All these woods once ours

“All these woods once ours” names both a lost freedom of movement and a continuing struggle over how forests are understood. Spoken by Sosep amid the spread of settler animals, plants, boats, and nets, the phrase becomes a refrain against the commercial vision of forest as endless supply. The novel later places that claim beside industrial waste, corporate conservation, and the slower work of restoring trees, making the words resonate as a question of who bears the costs of extraction and who accepts responsibility for the forest’s future.

Sosep’s Warning

Sosep speaks after settlers’ pigs have begun rooting along the tidal sands and competing with Mi’kmaw women for clams. A hog has killed a child who had lagged behind the clam diggers. The loss is part of a broader transformation: familiar foods grow harder to find, while introduced plants spread. Sosep describes settlers’ animals damaging food sources, their boats and nets taking fish, and their plants displacing local ones. Though many settlers do not intend harm, he stresses the imbalance between a numerous incoming population and a small one already living there.

Against this accumulating change, Sosep recalls that the Mi’kmaq once moved through the woods without hindrance. His sentence makes dispossession concrete: what has changed is not only ownership on paper, but the ability to travel, gather, fish, and live across a homeland. He warns that survival requires keeping Mi’kmaw ways present in thought and practice, even while living in two worlds. In the world he urges his listeners to preserve, plants, animals, and birds are persons who help one another. The phrase therefore recalls a relationship to the forest, not merely a claim to timber or territory.

A Refrain Against the Forest as Commodity

The same words acquire a stark economic counterpoint in the timber ambitions of Charles Duquet. Seeking wealth that could endure beyond the unstable fur trade, he rejects beaver, fish, seals, and game as vulnerable to disappearance and changing markets. He turns instead to forests, which he regards as vast, renewable, and capable of supplying wood for ships, houses, and fuel. The contrast is fundamental: Sosep speaks of woods as a shared homeland and community of living beings; Duquet sees a commodity whose apparent abundance promises lasting fortune.

That belief in limitless supply persists in later logging ventures. In New Zealand, timber stations and trading posts strip shore forests for flax, spars, and lumber, then move on, leaving waste and burned ground. The newcomers take what can be sold without learning the country beyond its commercial uses. In Michigan, Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes the same extractive logic in Duke & Sons’ hunger for a newly found stand of pine. He fears that the company’s appetite will turn rapine into its governing principle, while waste, soil damage, and erosion are treated as secondary to the assumption that another forest will always be available. In these distant settings, the old phrase’s implication is sharpened: forests may be taken from communities and ecosystems long before their loss registers in the accounts of merchants.

Knowledge, Markets, and Unequal Costs

The novel connects forest extraction to trade networks that stretch well beyond the places being logged. Charles Duquet notices the possibility of linking timber commerce to a three-cornered route while observing Captain Verdwijnen’s exchange of goods in India, where European trading interests also move spices and opium. Later, Duke & Breitsprecher sends its best pine to Sydney, and its lawyer negotiates over a decade-long supply contract and possible access to New Zealand kauri. The forest becomes part of an overseas chain of supply, contracts, and markets; the ecological consequences remain at the source.

Sosep’s account offers a different kind of knowledge: practical understanding of how people, animals, plants, and food sources depend on one another. Elsewhere, Mari teaches René Sel how to catch eels, weaving three traps, supplying bait, and taking him to suitable places on the river. Her instruction is specific and useful, grounded in Mi’kmaw practice rather than an abstract theory of inexhaustible resources. Read alongside Sosep’s warning, such knowledge shows what is lost when a place is approached principally as material for trade: not just trees or fish, but the relationships and skills through which people live with them.

From Recollection to Stewardship

The phrase’s force lies partly in its temporal reach. It remembers a freedom that has already been curtailed while exposing the assumption that extraction can continue indefinitely. Later chapters introduce an alternative, though incomplete, to that assumption. After marrying Lavinia Duke, Dieter Breitsprecher argues that cutover pine lands should be set aside for management and replanting rather than sold to speculators. He asks the company to think in decades, pointing to trees he planted years earlier that have grown into valuable timber. Conservation enters the company’s reputation, but it also remains entangled with a business seeking future returns.

Dieter’s planting ethic reaches beyond the company’s immediate horizon when he defends planting kauri seedlings that will not mature within the lifetimes of those who plant them. The point is not that a young tree can quickly replace an ancient one: the kauri described in the account may be thousands of years old, and a seedling could take a hundred human generations to match a fallen giant. Dieter nevertheless treats planting as care for the world and for people yet unborn. Later, Conrad Breitsprecher studies forestry and concludes that seedlings alone will not restore logged land without site preparation; timber companies must pay for and undertake that work if future forests are to grow.

These efforts do not undo the dispossession recalled by Sosep, and the novel does not present corporate replanting as equivalent to Mi’kmaw stewardship. Instead, the recurring phrase helps distinguish between remembering the forest as a homeland, exploiting it as a supposedly endless resource, and accepting obligations that extend beyond a single lifetime or profit cycle. Its apparent simplicity gathers the book’s historical contrast into a single measure: what was once shared and traversed without hindrance is increasingly divided, marketed, and damaged, while the work of keeping forests alive demands knowledge, restraint, and care across generations.