The Marrow Thieves

“‘Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.’”

The “science” of how the schools extract dreams from bone marrow is unclear, as the process is intended as a metaphor. Miig’s explanation to Frenchie about dreams is a combination of Indigenous belief mixed with a bit of science, and reveals why whites are trying to steal marrow from the Indigenous population.

“‘We were great fighters—warriors, we called ourselves and each other—and we knew these lands, so we kicked a lot of ass.’”

Often in the novel, Dimaline mixes highly poetic language with colloquial, modern-day speech. This quote is an example of that effect, where Miig’s story starts off like a recitation of an epic and ends abruptly with slang and syntax more common of a teenager.

“‘Anishinaabe were always the canary in the mine for the rest of them. Too bad the country was busy worrying about how we didn’t pay an extra tax on Levi’s jeans and Kit Kat bars to listen to what we were shouting.’”

Miig explains the origin of the climate apocalypse. He asserts that the Natives knew what was coming, but that whites did not want to listen to them because they were preoccupied with trivial things.

“Instead of dreaming their tragic forms, I recreated them as living, laughing people in the cool red confines of RiRi’s tent as she drifted off.”

RiRi, who is curious about everything, often asks Frenchie questions about his family. Frenchie finds the subject painful and has nightmares about losing his family, but for RiRi’s benefit, he tells her happy stories. RiRi inadvertently helps Frenchie process his feelings because she forces him to focus on his positive family memories rather than the negative ones.

“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?”

As Indigenous culture values the natural world, Frenchie does not understand how anyone could blindly destroy the world they live in, nor how they could eventually turn to killing an entire race for their own personal gain. At this point, Frenchie is still naïve to many of the atrocities that have been committed against people he cares about.

“Everything had been shut tight while so much was still supposed to happen. The intent and plans hadn’t had time to vacate. And here we were now opening the lid of a sealed jar, and all the anticipation of a tomorrow planned a thousand yesterdays ago came skittering to our feet like slick-shelled beetles.”

Dimaline’s poetic language comes through in this description of the Four Winds resort. The building itself has a “soul” in the form of captured possibility—as though the dreams of those who intended to visit somehow are trapped inside until Frenchie’s group stumbles upon them.

“And a man without dreams is just a meaty machine with a broken gauge.”

As dreams are a connection to the spirit world in Anishinaabe culture, lacking dreams suggests that a person has no soul. While not explicitly stated, Dimaline suggests that the non-Indigenous people of her post-apocalyptic future lose their dreams because they lose, or never had, souls. A person without dreams is essentially not a person.

“‘And then, 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. Because we had each other.’”

At the point in the story when Miig says this, it is unclear that hope is a good thing. In this context, Dimaline suggests that hope is overly optimistic and blinds the Natives to how bad things are going to get. Dimaline reveals that community is the most important thing the Indigenous have, but only in the context of understanding that there is little to hope for from those outside the community. Blind hope is bad, but informed hope is good.

“‘We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones.’”

Miig concludes his second Story section by explaining what happens to Natives in the schools, which bookends the first description Frenchie gives of Miig explaining where dreams live. In this instance, Miig highlights how dreams connect Natives to their ancestors, indicating that dreams represent more than just thoughts one has while asleep—they are a tie to the spirit world.

“‘Sometimes, you have to not bring things into the open, put them aside so that people have the hope to put one foot in front of the other.’”

Frenchie starts asserting himself, becoming angry with Miig for not letting Frenchie relay information in front of everyone because Frenchie childishly wants to feel important in front of Rose. Miig pulls Frenchie aside, first telling him everyone’s tragic backstories, then his own, finally concluding with explaining to Frenchie that just because something has happened doesn’t mean everyone needs to know right away. Sometimes being a leader means carrying a burden yourself because the weight is too great for others.

“There is a feeling that has no name because, really, it is such an absence that it exists only in a vacuum of feeling and so, really, can have no name.”

Loss is a motif of the novel. Frenchie describes his feelings immediately after realizing that Lincoln has gone over the cliff with RiRi. While Frenchie specifically says the feeling has no name, he is describing a loss so profound that he loses even the ability to name and experience his feelings.

“Something had changed since I’d fired the gun, since I’d killed Travis. It was like a color had ceased to exist and now the world seemed dull.”

Frenchie again cannot find the word “loss” to describe what he feels. He has lost his innocence in two ways—through losing RiRi, a literal innocent, and through killing Travis, which takes away Frenchie’s own innocence.

