Summary
As they sit around the fire, Wab asks Miig and the group if circumstances make people turn bad, or if it is people who make circumstances bad to begin with. In return, Miig helps the group understand that everyone, including themselves, is capable of doing bad things to survive. Wab indicates that in the woods she saw a disturbing scene involving two Native people—one of them a former acquaintance—but she doesn’t go into detail.
The group continues Northwest and comes to a former vacation area called James Bay. There they happen upon the Four Winds Resort and stay there for a couple of nights. The resort has remained practically unchanged since the days when it was still functioning. It is spacious with fine decorations and fireplaces. Each person in the group gets their own comfortable room. Minerva feels so relaxed that she begins to speak in full sentences. At night she invites the girls into her room to share the story her grandmother told her when she was becoming a woman. Frenchie hides outside the door to eavesdrop.
The story is about Rogarou, “a dog that haunts the half-breeds but keeps the girls from going on the roads at night where the men travel.” The character in the story is drawing water by the river when she sees a Rogarou. It is black, too big to be a dog, and breathes like a man rather than panting like a canine. The character throws her heavy water dipper at the beast’s nose. When he bleeds, the beast sheds his fur and becomes a tall, naked man with an unsettling “hunger” in his eyes. At first the woman uses the dipper, then a switch, to attack the beastly man. But over the years, as the two “become more like man and wife,” they tire of tools and bite each other. “When I bring the blood, he brings the man. And mother and grand-mère and Catholic are all erased and I am just a woman.”
As Rose leaves Minerva’s room, she catches Frenchie eavesdropping and smiles at him. At night she enters his room, crawls into his bed, and huddles close to him to tell her story. Rose’s mother was a Native woman from the White River Reserve. Her father was half black and half Indian, from the Caribbean islands. When she was young, the government took both of her parents away for their experiments, and Rose went to live with her granny. Later, she joined her great-uncles, William and Jonas, on a trek to the wilderness. After six years of walking, Will died. She and Jonas kept walking. They didn’t talk much, but he taught her to defend herself, to trust no one, and how to hunt. Eventually, Jonas also died, and that is when Rose buried him and joined Miigwan’s group.
After Rose’s story, Frenchie feels intensely aroused and they nearly kiss. But they are interrupted by the entrance of RiRi, who asks to sleep with them. She does, and over the course of the night the rest of group ends up filing into Frenchie’s room to sleep with them, unaccustomed to being separated by walls in an unknown place. After two days they prepare to move on and gather any provisions they can find. But while he is scouting, Frenchie finds Wab alone in an office. She is drunk and begins to sob about her traumatic past. Frenchie and Chi-Boy carry Wab to a couch. Miig smudges Wab as the group gathers around her and she tells her story.
Wab’s mother was an alcoholic. She had a rotating cast of men around and some of them tried to sexually abuse Wab. Wab was an excellent runner, and when the water and power went out and cell phone service was blocked in Toronto, Wab begun to run messages and packages in exchange for food. Business was good and she was in demand.
But after a year, a gang caught her. They wanted to make her stop working so that they could control the business of providing communications in the city. So they got a Native man who was addicted to opiates to commission Wab for a run in exchange for danishes. When Wab arrived she followed men with baseball bats to meet a man with kinky, red hair. He showed her that the envelope is empty and explained that he wanted to put her out of business. The men forcibly took Wab to a broken freezer. There the red-head slashed her eye and the men gang-raped her. The Native man who commissioned Wab for that run is the same man she saw in the woods.
The group realizes that RiRi entered the room and heard Wab’s story. So Miig invites them all, including the young Ri, to hear the second part of Story. Miig continues to tell about how the destruction of the earth led to devastating natural disasters. A diminished population worked harder than ever. They lost their ability to dream and they lost their minds. They killed themselves and each other and refused to work.
At first, some tried to learn from the Indigenous people who were still capable of dreaming. But then they turned on them, trying to figure out how to exploit their abilities for their own benefit. The Governors moved Native peoples off their lands. And rumor has it that they found a way to take the dreams right out of Native peoples’ bones. This led to the creation of new residential schools to warehouse Indigenous people.
After Story, the group treks back into the woods as it begins to snow. But on their journey they smell smoke. Miig tells Frenchie to climb a pine tree to scope out the situation. There Frenchie sees smoke rising in the West and trees swaying and falling between flashes of yellow. Miig orders Frenchie to share what he’s seen in private rather than with the whole group. After he does so, Miig tells Frenchie the traumatic history that each group member has survived.
