“Stories wrapped in Stories”: Analyzing Survivance and Kinship in The Marrow Thieves (2017)

Abstract

[eng] The Marrow Thieves (2017) is an Indigenous futuristic novel written by Cherie Dimaline that presents a group of Indigenous characters being persecuted by settler colonists, who seek to consume the Indigenous people’s marrow in order to regain the ability to dream. According to Vizenor (2010), the term survivance describes the active sense of defending and vindicating a culture, not only by keeping its members alive, but also by participating in its customs and traditions. This project examines how the Indigenous communities in the novel enact survivance through interactions with their cultures and among themselves, in comparison with the approach of the settler colonists who hunt them. For this purpose, this project studies how the characters in the story negotiate their treatment of the land, their connection to their cultures and their relationships with other members of their communities, based on the knowledge and ways of their nations. The text argues that Dimaline’s novel highlights how, owing to their nurture-based culture, in addition to the importance of connections, Indigenous people maintain a deep kinship with the land, with their communities and with the communal knowledge, which allows them to dream and prosper as a community. This is in contrast to the settlers’ colonial society, whose relationship with the land is based on overexploitation of natural resources and their connections with themselves and others are competitive, rather than nurturing. This dichotomy shows how the Indigenous cultures in the narrative survive thanks to the connections of their members among themselves, with the land and with their traditions and customs.