Cession of Acadia and British expansion

The Cession of Acadia and British expansion mark a political transfer that the novel refuses to treat as legitimate ownership of Mi’kmaw land. French and British authorities lay claim to territory and press the Mi’kmaq into their conflicts, while Mi’kmaw characters insist that their country is theirs to begin with. The consequences unfold not only in battles and diplomatic declarations but in altered shorelines, shrinking food sources, contested property records, and pressure to abandon Mi’kmaw ways of life.

The Transfer and Its Contested Meaning

When the Sel family prepares to return from Odanak to Mi’kmaw country, Sosep warns Theotiste that the French king has given their lands to the British. Theotiste rejects the premise: the land was not the French king’s to give. She had heard that the British seized Port Royal, but had taken the wider claim over their country for foolish talk. Sosep explains that the Mi’kmaq face advances from both French and English, neither of whom recognizes their political standing as they understand it.

Sosep distinguishes alliance from subjection. The Mi’kmaq have been allies of the French king, he says, not his subjects and not people obliged to obey him. French gifts are meant to secure their favor, not evidence that France owns them. British settlers, by contrast, are moving onto more land, while the British king offers no presents. The exchange exposes the difference between the Mi’kmaw understanding of political relations and the imperial assumption that a European ruler can dispose of a territory and its inhabitants.

The French demand that the Mi’kmaq fight for their interests even as their numbers decline. Père Crème tells a French official that the Mi’kmaq have dwindled from a vigorous people to only a few hundred warriors, and that their knowledge and sensibilities are being lost as they die. The official dismisses their feelings and treats them chiefly as unreliable fighters needed to defend French territory. Père Crème answers that they love the country being taken from them and the children being changed by French goods and coercive ways. His plea makes explicit the contradiction between French reliance on Mi’kmaw allies and France’s failure to respect their land or autonomy.

Return to an Altered Country

The Sel family reaches Mi’kmaw country in late March. Sosep points out French families settled along the shore and describes how the landscape has changed: woodland edges once rich in berries and edible roots have been plowed for maize and turnips, and Acadians have drained salt marshes to grow hay for livestock. Moose, caribou, and bear have retreated. Beaver numbers have fallen sharply as their pelts are exchanged for guns and metal pots; the customary placement of a beaver skin on a grave has also receded as the animal becomes a form of white money.

Theotiste imagines that Mi’kmaq and Acadians might still live side by side, trading meat for maize and pumpkins. Sosep replies that they have little choice. The passage holds that hope beside the material pressures that constrain it: settlements and cultivation have changed the land, while the reduction of game and beaver undermines established livelihoods. The cession’s political abstraction is thus made visible as a transformation of the places, species, and practices through which people live.

The conflict intensifies as settlers’ livestock and commercial fishing compete with Mi’kmaw food sources. Pigs forage in the forests and scour the shore for clams, making it harder for Mi’kmaw women to gather them; settlers’ boats and nets take fish, and introduced plants displace local ones. Sosep says that most newcomers may not intend harm, but that they are numerous while the Mi’kmaq are few. He describes the cumulative pressure as a wave: no single act accounts for the loss, yet settlement, animals, trade, and land conversion together make the old patterns of sustenance increasingly difficult to maintain.

Competing Ideas of Land and Improvement

The novel connects imperial expansion to a colonial theory of property that makes clearing a prerequisite for ownership. Monsieur Trépagny is scandalized when René asks why settlers cut forest instead of building in existing clearings. He explains that they have come to clear and subdue the wilderness, and defends the river-to-forest strips allocated to settlers as a way to combine fertile fields, high ground, and timber. The arrangement is presented as equitable within the colonial system, but its rationale assumes that land should be organized and transformed for settler use.

Père Crème gives that assumption a religious and moral justification in a letter. He complains that the Sel family resists farming and prefers seasonal work in the woods, on rivers, or at other jobs, followed by autumn and winter hunting and trapping. In his account, land belongs to the man who improves it: the settler who cuts forest, builds a house, and shelters livestock thereby earns a moral title, while Indigenous use of plants and animals is described as idleness. The letter shows how a claim of improvement can turn an existing relationship with the land into apparent evidence of its absence.

Mi’kmaw land relations rest on a different understanding. In another account, a missionary observes that Mi’kmaq organize time around the abundance of animals, fruit, and fish, and regard trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals. He records their insistence that trees are persons, not merely materials for houses and ships. Against that view, the French demand gardens, grain, and settled routines as proof of proper land use. The disagreement is therefore not simply about which method of cultivation is practical: it is about whether land and its other lives are kin and participants, or resources to be reordered for human possession.

Law, Dispossession, and Cultural Continuity

A later dispute over René Sel’s property shows how colonial legal records can recognize some claims while discrediting others. Démon Meillard tells Jean Mague that René’s notarized title was inherited by Renardette, his adopted daughter, and asserts that she is French while the Sel descendants claiming the property are not René’s children. He treats their Mi’kmaw identity as grounds to deny their kinship and dismisses their claim as false. Achille counters that the ledger records René’s ownership and his marriage to Mari under white law. The scene places documentary title and family history against a racialized denial of inheritance.

Sosep’s response to encroachment is not to claim that Mi’kmaw life can remain untouched. He tells his family that they will live in two worlds, but must keep their own world present: a world in which people, plants, animals, and birds are persons who help one another. Remembering and renewing that vision becomes a condition of survival under outside pressure, rather than a rejection of every change or exchange. The Sel family’s ability to speak French, read, and write coexists with its continuing preference for work in the woods and seasonal hunting and trapping, making cultural continuity a lived practice rather than a simple return to an unchanged past.

That continuity is later confronted by the residential-school system. Lobert sends Egga to school believing education will lead to better work than cutting trees; the narrative reveals that the children’s culture and language suffer a prolonged assault there. The episode extends the consequences of colonial expansion beyond land transfer: political subordination and settlement are accompanied by institutions that seek to remake Indigenous children. Across these generations, the cession remains consequential because its premise—that imperial power can assign land and determine how it should be used—continues to organize dispossession, ecological change, and pressure to assimilate.