Humans and Nature Theme Analysis

While the immediate conflict of The Marrow Thieves is Frenchie and his friends' attempts to evade Recruiters and protect themselves from human antagonists, it's important to keep in mind that this conflict arose in the first place because of the devastating effects of climate change. In the novel's present, sea levels have risen and transformed the coastlines, oil pipelines have poisoned many freshwater sources, and warmer temperatures combined with earthquakes have fundamentally changed the landscape and the weather of the world—and together, these changes have somehow made it so that people who aren't Indigenous are losing their ability to dream. After decimating the environment, non-Indigenous people begin harvesting the bone marrow of the Indigenous population because it enables them to dream again. Just as they decimated the environment, they now exploit the Indigenous population as another expendable resource they can consume. These dire consequences suggest that humankind’s flippant destruction of nature is ultimately self-destructive and symptomatic of a deeply corrupted society. Dimaline makes it clear that all humans are intrinsically connected to the natural world and argues that those who respect, embrace, and care for the land—as the Indigenous characters do—are the best prepared to face a changing natural world.

The Marrow Thieves goes to great lengths to illustrate the various ways that climate change has radically altered the lives of all humans, Indigenous and other groups alike. In addition to affecting people's capacity to dream, the changes have turned cities into dangerous concentrations of impoverished, ill, and desperate people, while Miig also notes in Story that many people have to turn to medical intervention in order to conceive and bear children. This has the important effect of making it clear to the reader that while the Indigenous characters are the ones who are being forced to pay for these changes with their bodies and their lives, the damage wrought by climate change is damage that affects everyone who inhabits the planet. Eighteen-year-old Wab's story adds even more nuance to the question of who ends up suffering in this world. She grew up in a city apartment block where people began to take up residence in the hallways—as well as in the streets—as the government slowly began cutting utilities, cell service, and food stores. The visceral images she creates paint a picture of an unhealthy, dangerous urban landscape that specifically subjugates poor people of all ethnicities.

Despite this recognition that everyone suffers the consequences of climate change, Dimaline also believes that not everyone is at fault when it comes to what caused the changes in the first place. Instead, Miig offers, in broad strokes, a history that makes it clear that wealthy and uncompassionate non-Indigenous people—and specifically, the Canadian government—are to blame. He notes that their government policies of removing Indigenous people from their ancestral lands and onto reservations, laying oil pipelines with no thought for the potential consequences to the natural world, and then removing Indigenous people from the reservations—the only places, per Story, where there was still potable water—is what ultimately led to the crisis. With this, the novel draws out a connection between abusing the natural world and the original stewards of nature (the Indigenous populations), and challenges the notion that one can rise above any consequences that may come from this abuse. Put another way, the people and systems that Miig implicates through Story are people who shirked responsibility for their destructive actions, and are now facing the fact that they can't just buy or legislate their way out of the world they created.

Though the novel doesn't fully flesh out how exactly this environmental tragedy can be remedied, it does make it very clear that for a variety of reasons, humanitarian and otherwise, the goal shouldn't be to find a quick fix solution like harvesting Indigenous bone marrow to enable people to dream again—something that helps a few people, but destroys many others and doesn't get to the root of the problem. Instead, an Indigenous man named Clarence tells Frenchie that if the Indigenous populations can achieve a sense of safety, they can "start the process of healing" and return home to their ancestral lands. Clarence specifies that Indigenous people already have the knowledge they need to "heal the land," despite efforts to destroy that knowledge through the historical and present residential schools. He says that "when we heal our land, we are healed also"—suggesting that the only way to recover from this crisis is to prioritize the knowledge of those who know best, even when those people may be more valuable for other things in the short term. The knowledge of how to heal the land (unlike harvesting bone marrow and the ability to dream) lies solely with the people who are most negatively affected by environmental destruction and is the only solution that will actually benefit everyone and everything.