“Seeing what might lie beyond”: Hope and indigenous futurisms in Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves

This essay explores the role played by hope in an era of climate emergency, and how in Cherie Dimaline’s (Georgian Bay Métis) prize-winning novel The Marrow Thieves (2017) hope not only emerges from surviving brutal genocidal and ecocidal historical experiences of settler colonialism and capitalism, but also from actively imagining a future that is Indigenous. In taking Dimaline’s text as an example of how we can ‘see what might lie beyond’, this essay considers the increasing impossibility of ‘hope’ in the face of climate emergency, how hope is itself refracted through individual and communal lived experiences, and how Indigenous forms of hope are inevitably and profoundly impacted by both genocidal colonisation and ongoing state-supported corporate ecocide on North American Indigenous lands. Through Dimaline’s text, this essay explores how 21st-century Indigenous North American fiction draws on contentious settler colonial capitalist histories of genocide and ecocide and on contemporary Indigenous experiences of ongoing colonisation, to look to the future. In this context, I assess The Marrow Thieves as an example of Indigenous Futurism: as a means by which hope can exist in the imagining of radically different decolonial futures that centre traditional Indigenous cultural knowledges and practices.