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Paula Wieczorek, PhD candidateDepartment of English Studies,University of Rzeszów, PolandEmail: wieczorek1paula@A plague of madness: Climate crisis, capitalism and Indigenous communities in Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves (2017)The most destructive hurricanes of recent years as well as record droughts show that the dire consequences of climate change are no longer only possible in the near future – they are already being observed and felt by communities around the globe. Both global warming and growing environmental and social injustices aggravated by the Anthropocene have sparked a number of popular movies and television series about the future of the Earth. Radically transformed climates and their consequences are also the subject of so many science fiction novels that a journalist, Dan Bloom, coined the term climate fiction (cli-fi) to name a new subgenre. Kyle Whyte notices that the mainstream fiction, written by such authors as Barbara Kingsolver or Margaret Atwood, presents dystopian or post-apocalyptic visions of climate crises that leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios (2018, 225). Such narratives often erase certain populations, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. The main intention of the following paper is to examine the way a Métis writer Cherie Dimaline responds to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene epoch through her 2017 speculative fiction novel The Marrow Thieves. The paper discusses the impact of extractive industries and climate change on the lives of all humans, Indigenous communities and other groups alike. It gives insights into the ways The Marrow Thieves reflects on current political conditions that impede action on climate change. Special attention will be paid to Indigenous knowledge and its relevance to sustainable development. The paper addresses Dimaline’s novel primarily from ecocritical perspectives. Marrow Thieves is set in a Canada where “Recruiters” harvest the bone marrow of Indigenous people. The protagonist Frenchie evades capture and finds a group led by Miigwaans (a.k.a. “Miig”), an Anishinaabe man who lost his husband to the Recruiters. Throughout the novel they continue to run away from their enemies, stopping only for the night to rest. Each character shares accounts from the life they led prior to joining the group, while Miig himself reveals the oral history of how the world collapsed into its dystopian state. The conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people arose in the first place because of the devastating effects of climate change, which are described in the following passage: “The EARTH was broken.. […] 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 crusts. 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.” (Dimaline 2017, 87-88)These changes made non-Indigenous people lose their ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to a plague of madness.?People got sick and started to kill themselves and others. The cities turned into dangerous concentrations of impoverished, ill, and desperate people, while? many people have to turn to medical intervention in order to conceive children. Governments, churches, and scientists started to search for a cure to restore dreaming. Many people turned to Indigenous people. When the Indigenous people refused to let others into their ceremonies, the white people started to look for ways to take the ability to dream. The government began to move Indigenous people off of their lands, just like in the past. Protecting their ceremonies allows the Indigenous people to maintain their traditions and not corrupt them, like what happened to the landscape.Non-Indigenous people began to harvest the bone marrow of the Indigenous population because they hoped it would enable them to dream again. When the scientists needed more bodies, they turned to history and decided to build new?residential schools. Indigenous people now attend these schools and their dreams are stolen from their bone marrow. They die, join the ancestors, and hope that there are enough dreams left in the world for the next generation. The fact that the places where the government extracts bone marrow are called “residential schools,” just like the ones which almost robbed the Anishnaabe of their language, indicates that what is happening in the novel’s present is not something new. It is a continuation of a long line of oppression that Indigenous people have suffered at the hands of white settler governments. The activities of extractive industries continue to disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples and result in environmental degradation, forced displacement, loss of culture and human rights violations, which include the abuses of Indigenous peoples’ right to lands or the right to determine one’s economic, cultural and social development. As Heather Davis (2017, 771) asserts, the current ecological crisis ought to be viewed as a continuation of, rather than a break from, the era of colonialism which extends through advanced capitalism. Miig remembers that the Anishnaable once ruled the land and convinces the children: “We’ve survived this before. We will survive it again. Trust that there is always someone who has taken the greater good as mission.” It echoes Kyle Whyte’s views that:Thinking about climate injustice against Indigenous peoples is less about envisioning a new future and more like the experience of déjà vu. This is because climate injustice is part of a cyclical history situated within the larger struggle of anthropogenic environmental change catalyzed by colonialism, industrialism and capitalism – not three unfortunately converging courses of history. (2016, 12)While the damage wrought by climate change affects everyone who inhabits the planet, the Indigenous characters are the ones who are being forced to pay for these changes with their bodies and their lives. By representing the dispossession of Native Americans from their lands by the government that barred them from a political voice, Dimaline draws attention to the concept of “environmental racism,” which was defined by Graham Huggan and Hellen Tiffin as a sociological phenomenon, exemplified in the environmentally discriminatory treatment of socially marginalised or economically disadvantaged peoples, and in the transference of ecological problems from their “home” source to a “foreign” outlet (whether discursively, e.g., through the more or less