Tools
ToolsTillett, Rebecca (2025) “Seeing what might lie beyond”: Hope and indigenous futurisms in Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves. Comparative American Studies. ISSN 1477-5700
Preview |
PDF (YCAS-2024-0022_R1)
- Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (501kB) | Preview |
Abstract
This essay explores the role played by hope in an era of climate emergency, and how in Cherie Dimaline’s (Georgian Bay Métis) prize-winning novel The Marrow Thieves (2017) hope not only emerges from surviving brutal genocidal and ecocidal historical experiences of settler colonialism and capitalism, but also from actively imagining a future that is Indigenous. In taking Dimaline’s text as an example of how we can ‘see what might lie beyond’, this essay considers the increasing impossibility of ‘hope’ in the face of climate emergency, how hope is itself refracted through individual and communal lived experiences, and how Indigenous forms of hope are inevitably and profoundly impacted by both genocidal colonisation and ongoing state-supported corporate ecocide on North American Indigenous lands. Through Dimaline’s text, this essay explores how 21st-century Indigenous North American fiction draws on contentious settler colonial capitalist histories of genocide and ecocide and on contemporary Indigenous experiences of ongoing colonisation, to look to the future. In this context, I assess The Marrow Thieves as an example of Indigenous Futurism: as a means by which hope can exist in the imagining of radically different decolonial futures that centre traditional Indigenous cultural knowledges and practices.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | Supplemental data: Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2025.2488103. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | hope,climate fiction,climate emergency,indigenous studies,indigenous futurisms,necropolitics,necroecologies,american literature,cherie dimaline,the marrow thieves,necroecologies,necropolitics,cultural studies,arts and humanities(all),sociology and political science ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3316 |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy and Area Studies University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Area Studies Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > American Studies |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Mar 2025 14:30 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Apr 2025 08:32 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98865 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/14775700.2025.2488103 |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |