« Settler bodies: Lisa Guenther, ‘Unsettling Perception: A Critical Phenomenology of Settler Colonial Body Schemas’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 255-268

Care against settler colonialism: Nina De Bettin Padolin, ‘Care as Resistance: Indigenous Feminist and Queer Survivance in The Marrow Thieves’, Postcolonial Text, 20, 3-4, 2025

24Dec25

Excerpt: “And I understood just what we would do for each other, just what we would do for the ebb and pull of the dream, the bigger dream that held us all. Anything. Everything.” In this way, Cherie Dimaline (Métis Nation of Ontario) ends the 2017 novel The Marrow Thieves. This article argues that the novel reimagines resistance to settler colonialism through an Indigenous feminist and queer ethic of intergenerational care. Dimaline centers Elders and queer kinship as the primary agents of survivance (Vizenor), showing how practices of teaching, tending, ceremony, and story constitute counter-violence. Methodologically, I draw on Indigenous feminist theory and resurgence (Simpson), refusal (Audra Simpson), and decolonial critique (Mignolo and Walsh) to read the novel’s aesthetic, narrative, and epistemic interventions. I show how The Marrow Thieves relocates sovereignty from the state to landbased kin-structures. I examine how chosen, non-biological family reorders value beyond heteropatriarchal nuclear logics and how Minerva’s and Miig’s teachings help their kin and ultimately the nation to actively practice resurgence. Finally, I argue that the text revises colonial temporality by insisting that time is non-linear, meaning that ancestors, present kin, and future beings co-occur. The sections that follow map (1) colonial extractivism; (2) care as counter-violence; (3) queer/Elder kinship as epistemic sovereignty; (4) story and language as insurgent and resurgent; and (5) Indigenous Futurisms.


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