Notes on Witnessing Story and Creating Kinship in a New Era of Residential Schools

Witnessing Story and Creating Kinship in a New Era of Residential Schools

• The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
• Patrizia Zanella
• Positioning Statement:
  • The author is a non-Indigenous reader who grew up in the Swiss Alps. Her primary focus is on unlearning assumptions and expanding her imaginary concerning Indigenous literature.
  • She taught The Marrow Thieves in her BA class on Two-Spirit and Queer Indigenous Literatures at the University of Geneva, expressing gratitude for the conversations it generated.
  • She acknowledges indebtedness to Indigenous academic and non-academic communities as a visitor to Indigenous lands and waters and a beneficiary of treaty relationships.
  • She also acknowledges learning Anishinaabemowin and nêhiyawêwin, thanking Dan Gaagigebinesiban Jones and Darlene Willier for their guidance.
• Apocalypse in Indigenous writing:
  • Daniel Heath Justice states that when apocalypse appears as an overt theme in Indigenous writing, it’s experiential because it hasn’t ended.
  • Published in September 2017, The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline is a dystopian young adult novel that has received critical acclaim and has been widely read.
  • Awards:
    • 2017 Governor General’s Award for young people’s literature in Canada
    • 2017 Kirkus Prize for young readers’ literature in the United States
    • 2018 CODE Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature
  • The novel was also discussed on Canada Reads in March 2018 and is being taught in classrooms around the country.

Intervention in National Conversations

• The Marrow Thieves intervenes in ongoing national conversations around reconciliation and Indigenous sovereignty through its broad circulation, public reception, and portrayal of “new residential schools”.
• Challenges to Reconciliation:
  • The novel confronts readers with the futurity of settler colonialism, challenging the idea of reconciliation as a progressive move away from Indigenous dispossession.
  • It uncovers the violence behind a linear, progressive understanding of time and contributes to Indigenous Futurisms.
• Settler Moves to Innocence:
  • Settler state reconciliation and apologies are seen as attempts to rescue settler normalcy and a settler future.
  • Canada’s official reconciliation discourse operates within settler colonialism’s efforts at self-supersession.
• Contrast to Settler Colonialism:
  • Instead of a future demise of the settler state, The Marrow Thieves portrays an apocalyptic era of heightened policing and genocide.
  • The protagonists’ stories reveal attempts at self-supersession and Indigenous elimination.
• Disruption of Settler Moves:
  • The setting, plot, and embedded storytelling episodes disrupt settler moves to innocence by uncovering settler colonialism's hidden tracks.
  • The novel depicts apocalypse as something ongoing rather than new.
• Resistance to Vulnerability:
  • The Marrow Thieves celebrates Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous protagonists’ active resistance.
  • The novel foregrounds Indigenous futurity and an expansive notion of kinship.
  • It offers a vision rooted in Indigenous worldmaking through an expansive understanding of kinship embedded in Indigenous languages and soundscapes.

