“By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature”

The expression “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature” appears as an epigraph attributed to Lynn White, Jr. It supplies a historical and ecological frame for the book: a shift from treating trees, springs, streams, and hills as presences with their own spirits to regarding the natural world as available for human use. The novel gives that argument dramatic form by repeatedly placing Mi’kmaq knowledge and kinship with the living world against religious and commercial doctrines that justify cultivation, possession, and extraction.

The animist premise

The passage preceding the expression describes an older belief in which every tree, spring, stream, and hill had its own guardian spirit. People could approach those spirits, but they were unlike humans; before cutting a tree, mining a mountain, or damming a brook, they had to be placated. In this account, Christianity’s historical importance lies not only in its beliefs about salvation but in the permission it gives people to disregard the feelings attributed to natural things. The epigraph thus announces an argument about changing relations with the nonhuman world, rather than merely a contrast between religions.

Missionary teaching and Mi’kmaq knowledge

Père Crème’s writing makes the conflict explicit. He describes Mi’kmaq people as living by the seasonal abundance of animals, fruit, and fish, and records their regard for trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals. Their stories and everyday interactions include transformations between human and animal forms and conversations with creatures in the forest. Yet he also reports that they reject his teaching that trees exist for people to build houses and ships, and his attempts to persuade them to farm and impose an agricultural order on their days. The letter preserves knowledge of the worldview it seeks to displace, even as its language places that worldview beneath European assumptions. That contradiction sharpens when Père Crème argues that land belongs to whoever improves it. He treats fishing and gathering as idleness, while forest clearing, house-building, and farming become evidence of a God-given right to ownership. He therefore recasts colonial seizure as moral entitlement: the settlers’ labor supposedly earns title to land, while Mi’kmaq use and care for it are represented as doing nothing. His reasoning translates a religious hierarchy of work into a political defense of dispossession.

Knowledge, service, and authority

The novel also shows that contact with Christian institutions and European learning is not simply a one-way transfer. Mari teaches René Sel how to fish eels: she makes three traps, supplies bait, and takes him to suitable places on the river. The practice turns on her knowledge of local waters and the Mi’kmaq methods best suited to René. In another scene, Mari writes a message as a sequence of marks, explaining that it says to cook the duck for three days. Her writing is not presented as conventional literacy, but it communicates purpose and practical knowledge on her terms. European medicine likewise encounters knowledge it does not control. Dr. Sarrazine travels to see Mari, carrying a notebook, drying papers, and French needles for her. After ten days he returns with wild vegetable specimens to send to the Jardin des Plantes. The episode places Mari’s reputation for healing beside the doctor’s collecting and institutional destination for specimens: Indigenous expertise draws outside attention, while the materials and knowledge associated with it may be recorded and carried elsewhere.

Consequences in labor and policy

The doctrine of improvement gains material force when a white lumber outfit establishes a sawmill in the interior. The mill creates paid work at the trading post, and Père Crème urges people to leave trapping and fishing temporarily in favor of wage labor, so they can buy salt pork and flour. Elphège, Theotiste, Achille, and René clear forest for the French company Duquet et Fils; Rouge Emil joins them despite having less skill with an axe. The work offers needed income, but the narrative marks it as a departure from Mi’kmaq practice. Père Crème is also troubled by the Sel family’s return from Odanak. They speak French, and the older brothers can read and write using the Roman alphabet. He regards these abilities as dangerous, objects to their preference for seasonal work in the woods and on rivers rather than farming, and describes their resistance as a potential source of trouble. Religious instruction thus operates alongside the policing of language, literacy, work, and cultural autonomy.

Extraction and the epigraph’s reach

The argument reaches beyond the missionary setting into the timber industry. When James Duke sees Michigan’s pine forests, he imagines a thousand men cutting the timber. Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes the scale of Duke & Sons’ appetite and fears the consequences: clear-cutting, wasted wood, damaged soil, erosion, and a ruined forest world. The company’s assumption that another forest will always be available repeats, in commercial form, the separation of human use from any obligation to the living landscape. Against that extractive vision, Dieter Breitsprecher’s correspondence with George Perkins Marsh attends to processes that the language of improvement overlooks: fallen branches, leaf mold, rain caught by roots and moss, soil lost after trees disappear, and birds vanishing when a pond is drained. Across these episodes, the epigraph serves as a lens for the novel’s historical pattern. Doctrines that elevate human ownership and utility help make nature exploitable; practical knowledge and attention to ecological relations reveal what those doctrines leave out, and who bears the cost.