Summary
Clarence, a Council member, formally introduces French to his nephew, Derrick, the young man who captured him in the woods. Derrick is very cocky and this bothers French, who feels that he is “trying to impress the girls by being a dick to me.” French feels uneasy and anxious and begins to walk briskly away from the others at the camp. Rose runs to catch up with him but he brushes her off rudely and she walks away upset.
Feeling downtrodden without understanding why, French visits his father’s room. Jean asks French what he’s looking for out there, and French explains that he’s looking for Minerva, since it’s the right thing to do. Then he angrily asks his father if he even bothered to look for him and Mitch. Jean explains that he looked for them every day, and that finding their lost community was the reason for bringing the Council and the others together. French laments that he has “done things” and his father comforts him.
Then a man calls them out to the cave for social night. There is traditional drumming, singing, and dancing. Derrick is one of the performers and he has an amazing voice. Feeling angry, French crosses his arms and doesn’t participate. Everyone else in the group dances joyously, including Rose, who concedes with a giggle when Derrick asks her to dance. French storms away furiously.
The following morning French wakes up early and feels relieved to find that Rose is alone in her tent. Clarence tells him it’s hunting day and he joins Miig, General, and a few other men as they head into the bush. Off in the distance, a whistle indicates that the scouts have shot a good-sized buck. French feels like a hero as he helps them carry it back to the camp. Rose tells him it’s a beautiful buck. But French responds harshly, telling her to go watch Derrick, who is wrestling nearby. Rose pulls him aside and they exchange harsh words. Rose says she would rather leave than be around him when he’s behaving like this.
Back in Jean’s room, French listens to the story of how his father ran away to the city at the age of thirteen. Jean felt he needed something to change, since he suffered from rages and moodiness, and “nothing seemed solid to me anymore.” That feeling brought him to the church, where he prayed for the second or third time in his life. In his prayers, he heard the sounds of the highway and decided to head to the city. There he eventually met his wife. She was the most beautiful woman in the world and made him feel important.
Clarence interrupts Jean’s story to inform them that there is news of Minerva. Father Carole, a priest in black robes who works at the schools, is the Council’s man on the inside. He informs them that the Recruiters have scheduled a convoy tomorrow at noon to move Minerva to an airstrip west of their camp and fly her to the capital. This means they must pass right by the camp on their way. Their convoy will be small since they don’t expect much of a threat.
The group quickly meets to plan their rescue effort. The following morning the group splits up, taking different positions along the road with rifles and bows and arrows. The plan is to shoot the car tires, then disable the drivers or allow them to run into the woods, before entering to rescue Minerva. Miig hands his special pouch to French for safekeeping. Finally, the moment comes: Chi-Boy signals from the curve up ahead that the convoy is arriving. There is only one car and one white van.
The archers puncture the tires. The driver of the car emerges with a gun and shoots General in the shoulder. The van speeds up to try to overtake the car, but Derrick shoots the driver. A blonde woman emerges and runs into the woods, shooting behind her. Chi-Boy captures her and ties her up. The archers release another wave of arrows and kill the driver of the first car. Another Recruiter steps out with his hands raised, and Tree and Zheegwon sneak up on him and tie him up.
The coast clear, they all emerge onto the road and gather around the van. The van is locked. Miig goes to grab the key from the ignition but it turns out the driver is still alive. Two shots ring out. When Miig finally manages to open the door, Minerva is bleeding from a gunshot wound. The Recruiters have cut Minerva’s hair short and she is barely recognizable. As she dies, Minerva leans in close and speaks to Miig in their language, bringing a smile to his face. Rose sobs and Minerva makes her promise to “Kiiwen,” to “go home.” Minerva sings her song and finally passes away.
The group springs into action: a few of the main campers take the vehicles and go ahead with Minerva’s body and the two school prisoners. They pack up the camp. The rest of the group runs. After a day they leave the prisoners on the side of the road with a blanket and a tin of soup. The following day they hold a ceremony to bury Minerva. Rose and French cut their long hair in mourning. They have forgotten about their fight and comfort one another.
They travel for ten days before finding a suitable location to establish a new camp. Once set up, they stay for a good amount of time. Wab and Chi-boy are officially a couple and Wab is expecting a child. The Council spends a lot of time piecing together words and images from their languages and cultures. Slopper thrives when he is tasked to help organize a youth council to pass on the Elders’ teachings.
One day, Rose packs up her belongings because she has decided to leave the camp. As she says her tearful goodbyes, French watches from a hiding spot in the nearby woods. He feels he has found his family and his home at the camp and will stay there. But he feels conflicted and doesn’t want to see her leave. Anxious, he feels around in Miig’s pouch around his neck, where he finds tobacco and glass vial that reads, “66542G, 41-year-old male, Euro-Anishnaabe.” This is the vial that Miig has identified as Isaac. French makes his way to his father’s tent and begins to cry.