“‘Sometimes the path in front of you alters. Sometimes it goes through some pretty dark territory. Just make sure it doesn’t change the intent of the trip.’”

After Frenchie’s group loses RiRi and Frenchie kills Travis, Miig notices that Frenchie is struggling emotionally. Miig tells Frenchie part of his own backstory—finding Natives reduced to liquid in vials—and how he responded. In telling this story, Miig tries to advise Frenchie on how to carry on after trauma and maintain his sense of self.

“‘Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to live it.’”

After Recruiters capture Minerva, Frenchie’s group finds jingles—rolled tin lids meant to attach to a dress—among her things. Chi-Boy explains why Minerva would carry noisemaking objects in a world where silence is often critical for survival; Minerva was holding onto a memento of a joyous part of her culture.

“It was a thin brown brook, pulling itself like a ribbon across the curve cut into the rock just ahead. It didn’t rage or wave or crash. It bled from somewhere up the hill and carried itself with quiet grace across the tortured ground.”

Miig tells Frenchie and his group that the climate apocalypse began as a war over water. Finding real water in nature is unusual in this world. Additionally, this stream is a metaphor for Indigenous culture—just as the water finds its way, tentatively and gracefully, across a broken world, so will the Natives.

“She sang with volume and pitch and a heartbreaking wail that echoed through her relatives’ bones, rattling them in the ground under the school itself.”

The imagery of bones as the containers of dreams persists throughout the novel. In this instance, Minerva uses her language as a connection to the shared past of all Natives, calling on their spirits to help her overcome her would-be murderers.

“As it turns out, every dream Minerva had ever dreamed was in the language. It was her gift, her secret, her plan. She’d collected the dreams like bright beads on a string of nights that wound around her each day, every day until this one.”

Minerva’s “secret power” is the key to preventing the schools from eliminating the Indigenous. Because of her strong ties to her culture and language, Minerva can harness all the power of her ancestors, the spirits, and the natural world, and use them to her advantage to overwhelm her attackers.

“I didn’t feel changed. I just felt…less. Or maybe it was more. Not changed so much as living at a different volume.”

By the time Rose tells Frenchie that he has changed, Frenchie has endured an extraordinary amount of pain. He has lost his mother and brother, lost (and found) his father, lost RiRi and Minerva, and killed a man. He does not realize how much his experiences have affected him, and he is unsure how to process his feelings and make decisions about what he wants in life.

“‘I mean we can start healing the land. We have the knowledge, kept through the first round of these blasted schools, from before that, when these visitors first made their way over here like angry children throwing tantrums.’”

When Derrick’s uncle tells Frenchie that they can go “home,” Frenchie replies that he thought their home was gone. Derrick’s uncle explains that through tribal knowledge, Natives can rebuild their ancestral lands, and in doing so, rebuild themselves and their culture. The Indigenous have survived white aggression thus far, and will continue to do so.

“We allowed the deer to take his dreams with him so he had all the magic he would need to find the next world.”

Frequently over the course of the story, Dimaline provides examples of how Native culture interfaces with the natural world. Just like humans, animals have dreams that connect them to the spirit world. Frenchie and his hunting group treat the deer’s death as they would a human death.

“I picked up the scissors when [Rose] put them down and cut my own braid off to send with Minerva.”

Hair is a symbol of pride and beauty in many Indigenous tribes. Frenchie is particularly proud of his own long hair, often referencing it as proof of his “Indian-ness.” Many Indigenous tribes treat the cutting off of hair as a sign of deep grief and mourning, and to send one’s hair with the dead is to send an obvious, significant part of oneself with them.

“We were broken, an almost unrecognizable bunch of mourners held together by habit and grief and a shared history of survival.”

In the wake of Minerva’s death, Frenchie and his group are unsure how to move forward. They believe that Minerva was the only key to fighting back against the schools. With Minerva gone, the group feels they have no hope of resisting. All that ties them together is their shared grief and resilience.

“We were desperate to craft more keys, to give shape to the kind of Indians who could not be robbed.”

In the wake of Minerva’s death, Frenchie’s group and the Council’s camp increase their education efforts among themselves. They collect as many written and spoken words as they can and form a youth council to pass down knowledge as quickly as possible. Losing Minerva as a resource inspires all the Natives to work harder to preserve what they still have in the hopes of finding another way to resist the schools.