From where we were now, running, looking at reality from this one point in time, it seemed as though the world had suddenly gone mad. Poisoning your own drinking water, changing the air so much the earth shook and melted and crumbled, harvesting a race for medicine. How? How could this happen? Were they that much different from us? Would we be like them if we'd had a choice? Were they like us enough to let us live?The Marrow Thieves is about a near-future dystopia: a not unimaginable one in which the worst predictions about Global Warming and the all-around poisoning of our planet have come to pass; shifting the landscape and killing off millions. In a unique twist, Métis writer Cherie Dimaline imagines that in this future world, the white folks are suffering from a debilitating malady that may be, somehow, cured by the bone marrow of Native peoples, and in a deliberate, appropriate, and thoughtful callback to the deplorable Residential School System, “Recruiters” are sent out to round up the Natives and bring them in for “harvesting”. As a result, Natives take to the forests, banding together for safety, and much of this book is about their daily struggle to survive; staying one step ahead of the Recruiters and working hard to keep their culture(s) alive. Despite there being little explanation provided around the specifics of the race-based illness and its race-based cure, I appreciate Dimaline using this framework to explore the history and present-day relationship between Native peoples and the rest of Canada; this kind of sociological exploration is found in all the best of dystopic fiction. On the other hand, I didn't think that this story was terribly well executed: the characters were shallow, the writing was clumsy (far too many clunky foreshadowing bits and narrative inconsistencies), and there was very little world-building for a changed Earth scenario (Dimaline writes early that the fauna has been affected by the ravaged environment – raccoons the size of huskies! – but we only see the hunters bring back very ordinary deer, squirrels, and wild turkeys; other than a lot of rain, this could be set in the Northern Ontario of today). Still, this feels like a really valuable narrative – the fact that a Native writer could imagine this future should alert the non-Native reader to the present-day fears of this community.
In the beginning we meet our narrator Francis (also known as French or Frenchie) as an eleven-year-old on the run. When he gets separated from his brother, Mitch, all he knows to do is to head for the woods and start walking north; rumour has it that there is a safe and viable Native community up there. Early on I was a bit taken aback by the overwritten thoughts of an eleven-year-old:
Out here stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes. And surrounded by these silent trees, beside a calming fire, I watched the bones dance. This was our medicine, these bones, and I opened up and took it all in. And dreamed of north.French soon meets up with a group of Natives who take him in, and through an Elder's campfire stories and the other group members' “coming-to” tales (the stories of how each of them came to run for the woods), the history of how this world came to be is related. I found this device to be a bit formulaic, but it gets the info out there. The story jumps ahead five years and they eventually find another lone Native – the outspoken and beautiful Rose – and she provides a love interest for French; allowing for all the elements of a classic coming-of-age story. Obstacles and crises propel the narrative forward, and while I found the ending to be incredibly touching, enough is left open-ended that Dimaline could certainly write a sequel, or even a series. Having won both the Governor General Literary Award for Young People's Literature and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers' Literature for The Marrow Thieves, I do hope that Dimaline is encouraged to explore this world further.
And as for the ideas: I have said before that I believe the Residential Schools here in Canada weren't necessarily conceived in evil; that the coloniser mindset could believe it was doing Native peoples a favour by stealing their children, erasing their culture, and attempting to educate them for a place in the steamrolling white culture coming over the horizon. (And, of course, this was a terrible and dehumanising mindset that has led to horrific intergenerational trauma for our Native communities; I just don't believe that the people who initially put it into effect were all genocidal maniacs.) On the other hand, in this future world, the white people are genocidal maniacs: none of the people that French runs into has much information about how the white disease works or how the Native marrow would cure it, they don't even know how the marrow is harvested, so the reader doesn't know either – all we do know is that the woods are crawling with white Recruiters (and Native traitors) who are prepared to apprehend and presumably kill fellow human beings in order to help their own community; and in my own mind I was wondering if we haven't evolved past that kind of official us-vs-them thinking; would I support the “harvesting” of Native children to cure my own children of a disease? I don't think I'd be any more capable of that than I'd be of hunting down another race of people for food if other sources ran out (but no one ever said that the killing of children to preserve order made that much sense in The Hunger Games, either; you just need to buy into the idea that there will always be power imbalances and people at the top who try to keep it that way.) But to nuance the moral quandary, Dimalane has the Elder, Miig, urge the others to consider what they themselves would do to protect their group: Anything; Everything, they reply.
As long as the intent is good, nothing else matters. Not in these days, son.So, if your intent is to protect your own group, whether white or Native, anything goes? What a remarkably subtle idea for Dimaline to have woven throughout this story, and it's one that I'll need to keep thinking on. In this interview, Dimaline explains her impetus for writing The Marrow Thieves – what she hoped both Native and non-Native young readers would take away from it – and, again, I find her inspiration to have been vital and necessary. I can't help but wish, however, that the whole had been better written.
