The Marrow Thieves
The Marrow Thieves
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Cherie Dimaline on The Marrow Thieves
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
When history was already the dystopiaThe book began as a reluctant experiment. An Indigenous publisher invited Dimaline to write something for a speculative fiction anthology, a genre she had never worked in. She sat down to think through the assignment and ran straight into a wall.
An Indigenous publisher had asked me to write a short story in the apocalypse or dystopian genre, and when I sat down to think about it, I could not think of anything worse than what had already happened.
That collision between genre convention and lived history became the book’s engine. Speaking to The Globe and Mail, Dimaline laid out why the dystopian premise felt redundant rather than imaginative, and why that redundancy was exactly the point.
I can write an apocalypse story. We survived an apocalypse, when you think about it. A whole other race or group comes to an area, wipes out life as you know it, you’re on the run, people are literally hunting you, how do you survive? How do you get past it? Indigenous people in Canada survived an apocalypse.
The short story she wrote for the anthology became the novel’s first chapter, and it would not stay contained. The reason it expanded had less to do with plot architecture than with a voice that arrived fully formed and refused to leave.
The Marrow Thieves is the first short story that I wrote that would not go the hell away, that demanded it become a novel. I love short stories—love them... I know now it’s because the idea was too big to leave behind and, most importantly, because it came to me in the voice of this young man, Frenchie. He had so much more to say.
Frenchie, a Métis teenager narrating his family’s flight from government Recruiters who harvest Indigenous bone marrow to restore dreaming capacity in non-Indigenous people, became the lens through which a collective historical argument could be made personal and urgent.
Once she knew the project was a novel, Dimaline made a deliberate classification choice that shaped who would actually encounter it. She pushed for a YA designation not for marketing reasons but because she had a specific room in mind: the Canadian classroom.
When it came time to decide how it would be classified, I asked the publisher that it be YA, simply because I really, really wanted it to have a chance at getting into schools. I thought, perhaps arrogantly, that if Indigenous kids had this book, they would feel proud and less alone, and that if Canadian kids had it, they would have the chance to learn and live and love with us—in our ways.
How she wrote it
A basket of words, built to carry a teachingThe first draft took roughly six weeks, but the craft behind it had been forming since childhood. Dimaline grew up in a storytelling tradition her grandmother maintained in the Georgian Bay Métis Community, one that sorted stories into two categories with different rules for how they had to be held and passed on. The goal was not just memorization but a learned ability to recognize what a story was for.
Because they were our textbooks and our maps... [stories carrying community history had to be recited back exactly, while stories carrying a lesson had to be told] differently, but the same... [I had to] recognize what the teaching was that had to be passed along [and] prove I could weave a basket of words to carry that teaching properly and be able to deliver it.
Character names in the novel are not decorative. Each one is a key that unlocks the character’s function in the group. Dimaline gave this most explicitly for two characters whose roles are bound up in what Indigenous people carry and protect. Miigwans, the group’s elder who teaches the practice of sharing Coming-to-Stories, gets his name from the Anishinaabemowin word for eagle feather, the highest honor in that tradition.
Miigwans was named so to show his position in the group, to have him be named after such a gift because he carries the greatest gift for the group—story. Minerva is absolutely named for her role as well—she is the one who has the ultimate answer. My favourite thing about these characters is that there is no effort or training in their victory—it is simply being who they are and representing the people they come from—a refusal to put down their context in order to pick up an outside one. That is what makes them heroes.
The central conceit of the novel, the idea that bone marrow could hold something as intangible as dreams, grew from an image Dimaline had carried since she was young. She arrived at the biology not through research but through a metaphor she had been turning over for decades.
I am in love with the idea of memory and experience being held like beads on a string. It’s something I imagined when I was very young, that stories were just one way of weaving, of creating jewelry that kept us warm and made us beautiful.
The personal thread
Words lost when the elders diedThe novel’s preoccupation with language loss is not abstract. Dimaline watched a specific vocabulary disappear within her own family. Her grandmother and great-aunts were speakers of Michif, the language of the Métis people, which blends Cree and French and is considered the youngest recognized language in existence. When they died, certain meanings became inaccessible in a way no translation could repair.
My grandmother and her sisters spoke Michif, the ‘youngest’ recognized language in existence. Hearing words that had no direct translation, and then losing them when they passed away, made me appreciate — sadly, too late — the magic of their words. The images, actions and feelings their words cradled will never be gifted in the same way again and that is a tragedy. I learned very young that language and story are carriers of a much deeper reality, and that we have to fight for them the same way we fight to preserve culture and art.
That personal loss sharpened into a professional identity. Dimaline has been explicit about what it means to be called a Métis writer rather than simply a Canadian one, and about the weight that title carries for her community. The distinction is not a matter of regional labeling; it names a responsibility.
Because we are the people of story, it is a great honor for me to be called a Métis writer. It denotes a title, an honor, and a certain knowledge. In fact, I feel demoted when I’m referred to as only a Canadian writer. My community has struggled and survived, and I’m enormously proud to be able to carry our voices forward.
What she wants us to sit with
Hope in the marrow, not just the woundDreams in the novel are the biological substance that non-Indigenous people have lost and are harvesting from Indigenous people to reclaim. But the word is doing double work. In a CBC interview quoted in the GradeSaver study guide, Dimaline connected the plot mechanism directly to a specific spiritual and historical reality her community navigated through each successive crisis.
Dreams, to me, represent our hope. It’s how we survive and it’s how we carry on after every state of emergency, after each suicide. Hope is the backbone of our survival, and it’s the core of our strength. Our grandparents survived residential schools and still brought through the stories, still carried our language, still made sure that we had ceremony and it was because we had that hope that there was going to be survival and revival. So I think dreams are the epitome of the hope that we carry.
The novel’s insistence on community, humor, love, and ceremony alongside the violence is a deliberate correction to a version of Indigenous narrative that Dimaline had grown impatient with. The concern was concrete: she worried about what children absorb when every story they receive about their own people is organized around suffering.
We are a very strong, vibrant, diverse, loving people and if we keep just telling the trauma without the context [...] our children will think they are broken, and our children are not broken, they are everything that we need to move forward.
The classroom she had in mind when she requested the YA label was not only a place for Indigenous students to find themselves. It was a place where all Canadian students might encounter Indigenous philosophy and history on their own terms. She framed that possibility not as a correction but as an invitation.
For me, the idea of kids, all Canadian kids, learning about philosophy, about history, about science, about psychology, about wellness, from an Indigenous lens is really, really such an honour.