Uncovering the Tracks of Settler Colonialism

• Setting and Timeframe:
  • The Marrow Thieves is set in the wake of ecological disaster on the North East Coast of lands occupied by Canada, approximately thirty to forty years in the future.
• New Residential Schools:
  • The novel portrays a new era of residential schools designed to harvest bone marrow from Indigenous people, who are the only ones who can still dream.
• Historical Context:
  • Historically, residential schools separated Indigenous children from their families to assimilate them and eliminate Indigenous peoples.
• Purpose of New Schools:
  • The new residential schools secure the settler state’s future by restoring non-Indigenous people’s ability to dream, lost due to “sickness and movement and death”.
• Environmental Destruction:
  • The destruction of homelands represents a cyclical, intensified version of colonially-induced environmental change.
  • Protagonists face continual displacement due to flooded plains, poisoned waters, and the threat of new residential schools.
• Narrative Perspective:
  • The novel is written from the first-person perspective of Francis (Frenchie).
• Loss of Family:
  • Frenchie loses family members to truancy officers (Recruiters): father Jean, mother Mary, and brother Mitch.
• Makeshift Family:
  • Frenchie is rescued by a makeshift family of Indigenous fugitives: five boys (Chi-Boy, Frenchie, twins Tree and Zheegwon, Slopper), three girls (Wab, Rose, Riri), and two Elders (Miigwans/Miig and Minerva).
  • Most family members are Cree, Métis, or Anishinaabe.
• Ethics of Story Sovereignty:
  • Each character tells their own story in their own time, contrasting with the coercive extraction of bone marrow.
• Sense of Urgency:
  • The novel creates a visceral impression of the protagonists’ flight from genocidal residential schools.
• Narrative Structure:
  • The main narration is interspersed with dialogue and storytelling episodes revealing each character’s background.
• Recruiters as Agents of the State:
  • Recruiters, acting as official agents, have uniforms with the logo “Government of Canada: Department of Oneirology”.
  • Oneirology signifies the study of dreams, indicating the co-implication of settler science and education in perpetuating violence.
• Parallels to Historical Figures:
  • Recruiters represent a new iteration of former Indian agents and contemporary policing and surveillance agents.
• Justification of Actions:
  • Recruiters justify actions as being “for the good of the nation,” mirroring how the Canadian state uses national interest and security terminology.
• Obscuring Violence:
  • The novel reveals that the Church’s and scientists’ initial demand for “volunteers” obscures escalating violence.

The Horror Behind the Schools

• Revealing the Truth:
  • The novel gradually uncovers the horror behind the new residential schools, initially referred to as “school truancy officers”.
• False Claims of Innocence:
  • The term “residential schools” carries a claim to innocence, both historically and in the novel.
• No Educational Purpose:
  • The new residential schools serve no educational purpose; they are based on the old system to break Indigenous people and are referred to as “death camps” and “new factories”.
• Blueprint for Culling:
  • The old system provides the blueprint for warehousing and culling Indigenous people.
• Indigenous People as Commodities:
  • Indigenous people are considered “commodities,” “crop,” products to be “harvested,” and resources to be extracted, escalating the abuse of the old system.
• Theft of Dreams:
  • The removal of marrow to steal dreams evokes the description of residential schools in Beth Brant’s 1985 “A Long Story”.
• Escalation of Violence:
  • Physical removal of the inside through marrow extraction presents an escalation of historically inflicted violence.
  • Forbidding Indigenous languages, removing children from the land, separating kin, and imposing cis-heteropatriarchal norms similarly participated in the theft of memory, growth, and dreams.
• Revealing the Connection to the Past:
  • The true nature of the new residential schools is revealed through coming-to stories and Story.
• Purpose of Story:
  • Story keeps the group running and grounded, involving attention to place and listeners.
• Miigwans’s Experience:
  • Miigwans educates the young adults and kids about the history of residential schools and the old and New Road Allowance to understand the need to keep moving.
• Communal Function of Storytelling:
  • Each protagonist’s coming-to stories provide additional knowledge to survive, highlighting the communal function of storytelling and listening.
• Preparing for the Future:
  • The interconnected telling of coming-to stories and Story uncovers the tracks settler colonialism seeks to hide while preparing the young protagonists for their role as future ancestors.
• Content of Story:
  • Story includes pre-colonial Anishinaabe history and stories of resistance, providing the young protagonists with a sense of pride and hope.
• Shielding the Youngest:
  • The family is careful to shield Riri from the full Story so she could form into a real human before understanding that some saw her as little more than a crop.
• Kinship-Making Effect:
  • The kinship-making effect of storytelling lies in the intentional act of careful consideration of how stories affect both tellers and listeners.
• Parallels to Settler-Colonial Mechanisms:
  • Miigwans traces the slippery slope from cultural appropriation to severe spiritual and physical harm.
• Settler Presumption:
  • “Story” hints at the settler presumption that all things Indigenous are ripe for the taking: blood, identity, bodies, land, heritage, spirituality, being, voice (Justice, Why 138).
• Cyclical Nature of Settler Colonialism:
  • Story hints at the cyclical nature of settler colonialism with its recurring patterns of cultural appropriation, land dispossession, broken treaties, lack of consultation, commodification of Indigenous ways of life, medical experiments, missing people, and residential schools.
• Challenging Linear Temporality:
  • Story gives the lie to the settler state’s linear temporality of progress and instead suggests that settler progress is a linear progression towards total destruction.

