Would an apocalyptic future cause history to repeat itself? Cherie Dimaline explores this question in terms of the persecution of Canada’s indigenous peoples in her YA dystopia novel The Marrow Thieves, which came out back in 2017.
As climate change ravaged the world and swallowed up the coasts, strange diseases began to spread that left long-lasting effects on humanity. Most devastatingly, the majority of the world’s population lost the ability to dream, a condition that drove many to madness. But a segment of the population was immune: those with Native American heritage. Desperate to regain their dreams at any cost, Canadian authorities built on the old infrastructure of the residential schools to round up Native Americans and extract a substance from within their bone marrow that seems to hold the secret to dreaming. Sixteen-year-old French has spent nearly half his life on the run from the Recruiters, traveling through the Canadian wilds with a band of fellow survivors. Together, they head into the frozen north, following rumors of a Native community that has found safety for themselves and their cultures. But can they outrun human greed? The woods are full of dangers, from illness and the elements to Recruiters and the construction crews who build ever-larger facilities for exploiting the Native population. But there is hope, too, in the form of young love and wisdom from the elders who can remember their Native languages and cultural practices.
The Marrow Thieves is a survival novel, but not in the way we usually see this particular post-apocalyptic subgenre portrayed. True, the characters spend a fair amount of time hunting in the woods or scavenging abandoned houses for sustenance and supplies. But more than individual survival and meeting the basic needs for food and shelter, this book is about survival as a community. French and his companions rely upon each other and help each other, even at the risk of their own survival. They take care of the younger children and even take turns carrying the elderly Minerva, when her motor skills fail or when they need to move faster than an old woman could manage. Rather than see her as a burden, though, French comes to realize that Minerva is the best hope for their future, since she holds knowledge about their indigenous ways of life that have nearly been lost.
As with many science fiction and horror novels, The Marrow Thieves uses these speculative genres to examine real world anxieties: in this case, both future fears about climate change and the past scars left by the residential school system in Canada. The climate change part is fairly straightforward, with the societal collapse that results from major natural disasters and diseases serving as the backdrop to the world of the novel. Meanwhile, the Canadian residential school system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a specter that haunts the indigenous population in the book. The elders have passed down stories of needing to hide from recruiters, lest they be taken away from their families to have their culture and language stripped from them. Now they use the same language to describe the government officials sent to hunt down any potential source of dreams. The concept of having one’s culture extracted is made literal in the brutal process of bone marrow extraction, which is more hinted at than described in the book. But the same things that have helped them survive in the past seem to be the key once again in this bleak future: coming together as a community, listening to the wisdom of elders, learning their Native languages, and continuing to practice old traditions.
If you love found families and a bit of social commentary in your dystopia novels, don’t miss The Marrow Thieves and its sequel Hunting by Stars. You can find both books on shelves now at your favorite local retailer or buy them online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!