46 pages • 1 hour read
Cherie DimalineThe Marrow Thieves
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Story
Oral history is crucial to Indigenous culture. Though Anishinaabe have written language, history and culture are traditionally passed down through stories—both sacred stories passed down through generations and personal stories shared with family and friends. Stories are how Natives perpetuate their culture, which is why removing Indigenous children from their parents—as was the case with residential schools—was so devastating to the Native tribes of Canada. The novel highlights three kinds of stories: historical, traditional, and personal.
Miig serves as the keeper of the historical Story because he has access to memories and knowledge that the younger generation does not have. Frenchie says, “We needed to remember Story. It was [Miig’s] job to set the memory in perpetuity […] But every week we spoke, because it was imperative that we know” (25). Miig’s topics vary, but generally center around shared history of their tribes and of the world. Miig generally does not tell individual stories of people or sacred traditional stories.
Minerva, however, does tell traditional stories on the rare occasions that she speaks more than a few words. While staying at the Four Winds, Minerva capriciously decides that she wants to tell an “old-timey” story, which is exciting enough that Frenchie eavesdrops despite not being invited to listen. Minerva’s story addresses a Native legend—the Rogarou—who is a werewolf that, according to Minerva, had a relationship with her grandmother. Minerva’s speech pattern—a mix of French, English, and Native words and syntax—is different from the rest of the group.
When the boys of Frenchie’s group speculate about Wab, Miig replied, “everyone tells their own coming-to story. That’s the rule. Everyone’s creation story is their own” (79). Dimaline devotes multiple chapters to specific characters’ coming-to stories, including Frenchie, Wab, and Miig. Despite Miig’s insistence that everyone tell their own story, when Frenchie starts behaving poorly, Miig responds by giving a brief overview of how Minerva, RiRi, Slopper, and the twins joined him and what had happened to them before. Miig uses their stories as a lead-in to his own, all of which is meant to teach Frenchie that sometimes he needs to trust that other people know what’s best for the group.
Loss, Rebirth, and Rebuilding
Though Dimaline’s novel contains bleak material—genocide, violent cultural appropriation, murder, trauma, separation—the overall message remains hopeful. Frenchie loses his mother, father, and brother, but manages to find his father and a surrogate family in Miig’s group. The Recruiters take Minerva, and death claims her in the end. However, in losing Minerva, Frenchie realizes what his people need to survive and gains insight into a way forward. After many years without Isaac, Miig reunites with him, ending the novel on a hopeful note for Miig’s personal future and the future of the Natives due to Isaac’s fluency with Native language.
Through sharing stories, the Natives who remain can rebuild their culture piece by piece. Many Indigenous tribes believe that life is cyclical; in certain tribes that burn their dead, the mythology states that part of moving onto the afterlife means finding all the pieces of oneself after being reduced to ash. Similarly, the tribes in the story must come together and reform from the ashes of what they once were.
Part of rebuilding Native culture means rebuilding the Earth. Dimaline shows hope in this respect, as nature eventually starts to take over in positive ways: animals appear, and Rose and Frenchie find water together in the woods. When Derrick’s uncle is speaking with Frenchie, he highlights the ties between Indigenous culture and the Earth itself: “All we need is the safety to return to our homelands. Then we can start the process of healing […] When we heal our land, we are healed also” (193).
The Threat of the White, Industrial World
Dimaline attributes the destruction of Indigenous peoples and the world to whites—the greed of corporations and industrialists and the appropriation of Indigenous culture. Through Story, Miig reveals how whites subjugated Natives and destroyed the natural world. He describes the original residential schools coming about because “when we were on our knees with fever and pukes, they decided they liked us there, on our knees” (23). Further, Miig describes how whites approached Natives when they first lost their dreams: “At first, people turned to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity […] And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves” (88). Several of the cultural elements that Dimaline highlights in the story—including dreamcatchers and smudging—have been appropriated by our current culture, by whites who want to feel “spiritual” but have no connection to the traditions from which them come.
Miig also explains how whites polluted the world, bringing about the climate-based apocalypse: “And where were the freshest lakes and the cleanest rivers? On our lands, of course” (24). Dimaline makes clear that white greed and disrespect for nature causes disaster, and that the Native approach of respecting the land is superior. In the wake of the disaster, once the Earth has had some time to recover, nature begins to take over again, generating more growth and evolving animals to handle their new surroundings. As Indigenous culture ties in with the natural world so strongly, the rebuilding of culture and Earth are analogous. Dimaline further highlights Native respect and affinity for the natural world through their interaction with specific animals—Frenchie choosing not to shoot a moose because the meat would go to waste, and the camp group singing a deer to the spirit world just as they would for a human who has died.
Related Titles
By Cherie Dimaline
