Conflict in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Conflict in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

 The Marrow Thieves is centered on the main character Frenchie and a mythically dystopian future where the effects of climate change ravage the entire Canadian society, taking away the individuals’ ability to dream. However, the individuals from the indigenous groups never lost their dreaming ability, an attribute that was attributed to their bone marrow, leading to the rise of conflicts between the First Nation communities and other parties. Dimaline noted that even the indigenous people would be asking themselves questions like “how could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept the dream” (81). The presence of the bone marrow in their body and the belief that harvesting the bone marrow could help the entire Canadian society brought conflicts in various ways. Thus, in Dimaline’s story, the theme of conflict manifests in different levels and multiple ways as it highlights the conflicts that emanate from the motive to cause suppression and marginalization of the indigenous people. Migwaan notes that “We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried deep within our bones, And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping that we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across” (Dimaline, 90). Most of these conflicts are premeditated long before the catastrophe, and the genesis of the disaster gave the Canadian authority a perfect platform to anchor their long-held motives to carry out ethnic cleansing against the individuals from the indigenous groups. The following are the instances of conflict in the text.

First, the instance of conflict arises between the Indigenous communities and the corporate society. Before the catastrophe, there were multiple instances where the First Nation individuals were pushed out of their ancestral lands to create room for the development of various entities such as water companies and other companies owned by the corporate investors. Miig highlights how the corporate society, at the help of the Canadian government, pushed people out of their ancestral land with absolute contempt and kept on expanding their invasion, creating another race. Such development translated to the lives of the individuals from the indigenous communities getting commoditized at the pleasure of the bourgeoisie class. Miig notes that “… even after our way of life was being commoditized, after our lands were filled with water companies and wealthy corporate investors, we were still hopeful” (Dimaline, 34). Such assertion does not only paint a picture of a race getting pushed away from the society by the conspiracy between different corporates but also highlights how the Canadian government was complicit in perpetuating the initial conflicts that the group faced.

Again, the conflict also manifests explicitly between the indigenous communities and the Canadian government. Save for the implicit role that the Canadian government played in alienating the indigenous people from their lands to create room for the corporates. The Canadian government was the direct perpetrator of the bone marrow harvesting from the individuals from the indigenous communities. Through the creation of the Recruiters, an armed organization tasked with applying brute force and harvesting the bone marrow from the indigenous people, the Canadian government exacerbated and made into reality the previously perceived rumors about bone marrow harvesting. Dimaline reports that the Recruiters would be “Poisoning your drinking water, changing the air so much the earth shook and melted and crumbled, harvesting a race for medicine” (47). Such acts were carried out through the orders of the Canadian government with a blatant contempt of the lives of the indigenous people but instead focused on saving the lives of the white Canadian populace. The atrocious conflict led to regret their ability to dream. Frenchie notes that “I understood that as long as there are dreamers left, there will never want for a dream (Dimaline, 231). Such regrets made people almost denounce their ancestry.

Again, the theme of conflict is allegorical and typifies the historical injustices that the indigenous people faced during colonization perpetrated by the Canadian government. Though Dimaline foreshadows the events and places them to occur in 2050, several assertions in the text point out to the historical injustices that were meted on the indigenous people. Frenchie highlights how his brother Mitch offered himself to the Recruiters to save, an act synonymous with the undertakings that took place during the establishment of the Residential Schools. During the colonization period, the indigenous communities were pushed out of their lands, forced to enroll in the government-funded Residential Schools, and were often separated from each other as symbolic in various instances in The Marrow Thieves. Miig notes that “soon, they needed too many bodies, and they turned to history to show them how to keep best we warehoused, how to best position the culling. That’s when the new residential schools started growing up from the dirt like poisonous brick mushrooms.”(Dimaline, 67). In that regard, the Canadian government set up the Residential Schools to perpetrate heinous atrocities against the indigenous people in different ways.

In conclusion, the conflicts evident in Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves are a classical representation of the historical injustices that the indigenous people faced at the hands of the Canadian government. Though the story is written from a dystopian perspective, the undertakings through various characters symbolize the evils that faced the First Nation communities, such as land alienation, forceful enrolment in Residential Schools, and separation of family members. Thus, Dimaline uses different conflicts to highlight the past and supposed future social injustices that the First Nation Communities still face.