thesis statement the marrow thieves

The Marrow Thieves

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The world presented in The Marrow Thieves is one in which Indigenous people have been reduced and flattened—in the eyes of the white government—to be nothing other than a commodity. Those who are on the run must contend with the horrific, dehumanizing fact that to many, they're something less than human. As the novel unfolds, Dimaline highlights the many forms of trauma that the Indigenous community is forced to shoulder, from physical violence to emotional pain. Despite this bleak picture of life for the Indigenous community, Dimaline ultimately argues that Indigenous identity deserves to be celebrated, and that having pride in one's identity as an Indigenous person can be a powerful thing.

Frenchie and his friends are reminded in a variety of ways and instances that their bodies are both extremely valuable and constantly at risk. This creates an environment in which Indigenous people must consistently protect their bodies and their minds from trauma of all sorts, and the effects of the traumatic experiences that they're unable to prevent ripple outwards through the community. For some, the trauma is mostly emotional. Miig and his husband, Isaac , were tricked by other Indigenous people who were in cahoots with the government—and for most of the novel, Miig believes that he lost Isaac to the residential schools . In this situation, Miig must reckon with two types of emotional trauma: first, the trauma and the sense of a fractured community that came from being betrayed by people who by all accounts should have been his allies; then, he carries the pain of having lost his only family member, a specific experience that many of the children in his group share.

Others, Wab in particular, have experienced intense physical trauma on top of their emotional strife. Wab grew up in a situation in which it was almost impossible to avoid sexual abuse and was ultimately tricked, gang raped, and suffered horrendous physical violence that left her with a huge scar across her face and neck and only one eye. For Wab, her scar is a constant reminder of the violence and trauma that she experienced because of who she is as an Indigenous person. Her identity and sense of pride as an Indigenous person is taken away from her and perverted into the very thing that is used to target and oppress her. This also isn't an experience unique to Wab—Miig explains to Frenchie that the twins, Zheegwon , and Tree , were strung up and cut into by people desperate to extract their marrow, but with no knowledge of how to effectively do so. In this way, the physical scars that many of Frenchie's family bear make it impossible to ignore or forget that within the world of the novel, Indigenous bodies and the scars they bear are the sites of intense trauma, as well as reflections of the destruction being wrought on the world at large.

The way that Miig rations out Story and controls who hears it suggests that he understands that one doesn't need to directly suffer violence or betrayal to experience trauma: simply being told that, in the eyes of others, a person is belittled to the status of an inanimate, harvestable resource is earth-shattering and traumatic enough. Dimaline illustrates this by allowing the reader to follow seven-year-old RiRi 's journey as she transforms from innocence, to being forced to grow up before she's ready because of this information, to her brutal death as she sees Story come to life in front of her eyes. Prior to hearing Story for the first time, RiRi is a generally happy kid: she knows her life is in danger, but she's blissfully unaware of why exactly this is the case. Miig chooses to tell Story to RiRi after RiRi secretly listens in on Wab's traumatic "coming-to story," the story of how Wab left the city because of violence and ultimately found Miig. Put another way, Miig believes that once RiRi becomes aware of the violence in the world and the ways in which she's susceptible to it, she must know the whole truth. Being Indigenous is, in this sense, inherently traumatizing—Riri’s initiation into the narrative of her own culture is unavoidably painful. Hearing Story and learning that others want to harm her and profit off of her body visibly shakes RiRi, and she's murdered less than a week later. RiRi's death, which is senseless and benefits nobody, not even the Indigenous double agents who killed her, drives home the precarious state in which the novel's Indigenous characters find themselves: even among people like them, there's always a chance that they'll be viewed as commodities, not members of a community with a shared history of trauma.