The Recruiters took Minerva’s grandson, raped her, and left her for dead. Wab was alone for two years before joining the group, which she followed for six weeks, unable to trust they wouldn’t hurt her. RiRi and Slopper each lost their parents to the Recruiters. A colony of townspeople experimented on and physically abused Tree and Zheegwon in an effort to extract their dreams. And Miig lost his husband, Isaac, to the schools. As he recalls Isaac, he rubs the marriage tattoo that he and Isaac share: an outline of a black buffalo on the back of his left hand.
Analysis
Even though Frenchie decides not to kill the moose, “[i]n a way, I got that moose” because “[h]e visited me in my dreams.” In this way, the moose comes to symbolize a respectful relationship with nature. Frenchie feels it would be unjust to kill this noble animal only to waste a large portion of its meat. He chooses to respect nature rather than waste its resources. In so doing, he chooses to be different from those—like the Recruiters—who extract resources from the land and from Native peoples in a short-sighted, destructive manner. As a result of his respectful decision, Frenchie “gets” the moose in a different way, since the animal visits him in his dreams, perhaps to share insights.
After Frenchie’s encounter with the moose, Dimaline continues to explore the central themes of survival and sacrifice. In response to Wab’s question, Miig explains that Native people and the Recruiters are actually motivated by the same thing: survival. Currently, the Recruiters are villains and they are innocent victims. But Miig helps them to understand that this may not always be the case. That is because they would do anything and everything necessary to save each other. In the future, that could even mean doing terrible things to others. “Who is to say what we will be capable of?” Miig asks.
Miig offers Frenchie another important lesson about the relationship between survival and sacrifice when they enter the Four Winds Resort. Before entering they must check to see if the fencing is still electrified. Miig prepares to touch the fencing, but before he can do so, Frenchie nervously touches the metal instead, feeling that Miig is too important for the group to lose. While the fence isn't electrified, Miig scolds Frenchie, telling him that “No one is more important than anyone else,” and “No one should be sacrificed for anyone else.” Frenchie wanted to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the group, since he felt they needed Miig to survive. Yet Miig implies that each member of the group is equally important to their survival, perhaps in ways that they are not even aware of.
In this section of The Marrow Thieves, Dimaline uses Minerva, Rose, and Wab’s stories to establish the themes of trauma, physical and sexual violence. Minerva’s story—which her grandmother told “when me and my sisters were turning into women,” centers around a mythical, werewolf-like character called the Rogarou.
When the woman in the story attacks the Rogarou and makes him bleed, he transforms into a naked, hungering man. Making the Rogarou bleed seems to represent a woman’s menstruation, marking a period in her life when she becomes capable of reproduction. “When I bring the blood, he brings the man,” explains Minerva. Subsequently, they “become more like man and wife,” which seems to imply a sexual relationship. Every full moon the dog comes back, referring to the parallelism between the moon cycle and a woman’s menstrual cycle.
But the story is also laced with violence. The Rogarou is said to kill unless he is met without fear. When Minerva describes the beast’s “hunger,” which appears the “same way I sees it in the men sometimes,” she uses a disturbing tone that evokes sexual aggression. Moreover, Minerva says that she is damned and her family is cursed because of her weakness and sin. Finally, she says that the Rogarou goes after half-breeds, which is likely a reference to people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry.
In this way, Dimaline alludes to her own Métis ancestry. The Métis are a multi-ancestral Indigenous group residing in the lands that we would know as Canada and parts of the United States. They have mixed Native and European ancestry, and Métis is the French term for "mixed-blood.” In The Marrow Thieves, Frenchie and RiRi are Métis, and this is the origin of Frenchie’s nickname.
As the novel progresses, Rose’s and Wab’s stories deepen the themes of trauma and sexual violence. Rose’s great-uncle Jonas says that “he couldn’t trust no one with a little girl around.” And he tells her that a child needs “walls to keep them in and others out. So they can play and they can sleep and they can move without the burden of eyes and hands.” Finally, he tells her that their family survived the residential boarding schools, an allusion to the real schools established by colonial governments “to kill the Indian in the child.” Taken together, these statements refer to the dangers of childhood physical and sexual abuse—a common practice in residential schools that have left lasting marks of trauma in many Native communities.
Finally, Wab’s story reveals her own personal trauma. Her mother was a neglectful alcoholic who exposed her to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse as a young child. Moreover, when the Toronto gang captured her, a group of men cut her face and raped her. She carries all of these terrible, traumatic experiences with her and they have left a lasting impact on her day-to-day life.
