Métis Survivance: Land, Love, and Futures in Cherie Dimaline's Dystopian Novels

Abstract

Métis Survivance:Land, Love, and Futures in Cherie Dimaline's Dystopian Novels Celiese Lypka "Who knows what it's like to leave, to give up a piece of land? If you do, it might haunt you forever, follow you till you come back." Marilyn Dumont1 Although widely different in their composition of Indigenous futurisms, Métis author Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (set in the dystopian future, [2017]) and Empire of Wild (set in the present as a dystopian landscape, [2019]) reveal the impossibility of a shareable future between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism. In both novels, Indigenous bodies and land are co-opted by settler communities to be mined for capital gain. The Marrow Thieves presents a horrific future in which Indigenous bodies are harvested for their ability to dream, something that non-Indigenous peoples have lost the ability to do. The narrative focuses on a young man named Frenchie, who is trying to make sense of the colonial past and present, while looking toward an Indigenous-centric future. In Empire of Wild, Joan searches for her husband who loses control over his mind and body after suggesting they sell her family land to developers for mining and pipeline projects. The protagonists of both texts are Métis,2 and the novels can be read as quests to find a sustainable community for the characters who, through processes of colonization, have forgotten Métis practices and ways of being—knowledge that is integral to healing and reconnecting with the land to build a better future in a postcapitalist world. Both Frenchie and Joan3 begin their respective narratives lost and alone, in search of a specific place or person rooted in "decolonial love," what Leanne Betasamosake [End Page 27] Simpson outlines as "a rebellion of love, persistence, commitment, and profound caring" that is a "generative refusal of colonial recognition."4 Kyle Whyte articulates how, through the sustained militaristic campaigns of settler colonialism across the globe (which includes damaging ecosystems for colonial gain, violent assimilation, and containment processes, as well as forced dependency and instilling conditions of mass fear), Indigenous peoples "already inhabit what our ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future."5 This essay analyzes the representation of Métis communities within the dystopian settings of both novels, identifying the fractures of Métis identity as a result of land dispossession. Dimaline's dystopias detail various ways in which Indigenous people and the land they live on have been devastated by the violence of settler colonialism, leaving them in a nightmarish landscape where they are insidiously disconnected from land and Indigenous ways of being. I argue that through the processes of learning and putting into practice Indigenous storytelling rooted in landedness—what acclaimed Métis scholar Emma LaRocque defines as "Metis love of land"6—the protagonists come to embody decolonial love that cultivates Indigenous futures by upending colonial constructions of identity and community through relational resilience. Landedness, in its relationship with "a particular and unique land area … where we carry out body and home-stitching everydayness" is a "place where we become familiar" to ourselves, a place where we live and grow in decolonial love that nurtures Métis identity outside of colonial structures. This idea is particularly important in Dimaline's novels, as landedness is continuously threatened by the dystopian structures that abolish Indigenous land and ways of being. Reading the colonial history of North America reveals the specific and insidious instances in which Indigenous peoples have been systematically eradicated to legitimize settler state claims to land, practices, and power. However, as Danika Medak-Saltzman identifies, "Yet, and despite the best efforts of settler colonial societies to deny Native peoples the possibility of meaningful futures, narratives about the future have always been, and remain, deeply entrenched in, and important to, Native communities."7 And it's important to note, more specifically, how Indigenous storytelling embodies the interplay between the past, present, and future, acting as a method of narrative resistance in the face of the ongoing violent and linear colonization processes. At the same time, it also offers persistence in Indigenous peoples' connection and relationship to the land by providing...