Narrative Agency and Storied Becomings in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Abstract

Set in a future in which North America has succumbed to ecological disaster and the settler-colonial inhabitants have lost the ability to dream, Cherie Dimaline’s novel, The Marrow Thieves, depicts how an ethics of reciprocal care for both humans and more-than-humans offers a means of resistance toward necropolitical colonial narratives of indigeneity. Throughout the novel, Story, dreams, and language are agential, and enact a communal being with such that the characters are able to see themselves not just in the past but also in the present and the future.

Keywords

• Agential narrative. Eco-critical dystopia. Indigenous epistemologies. Land agency. The Marrow Thieves