The Marrow Thieves (Marrow Thieves #1)

by Cherie Dimaline

“Miigwans says the Governors’ Committee didn’t set up the schools brand new; he says they were based on the old residential school system they used to try to break our people to begin with, way back.”

Out here stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes. And surrounded by these silent trees, beside a calming fire, I watched the bones dance. This was our medicine, these bones, and I opened up and took it all in. And dreamed of north.

“You have to try to keep the goal in your head. You can’t let what’s not here, what’s missing, you can’t let that slow you down.”

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.

“Anishnaabe people, us, lived on these lands for a thousand years. Some of our brothers decided to walk as far east as they could go, and some walked west, and some crossed great stretches of narrow earth until they reached other parts of the globe. Many of us stayed here. We welcomed visitors, who renamed the land Canada. Sometimes things got real between us and the newcomers. Sometimes we killed each other. We were great fighters — warriors, we called ourselves and each other — and we knew these lands, so we kicked a lot of ass.” The boys always puffed out their chests when Miig got to this part. The women straightened their spines and elongated their necks, their beautiful faces like flowers opening in the heat of the fire. “But we lost a lot. Mostly because we got sick with new germs. And then when we were on our knees with fever and pukes, they decided they liked us there, on our knees. And that’s when they opened the first schools. “We suffered there. We almost lost our languages. Many lost their innocence, their laughter, their lives. But we got through it, and the schools were shut down. We returned to our home places and rebuilt, relearned, regrouped. We picked up and carried on. There were a lot of years where we were lost, too much pain drowned in forgetting that came in convenient packages: bottles, pills, cubicles where we settled to move around papers. But we sang our songs and brought them to the streets and into the classrooms — classrooms we built on our o...

“Then the wars for the water came. America reached up and started sipping on our lakes with a great metal straw. And where were the freshest lakes and the cleanest rivers? On our lands, of course. Anishnaabe were always the canary in the mine for the rest of them. Too bad the country was busy worrying about how we didn’t pay an extra tax on Levi’s jeans and Kit Kat bars to listen to what we were shouting. “The Great Lakes were polluted to muck. It took some doing, but right around the time California was swallowed back by the ocean, they were fenced off, too poisonous for use.”

This was fast becoming the routine. I heard Story, she did not. So she would ask me to tell her stories, innocently enough, but desperate for some understanding, the understanding that was withheld from her youth so that she could form into a real human before she understood that some saw her as little more than a crop.

I jumped up. “Bullshit!” She jumped too, throwing her shoulder into mine. “Not bullshit. Real shit.” “How do you have language?” My voice broke on the last syllable. My chest tightened. How could she have the language? She was the same age as me, and I deserved it more. I don’t know why, but I felt certain that I did. I yanked my braid out of the back of my shirt and let it fall over my shoulder. Some kind of proof, I suppose.

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?

I thought about the sickness and the insanity that crept like bedbugs through families while they slept. What would I have done to save my parents or Mitch, given the chance? Would I have been able to trap a child, to do what, cut them into pieces? To boil them alive? I shuddered. I didn’t want to know what they did. And I didn’t really want to know if I’d be capable of doing it.

“I didn’t know him very well. He was with one other.” “Indian?” Miig asked. She nodded, and Rose squeezed my hand a little. We were always excited at the possibility of more of us. Miig must have seen the looks on our faces, the sudden excitement, because he said, “Not every Indian is an Indian.”

We headed northwest, up towards the shallows of James Bay where the whales used to migrate before they packed up and headed down to Australia for good. After the Indians left, the industries and businesses in and around their territories closed up too: small-time fisheries, hunting camps, tourist traps. After that, the big ones started to fall: large-scale resorts, fly-in luxury cottages, and wilderness getaways for stressed businessmen and their foreign investors. In light of the wars and the rush to adapt and survive, no one really gave a shit about tourism, gross domestic profit, or low-level jobs for rurally located folks. Though they cared enough to kick everyone out when the former employees tried to bunk down in the once-plush rooms and make use of the supplies and heat. They fenced them off, boarded them up, and some even hired security firms to walk around the perimeter and make sure no one was looking to survive on corporate-sponsored vacancy.

