Colonial Exploitation and Indigenous Resistance in Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Cherie Dimaline

Abstract

This article puts together and explores the conversation between Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s memoir The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic, and the Whole Planet (2015) and Cherie Dimaline’s young adult speculative fiction The Marrow Thieves (2017). These two texts interrogate the ongoing colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples and their lands and offer courageous and revelatory stories about their attempts to mitigate the havoc caused by this exploitation.

This article focuses on the different narrative modes of The Right to Be Cold and The Marrow Thieves to examine how they provide multiple voices and perspectives of Indigenous peoples and their nonhuman kin that reflect and convey their suffering due to social and environmental injustices. It also builds on the contemporary discourse surrounding the Anthropocene by Indigenous scholars, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Zoe Todd, and Vanessa Watts, to illuminate the power, spirit, and resistance inherent in the accounts given by Watt-Cloutier and Dimaline.

Juxtaposing The Right to Be Cold with The Marrow Thieves, this article demonstrates that both texts offer a medium to examine, communicate, and accentuate the intertwinement between problems of oppression against nonhumans and those against historically marginalised human populations, showing climate change to be a human rights issue. This enables critical reflection on how to untwine this intertwinement as Watt-Cloutier and Dimaline draw attention to Indigenous peoples’ powerful survival strategies—in their dreams, tradition, language, and kinship—that help them resist and fight against social and environmental injustices.