"Real old-timey": Storytelling and the Language of Resurgence in Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves

Abstract

Through an examination of Cherie Dimaline's (Métis) The Marrow Thieves (2017), this essay investigates the ongoing reconceptualization of the young adult genre as it expands to include Indigenous texts. Dimaline's novel disrupts settler narratives of supremacy embedded in many non-Indigenous young adult narratives that rely upon the suppression of rebellious young adults, and more specifically on the absence of Indigenous young adults who threaten the settler project. In our analysis of Marrow, we consider how youth characters are empowered by practices of Indigenous resurgence that connect them with what the novel calls the "real old-timey": ways of knowing and being that were present long before the novel's settler apocalypse and that will continue long after it. Storytelling and language are a central focus of the novel and the direct means by which the characters ultimately gain the power to destroy the new residential schools and their bone marrow extraction machines. Consequently, we focus on how opposition to settler institutions and structures intensify throughout the novel as youth characters integrate themselves into their community through old-timey resurgent acts of storytelling and language.