wholly imagined perception of other people’s “dirty habits,” or materially, e.g., the actual re-routing of First World commercial waste) (2010, 4).In Marrow Thieves, non‐Indigenous peoples intend to commodify not only the bodies but also the knowledge Indigenous folks possess. Minerva’s knowledge as an elder is particularly valuable; her ancestral singing overpowers the Recruiters and brings about the destruction of one of the residential schools where captives are housed and their marrow is harvested. These schools symbolise Canada’s history of trying to appropriate Indigenous knowledge. An Indigenous man named?Clarence?tells Frenchie that the Indigenous populations can “start the process of healing” as they already have the knowledge they need to “heal the land,” despite the efforts to destroy that knowledge through the historical and present?residential schools. He suggests that the only way to recover from this crisis is to prioritize the knowledge of those who are most negatively affected by environmental destruction. Therefore, Indigenous knowledge can play a vital role in fighting the climate crisis and sustainable development defined as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (United Nations General Assembly 1987, 43). Dimaline contrasts in her novel the Western worldview and the American Indian philosophy concerning the natural world. More precisely, Indigenous people perceive the environment in relational terms, while non-indigenous people treat non-humans as separate and inferior to humans. Frenchie’s way of thinking about animals also displays her non-anthropocentric understanding of human and non-human relations. Greta Gaard points out that Euro-Western culture is permeated by Cartesian rationalism that children are thought not to trust the information sent by the animate world (2017, xix). While in Western discourse and practice, the land is perceived in terms of property, Indigenous people understand the relationship between the people and the land in terms of intimate kinship bonds. The importance of the land can be traced in the stories of the creation as well as the stories of trans-species communication and kinship with earth-others and ecological entities. As Deloria writes, traditional Indian people saw themselves as “spiritual owner[s]of the land” that was given to them by the spirits (1992, 89). What is more, American Indian communities acknowledge the earth is a living organism, i.e. “the earth is alive in the same sense that human beings are alive” (Allen Gunn 1986, 70). It can be deduced that Indigenous thought around the assemblages of human and nonhuman parallel current ontological concerns and made an impact on the development of ecocriticism, which promotes the interconnectedness of all living things. (cf. Serenella Iovino and Serpill Oppermann)Despite all publicly available knowledge about the ecological crisis, the real drama of the impending future threat cannot be seen. Amitav Ghosh diagnoses a fundamental cognitive weakness that prevents “us” (as human beings) from adequately perceiving the relevance of non-human actors such as the phenomenon of climate change, and from reacting to it. In his 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh, following Lawrence Buell, points out that today’s climate events seem to pose challenges to the contemporary human imagination: “Let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (2016, 9). In his paper “Cosmopolitan Climates,” Mike Hulme claims that climate change issues should not be discussed solely in scientific terms, according to the geographer, global warming ought to be approached with a perspective that is based on an understanding of human beings as being “firmly embedded within the physical climate system” (2010, 38). The scholars agree that literary fiction has the potential to allow for the comprehension of the abstract future and the reconnection between the actions and impacts of an individual and a whole community.The Marrow Thieves is a book that can help the readers apprehend climate change and other threats remaining imperceptible to our senses, either because they are too vast or too minute in scale, or geographically remote. The novel contributes to the ongoing conversations on environmental ethics and social justice at times of climate crisis by exposing the planetary and the community implications of the state of relationships between the land and the people. The writer emphasizes the importance of Indigenous knowledge in fighting the climate crisis. Cherie Dimaline’s fiction can be seen as environmental justice work, as it imagines the future that makes the readers think critically about the present and the past. Literature thus appears to have a crucial role in understanding and overcoming the crisis. As Linda Hogan writes: “We need new stories, new terms and conditions that are relevant to the love of the land, a new narrative that could imagine another way” (1995, 94). ReferencesAllen Gunn, Paula. 1986. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon.Davis, Heather. 2017. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2017, 16(4): 761-780.Deloria, Vine. 1992. God Is Red: a Native View of Religion. Golden, Colo.: North American Press.Dimaline, Cherie. 2017. Marrow Thieves. ?Toronto: Dancing Cat Books.Gaard, Greta. 2017. Critical Ecofeminism. Lanham: Lexington Books.Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Hogan, Linda. 1995. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review Press.Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. New York: Routledge.Hulme, Mike. “Cosmopolitan Climates: Hybridity, Foresight and Meaning.” Theory, Culture & Society 27.2-3 (2010): 267–276. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2014. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.United Nations General Assembly. 1987. Report of the world commission on environment and development: Our common future. Oslo, Norway: United Nations General Assembly, Development and International Co-operation: Environment.Whyte, Kyle. 2016. “Is it Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice.” In Joni Adamson, Michael Davis and Hsinya Huang (eds). Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledges, Forging New Constellations of Practice. Earthscan Publications, 88-104.Whyte, Kyle. 2018. “Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises” In Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, vol. 1 (1-2) (2018): 224-242. ................
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