Dimaline sharply indicts the alienation of capitalism plaguing settler-colonial communities: Recruiters kidnap them for experiments and steal their bone marrow-an antidote settlers believe will help them once again dream, something lost by Canadians through the alienation of capitalism. In Dimaline’s dystopian world, ravaged by climate change, Canada has reinstituted residential schools while Indigenous people are hunted across the continent. Dimaline critiques state-sponsored reconciliation that leaves intact environmental destruction, capitalism and settler-colonialism.

The Marrow Thieves carries us through personal pain and trauma, dispossession and genocide. Like that wasn’t scarier to those still in the system than all the dreamlessness and desert wastelands in the world.” That they could explain the system had to die and a new one had to be built in its place. “They had this crazy notion that there was goodness left, that someone, somewhere would see just how insane this whole school thing was. The Marrow Thieves is not a reconciliation novel per se, it does not try to “put the events of the past behind us.” Dimaline indicts the reconciliation agenda, commanding nothing less than parity of status between Indigenous nations and settler communities: The Canadian state’s ongoing genocide project is undeniable. Instead, it urges us in Schedule N to “put the events of the past behind us.” But genocide is etched into this country’s ongoing history of settler-colonialism, from the strategy of erasure unearthed by the discovery of mass graves in 2021 to the latest paramilitary invasion by the RCMP of Wet’suweten land on behalf of big oil and pipeline companies. While the TRC has amplified a national debate about tactics of genocide like residential schools, it deepens our silence about ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. The TRC report documented Canada’s residential schools that stole over 150,000 Indigenous children from their communities. Since Stephen Harper’s apology for residential schools in 2008 and the release of the TRC report in 2015, reconciliation has entered the national mainstream. Five years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its findings, the slogan “Reconciliation is dead” reverberates across the country as Indigenous land defenders and solidarity activists blockaded highways and railways in support of the Wet’suwet’en. The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline imagines a world where resource extractive capitalism and climate change are taken to their extremes, signalling their underlying threats in the here and now. The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (Cormorant Books: 2017)

The marrow thieves full book