It’s just that neither extreme had prepared me for the Four Winds Resort. From the outside it looked like an oversized cottage, all wood and peaks and log pillars holding up odd angles and juts. It rose three storeys with a front entranceway that stretched out the front as a long corridor. We made our way to the doors and waited while Chi-Boy snapped the locks off with the cutters he kept in his roll. Then Tree and Zheegwon pried off the boards and opened the old doors with much effort and squealing of joints. Miig watched the darkness beyond the gates nervously. The moon lit the wide front hall in pale ribbons, turning the dust and broken bits of chair and wainscoting and climbing vines from feral houseplants into fairy tale turrets. We walked slowly, out of habit, out of fear, but also, now, out of reverence. This space felt untouched. We could feel the thrum of old activity sliding along the floorboards, caught in the keyholes of closed doors. Everything had been shut tight while so much was still supposed to happen. The intent and plans hadn’t had time to vacate. And here we were now opening the lid of a sealed jar, and all the anticipation of a tomorrow planned a thousand yesterdays ago came skittering to our feet like slick-shelled beetles. The lower windows were all boarded up on either side of the hallway, done professionally with sheets of reinforced plywood, backed with crossed two-by-fours. But the skylight arching out over the hallway above showed us the night ...

“‘A child needs walls. Not brick and wood walls all the time, but some sort of walls to keep them in and others out. So they can play and they can sleep and they can move without the burden of eyes and hands. I’m that wall for you. When I’m gone, you make your own walls with this,’ Jonas told me, and he held out Will’s hunting rifle to me.

I woke up when Minerva started coughing. The sound was deafening as she was sitting in one of the tufted chairs in front of the fireplace in my room. I jumped when I saw her there. How long had she been sitting in my room? She waved to me when I lifted my head. I tried to wave back, but I couldn’t lift my arm. In fact, my head was the only thing I could move. Slopper drooled on the pillow beside me and Rose was stretched out, her head back on my arm, on the other side. Beside her was RiRi, arms thrown out wide like she was making a great leap in her dreams. Our feet were trapped under a weight on top of the blankets that turned out to be Tree and Zheegwon lying perpendicular on top of the comforter. I slid my arm out from under Rose, an almost painful separation, and climbed over Slopper, almost stepping on Chi-Boy, who was stretched out beside the bed, a discarded pillow under his head. Beside him was Wab. There were a few inches between them, but their breathing was matched, an even greater intimacy than touch. So we were all here, crammed into one room, all of us besides Miig. “Morning, French. I see we ended up having a slumber party last night.” Spoke too soon. There he was, stretching out his arms above his head while he leaned up against the wall to the right of the closed door, his legs crossed in front of him.

everyone tells their own coming-to story. That’s the rule. Everyone’s creation story is their own.”

“The Earth was broken. Too much taking for too damn long, so she finally broke. But she went out like a wild horse, bucking off as much as she could before lying down. A melting North meant the water levels rose and the weather changed. It changed to violence in some cases, building tsunamis, spinning tornados, crumbling earthquakes, and the shapes of countries were changed forever, whole coasts breaking off like crust. “And all those pipelines in the ground? They snapped like icicles and spewed bile over forests, into lakes, drowning whole reserves and towns. So much laid to waste from the miscalculation of infallibility in the face of a planet’s revolt. “People died in the millions when that happened. The ones that were left had to migrate inward. It was like the second coming of the boats, so many sick people and not enough time to organize peacefully.

“But the powers that be still refused to change and bent the already stooped under the whips of a schedule made for a population twice its size and inflated by the need to rebuild. Those that were left worked longer, worked harder. And now the sun was gone for weeks at a time. The suburban structure of their lives had been upended. And so they got sicker, this time in the head. They stopped dreaming. And a man without dreams is just a meaty machine with a broken gauge.

“At first, people turned to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity, looking for ways we could help guide them. They asked to come to ceremony. They humbled themselves when we refused. And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves. How could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept to dream? How could they make ceremony better, more efficient, more economical? “That was the first alarm set off in the communities. We thought that was the worst of it. If only.

“They asked for volunteers first. Put out ads asking for people with ‘Indigenous bloodlines and good general health’ to check in with local clinics for medical trials. They’d give you room and board for a week and a small honorarium to pay for your time off work. By then our distrust had grown stronger, and they didn’t get many volunteers from the public. So they turned to the prisons. The prisons were always full of our people. Whether or not the prisoners went voluntarily, who knows? There weren’t enough people worried about the well-being of prisoners to really make sure.

“Soon, they needed too many bodies, and they turned to history to show them how to best keep us warehoused, how to best position the culling. That’s when the new residential schools started growing up from the dirt like poisonous brick mushrooms.

“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”

Snow fell in a light dusting now. It looked like glitter scraped from the underside of clouds by the scrubby top branches of the pines. The skeletons of the green trees curved under the elegant weight of the snow, bowing and twisting like ribbons in the wind.

And sleeping inside just made me dream about my brother. It was nice to see him, but always by the end of the dream he was gone, and in some horrible rending kind of way. Better to be in the forest, I thought. Where the dreams were shrouded in fog and cold and the group knew its order and stride by the weight of our want.

I heard a sharp rap on the front door, and my heart jumped into my throat. Isaac didn’t have memories in his family of the original schools, the ones that pulled themselves up like wooden monsters coming to attention across the land back in the 1800s — monsters who stayed there, ingesting our children like sweet berries, one after the other, for over a hundred years. 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.

