American Revolution

The American Revolution is evoked less as a self-contained battle narrative than as a changing idea of freedom, one that coexists with the dispossession of the Mi’kmaq and the accelerating conversion of forests into timber and farmland. Its legacy is measured in competing relationships to land: a national ideal of wildness for Americans, and an ongoing loss of territory and livelihood for Indigenous communities.

Freedom and the wilderness

The novel connects the War of Independence to the way Americans imagine the forest. Kuntaw finds work guiding Boston visitors through the Maine woods, where he leads them by train, buckboard, and canoe, and supplies the practical labor that makes their outings possible: carrying equipment, cutting trails through spruce, building shelter, making fires, and cooking. The visitors return with stories of strenuous adventure, while Kuntaw recognizes that they treat skills essential to his people’s life as leisure. The account explicitly links the Revolution’s language of freedom to a country imagined through wild forests and to the figure of the “men of the forest.”

That association contains an irony. The visitors’ sense of wilderness depends on a guide’s extensive knowledge and work, yet the novel shows how easily that labor and knowledge are misread. Kuntaw’s customers can celebrate the forest as a setting for freedom without recognizing either the Mi’kmaw presence that makes their excursions possible or the difference between their recreational hunting and Indigenous ways of life.

Revolution and contested land

The novel places the revolutionary legacy within a longer history of colonial claims. Père Crème tells a French authority that the Mi’kmaq love the country being taken from them and have lived there for generations; his appeal contrasts their attachment to their homeland with the imperial powers’ treatment of territory as something they can possess and transfer. Later, as the Sel family returns toward Mi’kma’ki, Sosep warns that the French king has given their land to the British. Theotiste rejects the premise: the land, she insists, is not the French king’s to give because it belongs to her people.

Sosep describes the consequences in lived rather than abstract terms. Settlers’ animals damage food sources, boats and nets take fish, and introduced plants overrun local ones. Though many newcomers may not intend harm, their numbers and expanding occupation produce a force he likens to a great wave. He recalls a time when Mi’kmaw people could travel freely through woods that were theirs, and urges his community to keep Mi’kmaw ways alive while living in two worlds. The Revolution’s language of freedom therefore sits alongside a persistent question of whose freedom and whose authority over land are recognized.

Forest, commerce, and the limits of the ideal

The novel also traces how forest settlement turns land into a structured resource. Monsieur Trépagny defends river-to-forest strips as a system giving each settler fertile ground, high land beyond floods, and trees for timber and fuel. He frames clearing as both necessary for settlement and a means of subduing wilderness. In a later account of the Ottawa region, timber prospectors and small entrepreneurs acquire land and stumpage, dam streams, and establish sawmills; the largest rewards go to those with credit and connections who can produce squared timber for the British market. William Scugog, a Massachusetts man who had fought the British in the Revolution, is named among the prominent operators.

These scenes complicate the idea of the forest as a natural emblem of liberty. For settlers and timber interests, it is land to clear, claim, and market. For the Mi’kmaq, it is homeland, sustenance, and a living world with which people belong. Mari’s healing knowledge and grief over disappearing woodland plants, and Kuntaw’s practical expertise as guide, make visible forms of knowledge and attachment that commercial expansion does not value on equal terms.

A legacy carried across generations

The revolutionary association persists in later generations through the contrast between public ideals and private experience. The novel’s account of Mi’kmaw children at Shubenacadie describes a prolonged assault on their culture and language, a process whose institutional force is likened to the devastation of wartime explosives. That history does not simply follow the Revolution as a direct consequence; rather, it sharpens the book’s recurring contrast between claims to freedom and the coercive power exercised over Indigenous people.

Across these episodes, the American Revolution functions as a reference point within a much longer struggle over land, labor, and belonging. The wilderness celebrated by American visitors is not empty, and freedom as a national inheritance does not undo the transfer of Indigenous territory or the extraction of its resources. By placing revolutionary memory beside Mi’kmaw testimony and the timber economy, the novel makes the ideal of liberty inseparable from the question of who is permitted to remain free on the land.