epidemic apocalypse” is a worldview specific to and has focused on serving the preservation of the white-dominant power structure. By using the epidemic dystopian world as the setting of her story, Dimaline shows her readers an alternative futurist vision — Indigenous futurism.