Burroughs – “The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits” (qtd in Dimaline). In the novel, dreaming is closely tied to health, wellness, and survival itself, which depends on the capacity to dream.ĭimaline begins the novel with an epigraph from the writer William S. The Recruiters, who are government officials responsible for capturing Indigenous people and extracting their bone marrow, believe that this would restore the capacity to dream among settlers. Indigenous people are hunted in the novel for their bone marrows, where dreams are located. The text presents humanity caught in lingering sadness after floods and earthquakes, as sickness has become rampant, and people find that they could no longer dream (Dimaline 29).

In The Marrow Thieves, settlers have lost the ability to dream due to their treatment of nature and the environment the land is sick and incapacitated due the constant demands imposed on it. This article examines Dimaline’s work in the context of a “sleep crisis”, which scholar Diletta de Cristofaro defines as “the notion that our modern society chronically struggles with a lack of sleep” (de Cristofaro). Métis Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline’s novel set in a dystopian future titled The Marrow Thieves presents a society plagued by troubled sleep.

The marrow thieves pages