Cherie Dimaline

​The Marrow Thieves

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What happens when humans collectively lose the capacity to dream? Cherie Dimaline’s YA novel The Marrow Thieves investigates this question via a dystopian Canadian political landscape that draws on the historical record—Indian residential schools and genocide in particular, with subtle allusions to the Holocaust—and also addresses the climate crisis and eerily echoes current political developments.

 

The premise of the novel—that white Canadians have lost the capacity to dream—is also a metaphor for Eurocentric cultural rigidity. Frenchie, the teen protagonist of the novel, flees agents of the state who have captured his family as part of a project to extract the ability to dream from the bone marrow of First Nations people. Alone in the wilderness, Frenchie encounters a small group of First Nations young people, led by an elder from the community. Together, they survive and organize to resist the atrocities.

 

Dimaline’s novel relates a compelling and harrowing story that critiques the “rational” mechanistic approach emblematic of Eurocentric culture and issues a stark warning about what happens when a culture forgets how to dream. In imagining the twisted attempts of those in power to falsely regain this capacity, Dimaline reminds us to resist inhumanity through connection to each other and nature and to continually dream up novel possibilities for how to exist ethically in this world.

 

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