Despite all the ways in which the novel shows the dangers of being Indigenous and the ways that Indigenous bodies bear the scars of trauma, Dimaline also suggests that Indigenous identity can—and should—be a source of pride and an antidote to the dehumanization of Indigenous people in general. Frenchie pays particular attention to the ways in which traditional Indigenous hairstyles, such as his long braid and Miig's Mohawk, make him feel proud to be Métis and, as he suggests of his braid, make him "a better Indian." He also fixates on the buffalo tattoo on the back of Miig's hand (his "wedding ring" with Isaac) and sees the tattoo as a reminder not just of Miig's grief, but of the happiness, love, and culture that he and Isaac shared. Similarly, Minerva 's ability to destroy a residential school merely by singing traditional songs shows how Minerva's pride in her identity and in her language, as represented by the Cree song she sings, has the power to completely decimate oppressors.

This sense of pride in one's identity as an Indigenous person is what the novel suggests will ultimately provide the tools and the knowledge necessary to effectively stand up to the government and to the Recruiters, and to stop the harvest of Indigenous bone marrow altogether. In this way, the novel itself stands as a mirror through which Indigenous readers can see themselves, their past trauma, and their resilience reflected back to them—they are encouraged to feel empowered by their cultural identity and its associated struggles, rather than defeated by it. For non-Indigenous readers, the novel creates the space to feel empathy and compassion, and to recognize the importance of not replicating this dehumanizing trauma in the future.

Trauma, Identity, and Pride ThemeTracker

Trauma, Identity, and Pride Quotes in The Marrow Thieves

I was nicknamed Frenchie as much for my name as for my people—the Metis. I came from a long line of hunters, trappers, and voyageurs. But now, with most of the rivers cut into pieces and lakes left as grey sludge puckers on the landscape, my own history seemed like a myth along the lines of dragons.

[...] I did have the longest hair of any of the boys, almost to my waist, burnt ombré at the untrimmed edges. I braided it myself each morning, to keep it out of the way and to remind myself of things I couldn't quite remember but that, nevertheless, I knew to be true.

"But we sang our songs and brought them to the streets and into the classrooms—classrooms we built on our own lands and filled with our own words and books. And once we remembered that we were warriors, once we honored the pain and left it on the side of the road, we moved ahead. We were back."

From where we were now, running, looking at reality from this one point in time, it seemed as though the world had suddenly gone mad. 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? Were they that much different from us? Would we be like them if we'd had a choice? Were they like us enough to let us live?

Isaac didn't have grandparents who'd told residential school stories like campfire tales to scare you into acting right, stories about men and women who promised themselves to God only and then took whatever they wanted from the children, especially at night. Stories about a book that was like a vacuum, used to suck the language right out of your lungs. And I didn't have time to share them, not now.

The schools were an ever-spreading network from the south stretching northward, on our heels like a bushfire. Always north. To what end? Now we'd lost RiRi. Now I'd shot a man. Would I even be welcome in the North? I couldn't even protect a little girl.

"But why? Aren't these supposed to make noise?" Slopper was confused. We'd been told over and over that silence was the only way to move out here, the only way to stay alive.

It was Chi-Boy who answered, out of character. "Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you're not the one that'll be alive to live it."

In them, there is always this feeling, an understanding more than an emotion, of protection. It didn't matter what was happening in the world, my job was to be Francis. That was all. Just remain myself. And now? Well, now I had a different family to take care of. My job was to hunt, and scout, and build camp, and break camp, to protect the others. I winced even thinking about it. My failure. I'd failed at protecting, and now, as a result, I failed at remaining myself.

There were about fifty people in total, a big enough group that invisibility the way we enjoyed it was out of the question. So they had to live differently, carving out communities in the spaces they felt they could defend.

We were desperate to craft more keys, to give shape to the kind of Indians who could not be robbed. It was hard, desperate work. We had to be careful we weren't making things up, half remembered, half dreamed. We felt inadequate. We felt hollow in places and at certain hours we didn't have names for in our languages.

I heard it in his voice as Miigwans began to weep. I watched it in the steps that pulled Isaac, the man who dreamed in Cree, home to his love. The love who'd carried him against the rib and breath and hurt of his chest as ceremony in a glass vial. And I understood that as long as there are dreamers left, there will never be want for a dream. And I understood just what we would do for each other, just what we would do for the ebb and pull of the dream, the bigger dream that held us all.

