Book
Summary
The novel, titled The Marrow Thieves, introduces a post-apocalyptic world where climate change has brought about an epidemic that has caused most of the North American population to lose their ability to dream — except Indigenous populations. The settler-Canadian government therefore restored the residential school system, targeting Indigenous people to harvest their bone marrow, which is what holds the ability to dream. In the beginning of the novel, Frenchie’s Mom and Dad have both been captured by the settler government. The story starts with Frenchie losing the last family he’s got, his brother Mitch, and unfolds around Frenchie’s coming-to story as he journeys up north with his Indigenous friends in quest for home. For this exhibit, I will be using my own copy of The Marrow Thieves. This young adult dystopian fiction was written by Cherie Dimaline, a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Community [1] between 2015 and 2016 and was published in 2017 by Comorant Books and printed in 2021. A previous version of “Frenchie’s Coming-to Story” was originally published by Theytus Editions in 2016.
Considering the novel from its medium of transmission
Orature, or oral literature, has a long history of being a major Indigenous literary form through which they express spiritual beliefs, encode moral and social values, and pass down frameworks for understanding the relationship between humans and nature. Dimaline’s novel, as both an Indigenous and post-colonial literature, takes textualized form. While this could be seen as assimilation into the Western conception associating literacy with textualization, it nevertheless benefits from the prevalence of the text and modern print technologies to promote Indigenous cultures and ways of knowing [2]. In fact, the novel itself is a linear narration of Frenchie and his friends’ adventure, interspersed with chapters titled “Story”, where Miig, the elder member of the group introduces the history of Indigenous contact with European colonizers through oral literature. Dimaline’s integration of orature into her work is an assertion of the Indigenous culture-specific voice.
[1] “Where my stories come from, which is to say, who I am.”, Cherie Dimaline, n.d., https://cheriedimaline.com/who-i-am. Accessed 12 June 2022.
[2] Fee, Margery. “Decolonizing Indigenous Oratures and Literatures of Northern British North America and Canada (Beginnings to 1960).” The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, Oxford University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199914036.013.040.