There is a feeling that has no name because, really, it is such an absence that it exists only in a vacuum of feeling and so, really, can have no name. It sucks you inside out and places you in a space where touch and taste and sound and sight all turn to ash. I was there now, alone. There was no mooring, no ground, no sky. There was just me and the boot, and then, suddenly, the warm weight of the rifle on my back.

“Thing is, French, sometimes you do things you wouldn’t do in another time and place. Sometimes the path in front of you alters. Sometimes it goes through some pretty dark territory. Just make sure it doesn’t change the intent of the trip.”

“Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to live it.”

was impossible to ignore for a few reasons. For one, any sort of noise could bring the predators, so we tried to stay quiet. And then there was the song itself. That’s what sent me out of the tent. “Do you hear that?” she’d whispered through my hair. I’d listened. There it was. “Yeah,” I’d responded against her neck. We’d stayed still, just listening to the shake of a dry seed rattle, alert to danger, until the singing began. Miigwans. Now I stood near the firepit and set my feet in the direction of his voice. It was a low, moaning voice, the kind the body used to travel through pain, the kind a child uses when they’ve realized the higher pitched tone used for bringing their mothers isn’t working and they are alone after all.

“All we need is the safety to return to our homelands. Then we can start the process of healing.” I was confused. “How can you return home when it’s gone? Can’t you just heal out here?” Miig and General gave each other knowing looks, and Clarence was patient in his answer. “I mean we can start healing the land. We have the knowledge, kept through the first round of these blasted schools, from before that, when these visitors first made their way over here like angry children throwing tantrums. When we heal our land, we are healed also.” Then he added, “We’ll get there. Maybe not soon, but eventually.”

“Are you okay?” I was confused, and searched Miig’s torso for signs of blood. Why was he shaking? “Did he shoot you?” I reached out and pulled his button-up shirt to the side, looking for a hole. “It wasn’t me.” He forced key after key into the lock until one slid to the hilt and clicked. “He didn’t shoot me.” Miig met my eyes for only a second, but I saw panic there; it stitched into his iris and brought electricity to the surface. He yanked the door open, and she fell into his arms. Obviously, she’d been pushed up against the back doors, waiting for her rescue. He caught her and sank to the ground. I dropped to my knees beside Miigwans, grabbing at Minerva like a kid, like I never had when we were on the run. I grabbed her hand, placing it under mine and over the hole in her chest. Blood, hot and sticky, gushed out between our fingers. Her thin shirt was already soaked through. “You’re gonna be okay,” I lied. She smiled, patting my hand, comforting me, even now that my distress stemmed from her own peril. The blood blossomed under my knees like peonies over craggy asphalt. Minerva wore a navy blue jumpsuit. Her hair had been cut short, and I barely recognized her. The lines on her face were deep, the deepest around her eyes. She had no sweaters, no long johns under skirts, no kerchief over her head. But when she opened her mouth to speak, I knew it was her for sure. She leaned in close to Miig and spoke words in the language. They fell softly on his face. They must have ...

But your mom, she doesn’t yell. She doesn’t even get mad.” He paused until I lifted my head and looked at him. He was crying too, already saying goodbye. “Your mother, she just looks at me real serious and says, ‘Jean, running only works if you’re moving towards something, not away. Otherwise, you’ll never get anywhere.’”

And I had already lost a few hours and night was falling fast. I took off running, away from camp, the Council, my family: running towards Rose, who was somewhere beyond the birch-beaded edge of the woods, running towards an idea of home that I wasn’t willing to lose, not even if it meant running away from the family I had already found. “Ahneen.” I almost tripped over my own feet at the sound of her voice. Sure enough, there was Rose, sitting on a log about twenty meters into the bush, her backpack at her feet. Most of her newly shorn curls were piled on top of her head in a messy bun; a few escaped and sat on her forehead like springs. “Jesus! You startled me.” She chuckled. “Startled? You damn near jumped out of your skin.” “Yeah, well … what are you even doing here?” Her brow furrowed. “You know what I mean. I mean, you left hours ago. I thought I was in for an evening run.” I stood in front of her, not sure if I should sit, not sure if we were continuing on just yet. “Yeah, well.” She kicked at the dirt between my boots. “Maybe I just wanted to give you a break.” “And what made you so sure I would even follow you?” I nudged the toe of her shoe with mine. She didn’t look up, but I could see the edges of a smile creep onto her cheeks. It made her eyes narrow and her forehead smooth like a pulled sheet. “A hunch, I guess.” “Oh, a hunch, eh?” I bent over, pushing my nose into the mass of curls on her head. I smelled flowers right before they burst out of their green cocoo...

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. Anything. Everything.