Everything.

The Marrow Thieves

46 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapters 2-6

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-15

Chapters 16-19

Chapters 20-24

Chapters 25-26

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Further Reading & Resources

Discussion Questions

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. 

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Marrow Thieves — The Marrow Thieves: A Tale of Survival and Resilience

The Marrow Thieves: a Tale of Survival and Resilience

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Published: Sep 6, 2023

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Table of contents

Survival in a bleak world, exploring indigenous identity, character dynamics, a message of resilience, conclusion: a tale of hope and resilience.

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The Marrow Thieves

by Cherie Dimaline

• The Marrow Thieves Summary

The Marrow Thieves takes place in a not-too-distant future in which the climate crisis has worsened signficantly. In this dystopian world, there are constant, torrential rains and many lands are no longer habitable. Half of the human population has died, and most have lost the ability to dream, leading to widespread madness. Only Native people still have the ability to dream, and the Canadian Government sets out to steal this ability through the extraction of Native people's bone marrow, which is where their dreams live. To do so the government creates a system of schools, based on the old residential boarding school system.

French and Mitch are Indigenous Métis brothers who have lost their father and mother. Recruiters surround their hideout and Mitch sacrifices himself so that French can escape. French wanders into the woods where a group of Indigenous people led by a man named Miigwans rescues him. Together they travel northward, where Native peoples are said to be doing better. Miigwans teaches French and the other youngsters about the history and present of the destruction of the earth and the oppression of Indigenous people. Eventually, he explains that marrow harvesting is a process that kills its victims. He also teaches the youth skills like hunting so they can survive in the wilderness. Meanwhile, a quiet old woman named Minerva teaches the group some of their traditional language and culture.

As the group travels on they encounter new members and lose others. Rose joins the group, and she and French eventually start a romantic relationship. The group encounters two Native traitors who work for the Recruiters, and this leads to the death of their youngest member, RiRi . Shortly thereafter, Recruiters take Minerva in the middle of the night. The group decides to travel toward a city named Espanola, where there is said to be an Indigenous resistance movement, in the hopes of getting information that will help them rescue Minerva.

One night, a group of masked and armed people captures them. At first, they are hostile. But they turn out to be members of the Indigenous resistance group and they invite Miigwans and the youth to their camp. There French reunites with his father, who has helped to re-establish the Native Council at the camp. Members of the camp explain that Minerva managed to destroy the Recruiters' marrow-harvesting system by singing a song in her native language. The song was comprised of all her dreams, also in her native language, which she recorded over the years. Together the groups plan to rescue Minerva when her convoy passes a nearby highway. The group nearly manages to save Minerva, but at the last minute, a driver shoots her to death. The devastated group buries Minerva and travels ten days before establishing a new camp. There Rose decides to leave and French runs after her. But before they get far they must join the others to inspect a group of strangers that the scouts have detected near the camp. Among the strangers is Isaac , Miig's half-Cree husband who he believed he had lost to the schools. The novel ends with their emotional reunion.

The Marrow Thieves Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Marrow Thieves is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Why does Frenchie tell RiRi some of the stories?

Chapter please?

• Frenchie is sixteen-years-old.

• Frenchie's brother, Mitch, allowed himself to be captured by the Recruiters in able to save French.

• French's father has disappeared and is believed to be in the hands of the Recruiters or dead.

• French's...

Opening scene. What popular snack do they find?

Bags of Doritos

Study Guide for The Marrow Thieves

The Marrow Thieves study guide contains a biography of Dimaline, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Marrow Thieves
• Character List

Essays for The Marrow Thieves

The Marrow Thieves essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Marrow Thieves by Dimaline.

• The Dystopian Truth of Indigenous People in 'The Marrow Thieves'

Lesson Plan for The Marrow Thieves

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Marrow Thieves
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Marrow Thieves Bibliography