Kinship Networks, Climate Catastrophes, and Environmental Racism in Two Young Adult Dystopias: Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Abstract: From the vantage of a present where economically distressed and racially marginalized nuclear families already struggle to thrive, young adult dystopias Orleans by Sherri L. Smith (2013) and The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (2017) project that the nuclear kinship unit will succumb to impending climate catastrophes compounded by racist policy responses and be replaced by larger, mostly non-genealogical tribal kinship networks. To parse Smith and Dimaline’s contention that future family survival lies in returning to extended kinship units, this essay argues that new kinship studies within anthropology, which decenters the nuclear family as a universal norm and frames relatedness as an enacted practice, provides a crucial theoretical lens. Smith and Dimaline also critique the present fragility of nuclear families by invoking the histories of African American and Indigenous Canadian extended kinship networks, using these histories to envision new kinship ties grounded in shared ethnicity and cultural memory.