Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves shows that Indigenous bodies are targeted by colonial settlers for their ability to dream with the land. These dreams, located in the bone marrow, allow Indigenous characters to survive by resisting colonial exploitation and climate change.
Paper long abstract
The proposed paper will provide an analytical reading of Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) in terms of its portrayal of nature as a living entity and a repository of cultural knowledge. The novel depicts dreaming as a storehouse of intergenerational memory, a weapon of epistemological resistance, and a site for imagining survivable futures beyond colonial-capitalist systems. Because dreaming is situated in the marrow, it makes Indigenous bodies the targets of extractivist violence by colonial settlers who have lost their capacity to dream. The author situates Indigenous futurism in a post-apocalyptic world of dystopian ecology in which climate crisis and colonial violence are interconnected. In this setting, nature provides the guidance and sustenance that are essential for the survival of Indigenous populations. It is not just a backdrop for the story but a space of refuge and survivance (survival and resistance) for Indigenous characters who nurture a reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world. For these reasons, Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves represents what scholars such as Grace Dillon and Kyle Whyte describe as Indigenous futurism’s dual purpose of confronting dystopian realities caused by colonial exploitation and connecting futurity to Indigenous philosophies of relationality. The novel resists the notion of apocalyptic finality by showing the inseparability of ecological and cultural survival.