Dreams of Indigenous People in The Marrow Thieves Essay Example

Losing yourself could look different in anyone's eyes in a million different ways. In this tragic series of events that occurs in this novel, losing yourself would look like losing your identity, your history, or your family, and most of all the risk of losing your dreams, the most important thing you could have in your life. Dreams help you take that step to keep moving forward, help you see those you cannot see anymore, but most of all dreams can also be the death of you. 

In the book “The Marrow Thieves”, anyone who is not an indigenous person has lost their ability to dream and so they hunt down the indigenous peoples for their bone marrow in order to find and utilize a remedy for this strange disease. Would the indigenous people do the same if they were in the place of the recruiters? 

The indigenous people had so much taken away from them that I feel if they were in the recruiter's place they would do the same. Even though it would be corrupt to try and wipe out an entire race to save your own people, I believe that that would be the natural instinct of a human being, to find a way to survive, no matter the costs. 

There is so much loss of family and identity in this book, it is shown in this quote from the book “It was painful, but I didn't really mind. The more I described my brother, my parents, our makeshift community before Dad left with the Council, the more I remembered the way my uncle jigged to heavy metal. Instead of dreaming their tragic forms, I recreated them living, laughing at people in the cool red confines of RiRi’s tent as she drifted off” that Frenchie has lost his family and he feels lost himself now recreating them as happy and joyful living humans in his fragile developing mind.

In this quote, Frenchie was thinking about his blood family but he didn't want to think of them as people he has lost, people he can't see anymore, he wanted to think of them as living and laughing people. He took the loss of his family hard and so have so many other indigenous people in this book. 

He's so young yet has to deal with something like this and so do so many other indigenous peoples, some just kids who had lost their childhood in the mess the world has created.

Loss plays a major factor in the book in my opinion, it emphasizes the experiences and memories of the characters within the book and really puts you in their shoes as you read their heartbreaking stories. 

“He'd lost someone he'd built a life with right in the middle of that life. Suddenly, I realized that there was something worse than running, worse even than the schools. There was a loss.” 

Miig, one of the characters, had experienced a loss that truly broke him, but also encouraged him to help others find those who have lost their cherished ones as he has as well. I assume this quote represents just how the indigenous people have lost their families, loved ones, language and who they’re as people. Miig had built and devoted his own life to someone he loved; however, he lost that life.

The schools were woeful, but there is something worse than that, something happening in the schools that hurts more. There was loss and losing people that they loved. Miig had his own family, and Issac became his own family. When the recruiters came and took away the only thing Miig had left, his family, he was then determined to find him again.

“From where we were now, running, looking at reality from this one point in time, it seemed as though the world had suddenly gone mad. Poisoning your own drinking water, changing the air so much the earth shook and melted and crumbled, harvesting a race for medicine. How? How could this happen? Were they that much different from us? Would we be like them if we'd had a choice? Were they like us enough to let us live?”

Hence, If the indigenous people had been in the place of the recruiters, would they have murdered families, taken lives and the only thing they had left, the very place where their dreams come from? Would they have done it? Frenchie wondered this as he drifted into his thoughts.

The recruiters are just doing what they require to survive but their actions are causing so many devastating losses for the indigenous people, they are all one big family who trust eachother and stick together to go through anything that comes their way. 

I don't think the recruiters realize how deplorable they are making it for the indigenous people causing so much loss of family and friends, but for their identities as well. 

So much hiding and loss have caused most of the indigenous people to forget or turn away from their culture in order to survive, anyone who kenned the language or looked indigenous would be killed. The recruiters had taken away so much for the indigenous people so would they do the same to them as the recruiters did to their people?

 If the indigenous people were the recruiters instead and they had no bad history, would they have the heart to do the same thing? Perhaps they would have, it is a natural human instinct to survive after all.

“I came from a long line of hunters, trappers, and voyageurs. But now, with most of the rivers cut into pieces and lakes left as gray sludge puckers on the landscape, my own history seemed like a myth along the lines of dragons.”

We can see by this quote that Frenchie feels as if his people have lost who they really are, who their ancestors made them be to this day. Having to hide who they really are made them forget where they came from, their language and their culture. Everything Frenchie knows about his ancestors feels like just a myth or a legend now, something not many people know or want to know in order to stay alive.

He feels he has failed himself and his people because they have lost the way of their predecessors and merged into a world where being indigenous isn't safe. 

His people could be in tranquillity, hunting, preparing food, and learning more about their culture but no, they have to forget all that and protect the only thing they have left, their dreams, the only thing left where they can go to see all their loved ones they have lost. That is why I believe this book truly brings out the loss of identity and family in these characters' lives.

The indigenous people have gone through so much loss and suffering of both their identity and family but would they have still done what the recruiters did if they were in their place? I believe so, I believe that no matter who was in that place they would do anything to keep their own race alive, to keep themselves alive, to survive. 

To review, the characters in the story have suffered a great loss of their identity with little to no knowledge of their history and ancestors and with only the knowledge that they have to keep running and hide from the recruiters. 

No matter how much they run, there will always be loss around them, they will always lose someone they love, and the recruiters will find them eventually. They have gone through the loss of their family but still kept going and surviving to keep the dreams of the generations ahead living. All things considered, this book was an interesting read, the author really described the settings spectacularly and made me feel what the characters were experiencing at that very moment. As I read I realized that most characters felt as if they had hit rock bottom only to find that there are more rock bottoms than the one they felt.