I wanted to see Mitch and my parents when I closed my eyes, but not in the way they had been coming to me as of late: Mom showing up in my tent with her mouth sewn shut and her left arm missing Dad sitting by the fire drinking out of a Mason jar, then jumping into the flames when I got close enough to smell the moose hide of his mitts (Dimaline 42).Įven though this is just a general overview of the types of dreams Frenchie has been having of late, it not only shows how Frenchie thinks of his parents, but how Frenchie thinks of his people. Within the first 50 pages, Frenchie describes his nightmares from the past week by saying With the novel being in first person point of view (POV), we as the reader have the opportunity to see French’s dreams as he experienced them. This high suicide rate among First Nations adolescents is extremely prominent because they are lacking a sense of hope and the ability to see a future in themselves and that is what dreams are in the novel, they are a representation of hope. First Nation suicides are twice the national average in Canada and are showing no sign in decreasing (Khan 2008).
The ironic fact is that today there is a growing problem of depression and suicide among Indigenous adolescents, although, nothing is being done to resolve this present day and very real issue. Their lack of ability to dream caused severe depression among the masses, which lead to a suicide crisis that the government of Canada was determined to resolve. The decision made by the government to harvest Indigenous people’s bone marrow was a result of an epidemic caused by an increasingly high suicide rate among non-Indigenous people from the loss of being able to dream. Throughout the text Dimaline continues to show readers the importance of dreams and how they are a representation of hope among people. Something that we see throughout the whole novel is the concept of how important dreams and the act of dreaming are. After it is discovered by non-Indigenous people that the cure to regain the ability to dream is from the bone marrow of Indigenous people, this causes them to be hunted, harvested and inevitably go on the run. In this world everyone has lost the ability to dream everyone except Indigenous people.
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline is a dystopian novel that takes place in a futuristic world that could take place not too far from our own present world.
0 kommentar(er)