There, Jean tells the rest of his story. He says he was extremely happy with French’s mother, although he could never shake his sense of helplessness. Yet Mary never got mad at him. Even when she found Jean drinking bootleg when he was supposed to be out looking for work, she simply told him: “running only works if you’re moving towards something, not away. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere.” When he hears this, French tells his father he has to go, and his father says he knows. Jean kisses French on the top of his head, making French feel safe enough to leave him and run after Rose.
French packs up hastily and runs after Rose. But he finds her a mere twenty meters into the bush. Rose admits that she hoped that he would follow after her. They are about to kiss when they hear runners nearby. Eventually, they see Derrick pass by, and he informs them that they have detected a group of unknown people half a mile northeast. Rose and French decide to stay and join the “welcome party” with Derrick, Clarence, Tree, Zheegwon, and Bullet. Bullet instructs them that they prepare to act aggressively.
They arrive to find two black Guyanese women cooking beans. Two pale men, one with long, blonde hair and the other shirtless with a mullet, are holding a casual conversation. The group moves in, pointing their guns and commanding the newcomers to get down on their knees around the fire. Clarence walks the shirtless man, hands behind his back, over to the fire, But as he does so he slips up and uses a Cree word, “astum,” which means “come” or “come here.” Upset by his mistake, Clarence lashes out violently, knocking the man over. This upsets Rose, who helps the man and the others up. The man thanks her in Cree.
The women, Talia and Helene, explain that they worked as nurses at the Sudbury hospital and saw the marrow-harvesting treatments and studies firsthand. That’s when they began rescuing people by helping them to escape the hospital to safety. As they tell their story, Clarence, a lover and curator of Cree, speaks quietly in his language with the shirtless man. The group steps aside to consult. Clarence says the man speaks an old Cree that he doesn’t even fully know, and that he is much more fluent than anyone he’s ever met. But Bullet is skeptical. Then Rose and French realize that if the man is fluent, he may hold a key to destroying the schools, just like Minerva. French asks the man what language he dreams in, and he replies that he dreams in Cree. Clarence gives the order to escort the group back to their camp.
On the way back, French ends up next to the pale, shirtless man. He explains that the nurses rescued him from the schools when he was brought to the hospital for blood work to make sure that his blood wasn’t too mixed for marrow harvesting. French asks the man how he stayed alive in the school, and the man replies that he had somewhere he needed to be and someone he needed to be with. At that moment, French notices the tattoo of a buffalo on the back of the man’s hand: the same marriage tattoo that Miig has. “Isaac?” French asks, and the man replies by asking how he knows his name. French runs ahead to the camp, panting, crying, and yelling for Miigwans. Isaac and Miigwans see each other and have an emotional reunion.
Analysis
In the final chapters of the novel, the romance between French and Rose develops. At the same time, French struggles with jealousy, moodiness, and his own sense of manhood. By contrast, Derrick is cocky, obnoxious, and self-congratulatory. In response, French feels the need to prove himself, which in turn makes him feel angry and resentful. In this mood, he rudely sends Rose away. It is an outburst that he later regrets but feels unable to control at the time.
The Marrow Thieves is among other things a coming-of-age novel, and Dimaline explores the themes of adolescence, adulthood, and, specifically, manhood. French has an outdated idea of manhood, in which he is the protector, provider, and hero. But deep inside, he feels like a young, awkward, teenage boy. This tension generates French’s anger and jealousy. When Derrick tries to make him look bad, French boyishly feels the need to prove he is a man. The only way he knows how to do this is through an angry outburst. Without realizing it, he ends up hurting Rose. This is because his strong feeling of love for her also brings up his insecurity and doubts.
Eventually, French understands that much of the resentment he feels is over his own story of abandonment and the loss of his childhood. He expresses anger that his father was off being a revolutionary and forming a community while he and Mitch remained with their unstable mother. Jean holds French and assures him that he looked for them every day. In this safe place, French is able to realize that on an even deeper level, he is angry and resentful about losing his childhood. He tells his father that he has “done things,” referring to having killed a man. Jean comforts French, indicating that given the circumstances of the world they live in, they have all been forced to do terrible things.
In the moving final lines of The Marrow Thieves, author Cherie Dimaline uses parallelism to deepen the reader's reflection on the theme of survival. Earlier, Miig explained to Wab and the rest of the group that they have the same motivation as the Recruiters: survival. He helps them to see that in order to keep themselves and their found family safe, they must be willing to do “anything” and “everything”—including ugly, violent acts.
But at the end of the novel, Dimaline portrays the more positive side of survival as a motivating force. As he witnesses Miig and Isaac’s emotional reunion, French realizes that humans are capable of incredible feats to stay alive, to find their loved ones, and to follow their collective dream of building a better future. In this way, the will to survive can actually lead to hope for a better world.
The novel’s closing scene highlights the idea of a “key” to taking down the schools. The group thought Minerva was the key, since she had the power to break down the Recruiters’ system through the strength of her dreams turned into songs in her native language. When the group meets Isaac, who is fluent and dreams in Cree, they believe they may have found another key. The novel ends there, with the reader left to wonder if they will manage to take down more schools using Minerva’s methods. More broadly, Dimaline suggests that preserving and connecting with ancestral language, cultural tradition and the power of dreams is the key to building hope and change.
