The Marrow Thieves (Marrow Thieves #1)

by Cherie Dimaline

“The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,the way the whites are taking care of the Indians:killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.” — William S. Burroughs

“Where you’ve nothing else,construct ceremonies out of the airand breathe upon them.” — Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“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.”

Unlike the smaller city outskirts where I’d later lose my brother, these suburbs were open and vast, a maze of darkened windows and burnt cars in kaleidoscopic boroughs that branched out like a geometric blossom of asphalt and curb and erupting driveways.

Here the sidewalks were shot through with arterial cracks and studded with menacing weeds that had evolved to survive torrential rain and the lack of pollinators. Wildlife was limited to buzzards, raccoons the size of huskies, domestic pets left to run feral, and hordes of cockroaches that had regained the ability to fly like their southern cousins.

“Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.” He poked at the crackling wood with a pointy stick till the shadows were frenetic against his tan face, till they slid into the longer shoots of hair near the front of his mohawk, the tendrils he swept up and patted into place atop the shorter brush with the care of a pageant queen.

“You are born with them. Your DNA weaves them into the marrow like spinners,” Miig answered. The flames tried to settle, and he prodded them to dance again. He added, “That’s where they pluck them from.”

“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 Water Wars raged on, moving north seeking our rivers and bays, and eventually, once our homelands were decimated and the water leeched and the people scattered, they moved on to the towns. Only then were armies formed, soldiers drafted, and bullets fired. Ironically, at the same time rivers were being sucked south and then east to the highest bidder, the North was melting. The Melt put most of the northlands under water, and the people moved south or onto some of the thousands of tiny islands that popped up out of the Melt’s wake across the top of our lands. Those northern people, they were tough, though, some of the toughest we’ve ever had, so they were okay, are still okay, the tales tell. Some better than okay. That’s why we move north towards them now.”

Sometimes we gathered for an hour so he could explain treaties, and others it was ten minutes to list the earthquakes in the sequence that they occurred, peeling the edging off the continents back like diseased gums.

“The Water Wars lasted ten years before a new set of treaties and agreements were shook on between world leaders in echoing assembly halls. The Anishnaabe were scattered, lonely, and scared. On our knees again, only this time there was no home to regroup at. Meanwhile, the rest of the continent sank into a new era. The world’s edges had been clipped by the rising waters, tectonic shifts, and constant rains. Half the population was lost in the disaster and from the disease that spread from too many corpses and not enough graves. The ones that were left were no better off, really. They worked longer hours, they stopped reproducing without the doctors, and worst of all, they stopped dreaming. Families, loved ones, were torn apart in this new world.”

“After the rains started and the lands shifted so that some cities fell right into the oceans, people had to move around. Diseases spread like crazy. With all this sickness and movement and death, people got sad. One of the ways the sadness came out was when they slept. They stopped being able to dream. At first they just talked about it all casual-like. ‘Oh, funniest thing, I haven’t dreamed in months.’ ‘Isn’t that odd, I haven’t dreamed either.’”

We all do what we can to survive. Right now, they can chase us. And us? We can run. It may not always be this way, and who is to say what we will be capable of.”

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.

Before they emptied out, the inner cities were swarming with desperation-hungry bellies, pinched guts, lousy scalps, dirty necks, and the people who made money off of it all. The alleys grew lean-tos and shelters made of layers of melting cardboard like hives. The apartments were stuffed to overflowing, and people huddled in the hallways. They made their homes in the stairwells after every room was taken, so that once the elevators were shut off you had to bribe your way through living rooms and sleeping babies to get to and from your apartment.

We’d heard too many stories about the death camps, the way we were being murdered real slow.

“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.

“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.

“People lost their minds, killing themselves and others and, even worse for the new order, refusing to work at all. They needed answers, solutions. So, up here, the Governors turned to the Church and the scientists to find a cure for the missing dreams. In the meantime, those who could afford it turned to sleep counselors, took pills to go to bed and pills to wake up, and did things like group hypnosis to implant new dreams.

“And then, even after our way of life was being commoditized, after our lands were filled with water companies and wealthy corporate investors, we were still hopeful. Because we had each other. New communities started to form, and we were gathering strength. But then the Church and the scientists that were working day and night on the dream problem came up with their solution and everything went to hell.

“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.

“It began as a rumor, that they had found a way to siphon the dreams right out of our bones, a rumor whispered every time one of us went missing, a rumor denounced every time their doctors sent us to hospitals and treatments centers never to return. They kept sending us away, enticing us to seek medical care and then ke...

“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.”

Animals were making their way back, but they were different. Too much pollution and too much change. Miig said if we gave them another half a century, they’d take everything back over and we would be the hunted.

And how quickly people would forget the art in the Indian and instead see only the commodity.

Knowing only that your people could be strapped into some kind of machine that chews them up and spits out bone mush and sticky sap. It’s much better to freeze and bleed a free man.

Dude, what do you want to get into the school for? You’re an Indian. Indians go there to die.’ “‘What do you mean? Indians go there to get harvested.’ “He shrugged his shoulders and chuckled without mirth. ‘What do you think harvesting is? They work them … I mean … you … until there’s enough demand built up then they hook you up, and game over, man. It’s done.’

They’re gone! There’s no one there now. Last group was used up. They’re waiting on new recruits!’ He yelled it at me from behind his arms.