The Marrow Thieves Summary

The novel begins with the “coming-to story” of Frenchie, an eleven-year-old boy growing up in the Métis Indigenous community in Canada. The story delves into how he found Miig, the middle-aged Anishnaabe man who becomes Frenchie’s surrogate father figure. Not long ago, Frenchie’s dad left with the Council to try to convince the Governors to stop the atrocities happening at the residential schools. His mom became depressed, and Recruiters got her. Frenchie and his older brother, Mitch, find a bag of Doritos, but the sound attracts Recruiters. Mitch makes Frenchie hide in a tree and sacrifices himself. When the coast is clear, Frenchie starts running north. It's cold, he's sick, and the little food he has is spoiled. Miig finds Frenchie, asleep and ready to die.

Frenchie is now sixteen, and he's been on the run with Miig for the last five years. Frenchie's family consists of the teens Chi-Boy, Wab, and the twins Tree and Zheegwon; the kids RiRi and Slopper; Miig, and the Elder Minerva. One night, Miig explains that dreams live in their bone marrow and then tells the teens Story, the narrative of how the world got to where it is now. The Indigenous Anishnaabe people were proud and valiant warriors, but newcomers opened residential schools to subjugate them and deprive them of their language. After the end of those original schools, water became scarce. As governments began fighting over water and taking it from Anishnaabe lands, the north started to melt, and natural disasters killed millions of people. Some people stopped dreaming. Miig stops for the night. Per RiRi's request, Frenchie goes to her tent to tell her stories. She desperately wants to hear Story, but Miig thinks she's too young. Later that evening, Rose arrives and joins the family. Frenchie loves her immediately.

Miig takes Frenchie and a few others hunting, and Frenchie feels superior for being included. When he returns, he's distraught to discover that Minerva has been teaching Rose their language. A few days later, Frenchie is again part of the hunting group. On his own in the woods, he wonders if he could torture children for marrow if he stopped dreaming. He comes face to face with a giant moose, but he decides not to shoot it. Later, Wab asks if circumstances make people bad, or if people make bad circumstances. Miig suggests that it's complicated and that in their case, both they and the Recruiters are motivated by the same thing: survival. Wab admits that she saw two men in the woods last week, one of whom she recognized and who was dishonest.

Miig's family breaks through a fence to spend a few nights at the closed Four Winds resort. There, Minerva tells the girls the story of the Rogarou, a dog-man shape-shifter that she beat and then became intimate with. The Rogarou will damn Minerva's entire family. That night, Rose crawls in bed with Frenchie. She tells him her coming-to story: her grandmother and then her grandmother’s brothers, William and Jonas, raised her. When William and then Jonas died, Rose began heading north. They start to kiss, but RiRi and Slopper interrupt them. Frenchie wakes up in the morning to find his entire family asleep in the room.

After two days, Miig is ready to leave. Frenchie comes across Wab, who's drunk and talking about how horrible her mother was. She tells the boys, Rose, and Miig her coming-to story: when she was eleven and still in the city, Wab was earning money to eat by running messages across town. One Indian suspiciously paid upfront and when Wab got to the drop-off, she discovered that it was a setup. The man who accepted her letter cut Wab from her forehead to her chest and a group of men raped her for two days. The man she saw in the woods was the man who set up the run. They discover that RiRi has been listening and is hysterical and afraid. Miig says it's time to tell her Story. Picking up where he left off weeks ago, Miig says that pipelines burst and poisoned the earth, and the sun started to disappear for weeks at a time. People stopped dreaming, and some turned to the Indigenous populations with curiosity—Indigenous people could still dream. The ability to dream was somehow stored in the Indigenous people’s bone marrow, and the government began to construct new residential schools where the marrow was forcibly extracted.

When the group finally leaves, Frenchie is in a state of emotional turmoil. RiRi is anxious, Frenchie wishes he hadn't heard Wab's story, and Rose hasn't spoken to him in days. The group smells smoke and Miig sends Frenchie up a tree to look around. Frenchie sees a plume, trees falling, and something yellow. Miig doesn't let Frenchie share this with the group and makes Frenchie relay what he saw privately. He then tells Frenchie the heartbreaking coming-to stories of the other children: both RiRi and Slopper lost their parents; Recruiters stole Minerva's baby grandson and raped her; and he found the twins strung up in a barn, covered in cuts and missing their pinkies. He says that he lost his husband Isaac to the schools and rubs the buffalo tattoo on his hand—his "wedding ring."

