Historical Context

The Canadian Indian residential school system

For over 160 years, the Canadian Indian residential school system played a major role in the settler-Canadian government’s regime to assimilate Indigenous communities into the Euro-Canadian culture, with the goal of eventually eliminating the “Indian Status”. For the longest time, the truth behind the residential school system remained hidden from the public. The last residential school didn’t close until 1996, and it wasn’t until 2008 that Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology over this integral part of Canadian history, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was established with the purpose of documenting the history and impacts of the residential school system, publishing its final report in 2015. Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves was written roughly in that same year. With its heartfelt language and engaging storyline, the novel touches on multiple themes in the Indigenous colonial and post-colonial history such as the reclamation and preservation of Indigenous languages, the Indigenous ways of knowing and family structures, the cyclical history of Indigenous oppression, etc., rendering the book an immediately well-received post-colonial literature.

Defiance of the traditional Bildungsroman genre

In her interview with Niranjana Iyer, Cherie Dimaline reflected on her conscious choice to write The Marrow Thieves into a young adult fiction, stating her hope that the work would reach young Indigenous readers making them feel less alone and out-of-place in the settler-colonial society. At the same time, The Marrow Thieves takes on the classical Western genre of Bildungsroman, which focuses on the development of the protagonist from childhood to maturity, usually through some kind of crisis. In the case of the novel in discussion, the author follows Frenchie’s “bildung” through the crisis that is the residential school system restored by the settler-Canadian government in response to the epidemic. The adoption of a popular Western literary genre allows The Marrow Thieves to reach non-Indigenous audiences while challenging the original Western intellectual apparatus that informs the genre. Traditionally, Bildungsroman consists of three developmental stages: Body – Mind – Spirit, that is linked to the racialized theory of human development: Savagery – Barbarism – Civilization (Europe). Indigenous people had previously been regarded in Western perception as primitive and did not possess the agency to progress and develop without the guidance of white settlers. J. A. Macrae, an Indian Affairs Department Inspector of the North West wrote in 1886: “The circumstances of Indian existence prevent him from following that course of evolution which has produced from the barbarian of the past the civilized man of today. It is not possible for him to be allowed slowly to pass through successive stages as we have done. He has been called upon suddenly and without warning to enter upon a new existence” [2]. Therefore, for Dimaline to even write in the Bildungsroman genre is an act of Indigenous defiance.

Epidemics/Plagues as a literary medium through which body politics is performed

In literature, plagues are often used as a metaphor for certain human brutality that spreads — just like the plague. While plagues are generally presented as undifferentiating destruction of a species, The Marrow Thieves demonstrates just the opposite of that. While epidemics start out being known as “natural disasters”, the impact they create are subject to the racial, gender, ableist differentiation of humans, revealing the true condition of the social, cultural, and political condition of the human society. In the book, the literal epidemic is a disease that causes people to lose the ability to dream; what is more horrifying, however, is the social and political disintegration that came with it — the reversal of previous humanistic progress and return to a genocidal regime. What the epidemic has been to the settler population in The Marrow Thieves, the residential schools have been to Indigenous communities across Canada. During the operation of the Canadian Indian residential school system that lasted from the 1880s to 1996, Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their homes [3], 150,000 children were separated from their families. Residential schools were cheaply built with little to no sanitation, and sick children were often not provided with any medical care [4]. In the 1907 Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and the North West Territories by Dr. P. H. Bryce, it was revealed that there was a 40%-60% mortality rate in the schools [5].

Habkirk describes the body as “a cultural text on and through which meanings can be inscribed” [6]. By staging the story in an epidemic, Cherie Dimaline demonstrates the body politics of Indigenous oppression in The Marrow Thieves. Historically, Indigenous bodies have been objectified by the settler-Canadian government, expendable in service of the political and economic needs of the settler society. For example, in residential schools, students were utilized as child labour in the name of “vocational training” to subsidize the expenditure of the schools [7]. In another example, beginning in the 1890s, cadet training was implemented in residential schools to assimilated Indigenous youths to the broader Christian Canadian culture. During the Second World War, Indigenous students enlisted in the military in order to escape residential schools [8]. The Indigenous population was therefore treated as an economic and military resource for the settler-Canadian government to tap into in addition to their assimilation regime. In The Marrow Thieves, the Indigenous population being targeted by the new residential school system to harvest their bone marrow, is thus a fictional iteration of this dark history of oppression.