Water as wahkohtowin in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Water is vital to works of Indigenous literature. This is true not only because water is a central site of colonial appropriation, subject to theft and pollution by states and corporations in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, but because water is also the substance of connection, facilitating kinship between human beings and their other-than-human relations.¹ Water’s connective capacities are especially prominent in Metis author Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 book The Marrow Thieves.² In that text, the devastation of the world’s waterways robs most of humanity, save Indigenous peoples, of the ability to dream, triggering the reopening of residential schools. Dimaline’s characters—including her protagonist, French—spend the novel travelling north, seeking fresh water as they flee so-called school “Recruiters.” But water in this text also facilitates relationships: just as rivers link disparate places and just as freshwater lakes sustain a variety of lifeforms, waterways in Dimaline’s novel enable connections between human kin, between living beings, and between seemingly disconnected ideas. This element’s inherently connective quality means that, in Dimaline’s text, water informs the human imagination and therefore undergirds the ability to dream. Only when French understands this relationship can he help his human family defeat the Recruiters. Thus, in The Marrow Thieves, water is both the site of colonial conflict and the key to anticolonial Indigenous resurgence.

In this article, I argue that water in The Marrow Thieves is best understood under the rubric of wahkohtowin, the Metis and Cree concept variably translated as “kinship,” “family,” or “relation.” This argument builds on Patrizia Zanella’s observation in a recent SAIL article that the novel’s “expansive kinship networks” and its protagonist’s “understanding of family” both resonate with the concept of wahkohtowin (185). My understanding of this concept is primarily informed by scholarship in Metis studies. Within that field, wahkohtowin has been mobilized to describe the emergence of Metis collective identity: wahkohtowin frames Metis historian Brenda MacDougall’s study of the Metis community at Sakitawak in what is now northern Saskatchewan (3), and Metis scholar Adam Gaudry uses this term to describe buffalo hunt governance amongst the nascent Metis nation in the early nineteenth-century plains (78). Some of these same scholars look beyond interhuman relations to consider how wahkohtowin informs human relations with the land and its denizens. Gaudry, for example, argues that for nineteenth-century Metis, wahkohtowin encompassed “a familial connection to the environment and the sacred world . . . a sense of kinship to the land” (89). Like Gaudry, Metis anthropologist Zoë Todd focuses on wahkohtowin in the other-than-human world. But where Gaudry focuses on land, Todd looks to the waterways of the Lake Winnipeg watershed and the beings who inhabit those waterways, using wahkohtowin to articulate protocols for human–fish relations in this territory (2016, 48–49). Taken together, these analyses reveal that wahkohtowin is central to Metis collectivity writ large because wahkohtowin describes kinship between Metis people, where “people” denotes not only humans but bodies of water and the beings who subsist on or in those bodies of water. These insights suggest wahkohtowin is an apt framework for analyzing the role of water in a work of Metis literature, as I do here. Such a study is timely because, while Metis critics including Deanna Reder and Jennifer Adese have examined wahkohtowin in works of Metis literature,³ these analyses focus exclusively on interhuman relations, whereas my exploration of The Marrow Thieves will attend carefully to French’s relations with bodies of water and the other-than-human beings who rely on them.

My decision to use wahkohtowin to analyze Dimaline’s novel comes from a desire to heed the call made by Adese, in a 2016 SAIL essay, to change how critics analyze works of Metis literatures. Drawing on her own biography, Adese describes “‘Métisness” as a “placeholder for a broad, meaningful, and very deep set of kinship ties, shared family and social (hi)stories, and shared geographic relations” (57), relations she also sees in Metis writing, including Herb Belcourt’s memoir Walking in the Woods...