Leaving the Cannibal Anthropocene. Consumption, Disconnection and Rehabilitation in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Hunting by Stars and Empire of Wild

In this essay, I discuss how the Métis author Cherie Dimaline – in The Marrow Thieves (2017) and its sequel Hunting by Stars (2021), as well as in her 2019 novel Empire of Wild – relies on images of cannibalism to understand the violence of colonial and capitalist exploitation. I also argue that this imagery, through Dimaline’s use of flesh-eating entities like the wendigo and the rogarou, also implicates Indigenous peoples; not to provide justifications for settler violence, but to offer an insight on a specific type of damage that colonialism and capitalism inflict on their victims, by forcing them to participate in the cannibal dynamics of the Anthropocene. However, I also argue that Dimaline’s books contain a utopian kernel that represents an escape route from the cannibal Anthropocene. Considering that a cannibal is someone who consumes without relations, Dimaline’s alternative is to insist on rehabilitating those forced into various kinds of ‘cannibal’ behaviour, and to advance a model of consumption-through-reciprocity, both metaphorical and literal. Discussing her work between Anthropocene and cannibalism discourse, particularly Jonnelle Walker’s formulation of the Wendigocene (2023), I highlight this interweaving of consumption and relation as a key to her politics and poetics.