Both novelists tacitly critique settler colonialism by centering sovereignty, decoupling kinship from the nuclear family, and exploring the connections between personal agency and romantic desire in their world-building and characterization. The writers tacitly ask readers to consider how the harm the novels document and forecast might be mitigated in the present moment. The Northwest Territory is populated by a group of indigenous characters hiding from Euroamerican settlers who, having already seized all arable Anishinaabe and Inuit property, now hunt indigenous people for their bone marrow, which scientists hope to use to cure a pandemic of dreamlessness that is decimating the non-Native population.ĭimaline and Roanhorse fictionalize historical trauma and ongoing institutional oppression through futuristic speculation. Similarly, Métis writer Cherie Dimaline sets The Marrow Thieves (2017) in a near-future where the climate has warmed to an extent that makes most of Canada’s land uninhabitable and population unstable. Both plots center land rights, personal and communal sovereignty, and make use of culturally specific allusions to build an intertextual narrative overturning the savage/civilized dichotomy implicit in much colonialist narrative historiography. In the second novel, Swarm of Locusts (2019), Maggie must prevent the cult of the White Locust from breaching the wall to cleanse Dinetah of the impure.

In Trail of Lightening (2018), the first installment in her Sixth World series, Diné novelist Rebecca Roanhorse imagines a landscape populated almost entirely by Diné people, encircled by a giant turquoise wall, which was raised by animistic gods and clan heroes who sought to save Navajo lands from “Big Water,” and global flood created by a super earthquake, nuclear war and climate change in the near future.

Trail of lightning