“Seeing What Might Lie Beyond”: Hope and Indigenous Futurisms in Cherie Dimaline’s <i>The Marrow Thieves</i>
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".