Scientific Invention and Historical Reality

• Carceral Institutions:
  • The scientific invention of extracting bone marrow takes place within carceral institutions based on old residential schools.
• Historical Experiments:
  • Historical residential schools were used as sites of nutritional experimentation without informed consent.
• Motivations Behind Experiments:
  • Nutritional experiments were conducted within a paternalistic desire to solve the “Indian problem,” modernize Canada’s Indian administration, advance nutritional science, and protect the white population (Mosby 153).
• Escalation of Violent Practices:
  • The medical discovery that extracts Indigenous people’s bone marrow presents an escalation of previously violent settler-colonial practices.
• Heightening of Violence
  • The novel presents a heightening of already-present forms of violence.
• Resemblance to Historical Events:
  • The novel’s plot is terrifying because fictional events bear eerie resemblance to historical and contemporary settler-colonial mechanisms.

The Context of Canada Reads

• Critiques of Public Reception:
  • The public reception of The Marrow Thieves by a non-Indigenous audience within Canada Reads has been critiqued for emphasizing reconciliation rather than truth.
• Unspoken Requirements:
  • Critics point to an underlying problem in reconciliation discourse, such as Indigenous forgiveness and consent to continued occupation.
• Challenging Dismissals:
  • Dimaline challenged the common dismissal of Indigenous literatures as “too dark, too divisive” and reassured listeners to “trust that at no point in our stories do we leave you alone”.
• Sense of Responsibility:
  • Miig’s telling of Story provides explanatory context for readers who are invited to recognize the settler state’s cyclical patterns of violence in order to actively co-resist them.

Kinship-Building Practices of Indigenous Futurisms

• Macro vs. Micro Levels:
  • While Story unveils the macro-level mechanics of settler-colonial elimination, the main storyline and coming-to stories present how individual settlers, climate refugees, and displaced Indigenous people are co-opted into or resist state violence.
• Settler vs. Indigenous Futurity:
  • Indigenous futurity is necessarily opposed to settler futurity, which means the eradication of the original inhabitants of contested land.
• Expansive Kinship:
  • Protagonists are guided by an expansive understanding of kinship that defies racist, cis-heteropatriarchal, and anthropocentric constraints of settler-colonial ontologies.
• Leadership of the Young:
  • The young protagonists are portrayed as leaders capable of building a better future for everyone.
• Abduction of People of Color:
  • Following climate disaster and economic collapse, Black people and people of color are also abducted.
• Dispossession Logics:
  • The abduction of Rose’s father and her Anishinaabe mother manifests settler-conquistador logics of dispossession of Black and Indigenous bodies and Indigenous land.
• Scarcity-Induced Patterns:
  • Wab’s coming-to story speaks to scarcity-induced divide and conquer patterns and emerging kinship connections.
• Financial Benefits and Resistance:
  • The promise of financial benefits is predicated on the death of others, yet protagonists carve out pockets of resistance and mutual support.
• Indigenous and Black Kinship Networks:
  • The novel foregrounds Indigenous and Black kinship networks, featuring an Anishinaabe Black protagonist, Rose, and two Black women who play a crucial role in the novel’s final scene of reunion.
• Underground Railroad Nod:
  • The two nurses model a form of kinship and care that centers the people whose safety is the most compromised, nodding to the Underground Railroad.
• Core of the Story:
  • At its core, The Marrow Thieves is a story about expansive kinship networks and structures of care.
• Beyond the Nuclear Family:
  • Frenchie introduces a notion of kinship that goes beyond the nuclear family, including “family here, blood and otherwise”.
• Cree Concept of Wâhkôtowin:
  • Frenchie’s understanding of family resonates with the Cree concept of “wâhkôtowin,” which is “kinship beyond the immediate family or state of being related”.
• Building Outwards:
  • In counter-distinction to the settler-colonial logics of elimination and replacement, the protagonists’ kinship-building practices build outwards.

