French thinks about how, when a people don't have their youngest and their oldest, they are without deep roots, and without an acute need to protect and make things better. There's a passage in The Marrow Thieves that, for me, embodies what matters for any society. They're startled when they hear little Ri say "French, can I sleep with you guys?" and then a minute or two later, Slopper (he and Ri are the two children in the group) appears and says "Move over, French. For the first time, French and Rose are curled up together. After months of sleeping on the ground in tents, they cautiously enter the hotel, and then later, enthusiastically say good night, each in their own rooms, on beds. One moment that made my heart swell is when the group has come to an abandoned hotel. It will resonate with other Native readers, too. It is one of many points in The Marrow Thieves where-painfully or with exquisite beauty-Dimaline's story resonates with me. That's a specific reference to the residential schools of the past, where so much was taken from Native children. The Marrow Thieves begins when French is 11, being chased by those Recruiters who want to take Indigenous people to schools to take their marrow. The hunters in Dimaline's story are "the Recruiters." They're the ones French and all the others are hiding from, running from. but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. "We had a future and a past all bundled up in her round dark cheeks and loose curls."įrench (sometimes called Frenchie his given name is Francis) and the rest are on the run, running away from "the Recruiters." Here, I'll share the description from the back cover: On page 32, there's a line about her that squeezes my heart. Later, French will meet and fall in love with Rose. I paused again and again as I met and came to know 16 year-old French, and then the people who would become his family: Miig, Wab, Zheegwon, Tree, RiRi, Minerva, Chi-Boy, and Slopper. That's the case, too, with The Marrow Thieves. There's a quality in Dimaline's writing that reached from the page, into my being.
I wrote, then, that I had to "just be" with Auntie Dave and that story for awhile.
The character she writes about in that story is named Auntie Dave. I first came to know Cherie Dimaline's writing last year, when I read "Legends are Made, Not Born" in Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An LGBT and Two-Spirit Sci Fi Anthology.
0 kommentar(er)