Miig shares his coming-to story. Isaac, who was a poet and fluent in Cree, escaped with Miig to their cabin. After a few months, three suspicious Indigenous people showed up requesting shelter, but Isaac was willing to trust them. The young woman in the group showed Miig her ankle monitor: Recruiters were coming. Isaac didn't believe the stories and thought they could talk to the Recruiters. Miig tells Frenchie that the government is building new schools, but he wants to keep this quiet to give the other kids hope. That night, Frenchie thinks about Isaac and realizes that losing people is worse than running.

Five days later, Frenchie climbs a tree and sees two men (the same men Wab saw) a few hours away. They don't look like Recruiters, but they also don't move like they're being chased. Miig insists they make contact, and the group reaches the men three days later. The men introduce themselves as Travis and Lincoln and speak Cree. Travis recognizes Wab but invites the group to share their food. Miig decides to accept when he learns that Travis has been in Espanola and will have news. Frenchie follows Chi-Boy into the woods to scout around, and a task that makes Frenchie feel very mature. When they return to the clearing, they hear that there's a resistance group near Espanola, and Travis attempts to apologize for setting her up on the run that resulted in her injury and rape. Travis and Lincoln camp with Miig’s group, and they end up holding the family at gunpoint in the middle of the night. Lincoln, who looks inebriated, chokes RiRi and races away with her. Frenchie follows Lincoln, Miig, and Rose, and discovers that Lincoln and RiRi fell off the edge of a tall cliff. He runs back to the clearing and shoots Travis. They pack up and run for days to escape the Recruiters, crying and grieving as they go.

As they travel, Miig tells Frenchie that after he escaped from the school, he knew he had to get back to Isaac. He ended up in an Anishnaabe settlement and bartered with Frenchie's dad in exchange for a rifle. Miig returned to the school and held a driver at gunpoint until he told Miig that harvesting marrow kills the victims. Miig discovered that the back of the truck was filled with labeled vials. He took the one containing Isaac’s marrow, killed the driver, and "sang home" the other vials. Later, Miig's family reaches a barn and spend the night there. In the middle of the night, Recruiters find and take Minerva. Frenchie declares that they should go south, find the resistance group, and rescue Minerva.

Frenchie feels lost. His family has lost their oldest and their youngest members, and being in charge with Miig and Chi-Boy is a lot of responsibility. They encounter syllabics (the written language) on a tree, and Rose and Frenchie discover a stream of good water and kiss. That night, people in bandanas drag Frenchie and his family out of their tents. Miig recognizes an older man in the group. A young man named Derrick seems jealous that Rose and Frenchie are close. They follow their captors to a cave filled with people that opens onto a secluded valley. People start to emerge from a sweat lodge. The last man out is Dad, who introduces his Council and says they've heard of Minerva. Their spy, Father Carole, said that Minerva began to sing when they hooked her up to the machines. The machines malfunctioned and the school burned down. Rose and Frenchie fall asleep in her tent after Rose expresses anxiety that Frenchie will leave them now that he's found Dad, and Frenchie feels like he's lost his identity. In the middle of the night, he wakes up and sings with Miig.

The next day, Frenchie feels at odds with everything. He's rude to Rose and accuses Dad of not trying to look for him and Mitch. At a social dance, Derrick asks Rose to dance with him and Frenchie leaves. The next morning, Frenchie joins the older men hunting, and Clarence tells Frenchie that they'll soon be able to heal their lands. Frenchie is rude to Rose when he gets back to camp and miserably seeks out Dad. Dad tells Frenchie how he ended up meeting Mom, but Father Carole arrives and says that they're moving Minerva tomorrow. Frenchie is part of the rescue group, but the van driver shoots Minerva before they can carry out their plan. She dies in Rose, Miig, and Frenchie's arms after telling them to always go home. They bury her, and both Rose and Frenchie cut off their braids to bury with her. The group runs for ten days. The Council begins piecing together all the things they know about their language and their stories, and creates a youth council to pass on the knowledge.

Rose decides to leave the group. Frenchie hides so he doesn't have to say goodbye, reasoning that he should be happy with the family he's found with Miig and Dad. Dad, however, gives Frenchie permission to go after Rose and search for his own version of home. Frenchie finds Rose waiting for him. Before Frenchie and Rose can kiss, they are distracted by Derrick running by, and they come across a group of two Guyanese women, one obviously Cree man, and two pale men. One of the pale men is actually Cree—he speaks fluently and even dreams in the language. They join this expedition, and on the way back to the camp, Frenchie sees that the man has a buffalo tattoo on the back of his hand—he's Isaac. Frenchie laughs and cries as Miig and Isaac reunite, and he realizes that they'll do anything for their dreams.