Distinctly Indigenous and Queer Bonds

• The novel centers kinship bonds that are both distinctly Indigenous and queer.
• Miigwans and Isaac:
  • The main love story is Miigwans’s and Isaac’s relationship.
• “Coming In” vs. “Coming Out”:
  • The fact that their relationship is never othered resonates with Alex Wilson’s notion of “coming in”.
• Miig’s Care for Others:
  • Miig’s love and grief for his husband extends to the ways in which Miig cares for others.
• Extending Kinship
  • Miig models kinship that not only extends to humans in a wider sense than the nation state’s emphasis on the nuclear family, but to the other-than-human or more-than-human kin, the land, and the waters.
• Roles to Ensure Survival:
  • Kinship is created through acts of caretaking that restore proper relations between interconnected entities and every member of the family has a specific role in order to take care of others and to ensure their own survival.
• Indispensable Youth:
  • As Miigwans reminds Frenchie: “No one is more important than anyone else”.
• Primary Message:
  • The novel’s primary message to Indigenous youth is that they are indispensable.

Indigenous Fictional Testimony

• The author consciously wrote The Marrow Thieves for a young adult audience so that the book might be taught in classrooms to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth.
• Communal Responsibility:
  • This deliberate selection of intended audience speaks to a sense of communal responsibility that aligns with Indigenous fictional testimony.
• Classroom Experiences:
  • Dimaline related how students “talk[ed] about how they would never let this potential future, this residential school, this commodification of Indigenous culture happen”.
• Encouraging Kinship Ties:
  • Dimaline wants non-Indigenous youth to “feel like they have kinship ties to . . . Indigenous communities”.

Foregrounding the Strength of Indigenous Youth

• Critique of Settler Colonialism:
  • The Marrow Thieves uncovers the tracks settler colonialism seeks to hide and exposes the degree to which Indigenous people are targeted without adopting the discourse of vulnerability.
• Celebrating Brilliance:
  • The novel celebrates the brilliance of Indigenous youth and features countless moments of humor, tenderness, joy, and rituals.
• Communal Analysis of Violence:
  • The young protagonists participate in the communal analysis of structural violence.
• Adapting Indigenous Ways:
  • While the young heroes demonstrate critical knowledge of the settler-colonial sense of entitlement to Native bodies and land, they also adapt Indigenous ways of knowing to their changing environment.
• Refraining from Waste:
  • In sharp contrast to the settler population that harvests Indigenous bodies to fill the gap created by their inability to dream, dreams emanate from an act of preservation.
• Healing the Land:
  • The Indigenous fugitives’ primary purpose is to protect each other and return to the land to start a healing process based on the principle “When we heal our land, we are healed also”.
• Relational Worldview:
  • This relational worldview resonates with Métis writer Maria Campbell’s call for a return to the principles of wahkotowin.
• Challenging Euro-Western Binaries:
  • The protagonists’ mindfulness of the interconnected nature of human and other-than-human beings constitutes a scientific teaching that challenges the Euro-Western binary between story and science as well as the settler state’s linear narrative of progress.

