The Marrow Thieves introduces the reader to a horrific post-apocalyptic world in which the majority of the population has lost the ability to dream—everyone, that is, except Indigenous populations, which are being targeted, kidnapped, and taken to residential schools where their bone marrow (which holds the ability to dream) is harvested. The novel follows Frenchie, a sixteen-year-old Métis boy, as he travels north with other Indigenous children, as well as middle-aged Miig and elderly Minerva. While the novel is a work of speculative fiction, the dystopian future that Dimaline presents isn't complete fantasy. She draws heavily on the history of Canadian residential schools, which operated in Canada in various forms for centuries, and goes to great lengths to show how this history would be shockingly easy to recreate under certain circumstances. With this, Dimaline pays particular attention to the specific ways in which white Canadians have historically targeted Indigenous people, and how, even decades after the official end of the residential schools, those same methods can prove to be just as effective and dangerous. In the face of this bleak reality, The Marrow Thieves becomes Dimaline's call to action for all Canadians, encouraging them to support Indigenous populations in keeping their culture alive by sharing their stories and native languages.
The very fact that the facilities where the government harvests Indigenous bone marrow are called "residential schools" in the novel's present makes it clear that the reality presented in the novel (which takes place sometime after 2050) is simply the current iteration of a dark and complex history of oppression, rather than a radically new idea. Canada's residential schools came into their power in 1876 with the specific goal of separating Indigenous children from their families and their cultures, and in doing so, "civilizing" children and assimilating them into mainstream Canadian culture. Students were banned from speaking their languages and practicing their spiritual beliefs to the point that many students forgot their native languages. This meant that when students did manage to visit their families, they couldn't communicate with them—and by severing this connection between the young and old, colonial powers were able to divorce children from their history and replace it with a story in which children were "saved" and were the recipients of huge favors from the Canadian government. This state of affairs is, importantly, not all that different from the way that the residential schools in the novel operate: Indigenous people who end up in the schools overwhelmingly don't come back out again, and when those people die, their language dies with them. The history of these schools is also something that the characters in The Marrow Thieves haven't forgotten: there are still Elders among them who were victims of the historical residential schools.
Through his actions, Miig suggests that one of the few avenues available to on-the-run Indigenous people to stand up to the government and to these false narratives is through storytelling and language. In particular, Miig advocates for the regular recitation of "Story," or the tale of how the world got to the place it is in the novel's present. As with the historical account of the residential schools, Story tells of how the government abused Indigenous people (adults and children alike) and treated them as disposable and a nuisance—that is, until it turned out that their bone marrow was a valuable natural resource. By regularly reciting Story for Frenchie and the other older children in the group, Miig does one of the few things he can to ensure that his adoptive children don't fall prey to whatever narrative the government is currently spinning about the atrocities taking place.
At the same time, the Elder Minerva regularly bestows "gifts," in the form of words in the Cree language, upon the children in the group. Like Miig’s storytelling, Minerva uses language to help the children connect with their more distant past and in doing so, with their cultural history—in a way that specifically counteracts the aims of the original residential schools and therefore, gives the Indigenous communities a way to begin to heal from some of these abuses. Throughout the novel, Dimaline suggests that Indigenous language is one of the most effective ways to maintain ties with one's culture and to counteract the residential schools. At one point in the novel, Miig and his group hear that when Recruiters captured Minerva and tried to harvest her bone marrow, she broke the extraction machines and the school burned down—all because she began singing traditional songs in the native language. With this, the novel makes the case that one of the most effective ways to stand up to and counteract the oppression of Indigenous people is by keeping Indigenous language and stories alive by passing them on to future generations. Doing so ensures that the history of Indigenous oppression isn't forgotten, minimized, or rationalized.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Cyclical Histories, Language, and Indigenous Oppression ThemeTracker
Cyclical Histories, Language, and Indigenous Oppression Quotes in The Marrow Thieves
I was nicknamed Frenchie as much for my name as for my people—the Metis. I came from a long line of hunters, trappers, and voyageurs. But now, with most of the rivers cut into pieces and lakes left as grey sludge puckers on the landscape, my own history seemed like a myth along the lines of dragons.
[...] I did have the longest hair of any of the boys, almost to my waist, burnt ombré at the untrimmed edges. I braided it myself each morning, to keep it out of the way and to remind myself of things I couldn't quite remember but that, nevertheless, I knew to be true.
"But we sang our songs and brought them to the streets and into the classrooms—classrooms we built on our own lands and filled with our own words and books. And once we remembered that we were warriors, once we honored the pain and left it on the side of the road, we moved ahead. We were back."
"How do you have language?" My voice broke on the last syllable. My chest tightened. How could she have the language? She was the same age as me, and I deserved it more. I don't know why, but I felt certain that I did. I yanked my braid out of the back of my shirt and let it fall over my shoulder. Some kind of proof, I suppose.
It was painful, but I didn't really mind. The more I described my brother, my parents, our makeshift community before Dad left with the Council, the more I remembered, like the way my uncle jigged to heavy metal. Instead of dreaming their tragic forms, I recreated them as living, laughing people in the cool red confines of RiRi's tent as she drifted off.
"Soon, they needed too many bodies, and they turned to history to show them how to best keep us warehoused, how to best position the culling. That's when the new residential schools started growing up from the dirt like poisonous brick mushrooms."
Isaac didn't have grandparents who'd told residential school stories like campfire tales to scare you into acting right, stories about men and women who promised themselves to God only and then took whatever they wanted from the children, especially at night. Stories about a book that was like a vacuum, used to suck the language right out of your lungs. And I didn't have time to share them, not now.
He'd lost someone he'd built a life with right in the middle of that life. Suddenly, I realized that there was something worse than running, worse even than the schools. There was loss.
"But why? Aren't these supposed to make noise?" Slopper was confused. We'd been told over and over that silence was the only way to move out here, the only way to stay alive.
It was Chi-Boy who answered, out of character. "Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you're not the one that'll be alive to live it."
Everything was different. We were faster without our youngest and oldest, but now we were without deep roots, without the acute need to protect and make better. And I had taken up a spot that'd opened up in the middle of it all, somewhere between desperation and resolve.
There were about fifty people in total, a big enough group that invisibility the way we enjoyed it was out of the question. So they had to live differently, carving out communities in the spaces they felt they could defend.
"I mean we can start healing the land. We have the knowledge, kept through the first round of these blasted schools, from before that, when these visitors first made their way over here like angry children throwing tantrums. When we heal our land, we are healed also." Then he added, "We'll get there. Maybe not soon, but eventually."
We were desperate to craft more keys, to give shape to the kind of Indians who could not be robbed. It was hard, desperate work. We had to be careful we weren't making things up, half remembered, half dreamed. We felt inadequate. We felt hollow in places and at certain hours we didn't have names for in our languages.
I heard it in his voice as Miigwans began to weep. I watched it in the steps that pulled Isaac, the man who dreamed in Cree, home to his love. The love who'd carried him against the rib and breath and hurt of his chest as ceremony in a glass vial. And I understood that as long as there are dreamers left, there will never be want for a dream. And I understood just what we would do for each other, just what we would do for the ebb and pull of the dream, the bigger dream that held us all.
Anything.
Everything.