Gathering Words: Building Indigenous Futures through Sonic Sovereignty

• Importance of Building:
  • Acts of building are an integral part of the novel, involving awakening Indigenous languages and gathering words.
• Language Learning:
  • The novel chronicles a collective learning process in which Indigenous youth become each other’s teachers.
• Co-Creating Relationships:
  • The significance of the language unfolds in the relationships it co-creates, having a physical presence in the world in both written and spoken forms.
• Protective Charm:
  • The words Minerva breathes and the syllabics on the tree constitute a physical act of care, a blessing, a protective charm, and a signpost to Indigenous-centered worlds.
• Indigenous Worldbuilding:
  • The Marrow Thieves showcases Indigenous worldbuilding outside of settler-colonial constraints through Indigenous languages and soundscapes.
• Indigenous Inflections:
  • Even when English is spoken, Indigenous inflections co-create a sense of belonging and home.
  • Language is like storytelling; language is an integral aspect of kinship-building between the characters, who come to life through Dimaline’s knack for dialogue and striking imagery and powerful and has to be handled with care.
• Language as Dangerous:
  • Language becomes dangerous when Anishinaabemowin speakers use the language to sell out the family to Recruiters.
• Central to Indigenous Futurity:
  • Indigenous languages are central to Indigenous futurity because they present the “key” that breaks the new residential school’s extractive process.

Ceremonial Singing

• Community-Building:
  • Minerva’s singing participates in resurgent community-building, as the song gathers its force from her relational act of calling on her blood memory, her teachings, her ancestors.
• Unextractable Words:
  • The unextractable “words of a dreaming old lady” participate in sonic sovereignty.
• Poetic Justice:
  • Minerva’s sonic reclamation counters the ways in which children were forbidden from speaking their language at residential schools.
• Sonic Sovereignty:
  • Minerva’s ceremonial singing represents not only the sonic sovereignty of speaking Indigenous languages but of singing, drumming, and ceremony.
• Minerva’s unapologetic sound is central to radical resistance, resurgence, and wâhkôhtowin.
• Sonic Sovereignty at Turning Point:
  • There is a remarkable moment of sonic sovereignty when the family members find Minerva’s carefully wrapped jingles, a reminder of Indigenous futurity.
• Radical Tradition:
  • Jingles evoke jingle dresses, which emerged in response to the flu pandemic representing a “radical tradition” rooted in beliefs in “the healing power of music”.
• Acts of Healing
  • The discovery of Minerva’s jingles shakes loose Frenchie’s desire to rebuild a world where language and culture can be celebrated without the risk of being appropriated and extracted in the new residential schools and jingles set in motion acts of resurgence and affirm the protagonists’ quests to become fully human, to learn the language, and to heal the new sickness that has befallen the people and the land.
• Indigenous Fugitivity:
  • The young protagonists’ efforts to relearn their language while being on the run is an example of Indigenous fugitivity as “a flight inwards”.
• Minerva’s Final Message:
  • Minerva’s parting words remind the family of the homeward motion behind their northward journey.
• The fugitive protagonists’ northward trajectory is not merely an externally compelled flight but also a deliberate flight inward to rebuild, reclaim the language, and return to their caretaking responsibilities towards their extended kin.

Liberation through Kinship

• Foregrounding Kinship
  • By portraying a world of overtly visible settler-colonial genocide, The Marrow Thieves foregrounds an expansive understanding of kinship.
• Upending Progress-Oriented Discourse:
  • The history lessons embedded in Story upend the progress-oriented discourse of settler-colonial benevolence by showcasing how cyclical, settler-colonial violence targets various groups without severing kinship ties.
• Critique of Reconciliation:
  • If The Marrow Thieves can be read as a critique of Canada’s current reconciliation discourse, it also imagines kinship-oriented futurity that resonates with Nêhiyaw writer Erica Violet Lee’s vision for practicing reconciliation.
• Centering Indigenous Worlds:
  • The protagonists work towards building Indigenous-centered worlds filled with Indigenous joy and sound that will liberate not only themselves but others.
• Rebuilding Structures of Care:
  • What The Marrow Thieves does is the work of future ancestors leaving enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.