Claude Trépagny expels Mari and her children

Claude Trépagny expels Mari and her children after returning from an absence of more than two years transformed in appearance and allegiance: dressed as a gentleman, he rejects the food he once enjoyed, disparages Indigenous people, and orders the family out so he can marry a French lady. The expulsion is not simply a change of household. It exposes the power behind his seigneurial authority, while the journey east reveals Mari’s own geography of home, community, and knowledge—one that René Sel has not understood.

The return and the order to leave

Monsieur Trépagny returns on a fine sorrel stallion in a pea-green doublet, silk breeches, silver-buckled belt, crimson-heeled boots, and a low-crowned hat ringed with six red-dyed ostrich plumes. The display of rank turns violent almost immediately: when Elphège sneezes onto his cuff, Monsieur Trépagny knocks the boy down and kicks him. Mari throws herself over her son and receives a kick in the ribs. Monsieur Trépagny then rides west, leaving René to imagine that he has gone to revel in a secret house.

The next evening, the change in Monsieur Trépagny’s clothes is matched by a change at the table. Mari serves stewed eels and dried salmon in a thick fish pudding, but he denounces eels as savages’ food, although he had previously relished them. He now presents himself as a seigneur entitled to better fare and calls Indigenous people lazy and ignorant barbarians. The meal becomes the occasion for his order: he throws Mari a coin and tells her to pack and leave with the children the next day, because he will marry a French lady in a fortnight. He describes the coin as payment for her passage east, back to her people, where she can eat eels to her heart’s content. Mari says nothing. René reads her silence as submission and lack of feeling, mistaking what he cannot interpret for what is not there.

The journey east and Mari’s account of home

The family leaves with little: Mari carries her possessions in a willow-basket pack, while the children take bundles. Renardette says quietly that she does not want to go to Wobik, where people treat her badly. Mari glances toward Chama, who is sharpening knives and listening. He answers that she should stay there and come with him, promising that the mission is safe. Yet Monsieur Trépagny’s command sends René with Mari and the children: he is to go to Wobik, arrange for Philippe Bosse to bring out the master’s trunks, and return within five days.

The crossing and the walk east unsettle René’s assumptions. Mari crosses the river first, holding Renardette’s reluctant hand, and moves as though there were a firm path beneath the water. When René asks whether her people are in Wobik, she answers that they are not. At a midday stop for tea, she names Sipekne’katik as her people’s home: they are river people, and that river and the other rivers have been their life. She recalls good rivers, good food, eel and fish, and useful medicinal plants; Mi’kma’ki is their place, while here is no good. She gives corn cakes spread with cacamos to the children as she speaks. The account makes the expulsion more than a forced change of address: it separates the family from a living network of food, medicine, river life, and community.

When they reach Wobik the following noon, Mari stops by the path to the mission church and explains that it is where she goes for confession and mass and learned to read, write, and speak French from Père Perreault. She gives René two corn cakes for his return journey. His astonishment and jealousy at discovering her literacy show how little he knows of her capacities. The person he has taken for silent and dependent has acquired skills and knowledge beyond his notice.

The household’s dependence on Mari

Monsieur Trépagny soon discovers a practical consequence of the expulsion: he has forgotten that the household needs a cook. When the wedding preparations make the omission urgent, he rejects Toussaint’s suggestion that the men be fed pemmican and orders René to hurry back to Wobik, fetch Mari, and bring whatever she needs to make a wedding feast. The demand makes the contradiction plain. He has banished Mari while dismissing her food as beneath a seigneur, then recalls her labor when it becomes useful to his celebration.

Mari is outside the mission house with Renardette, plucking birds, when René delivers Monsieur Trépagny’s demand. She hears it stoically and continues pulling feathers, which the breeze carries across the ground. The pause gives her silence a different weight from René’s earlier interpretation: she does not immediately obey or answer. Although René understands that she would rather stay and roast Elphège’s duck, Mari eventually stands and goes into the mission house. She packs the cleaned duck in a basket, gathers jackets, and writes a note on a scrap of paper with a pen and inkwell. Her action both answers the summons and preserves a measure of choice: she prepares for the return, but does not simply erase the life she has made at the mission.

A rupture within a longer history

The expulsion’s significance reverberates beyond the immediate household. The novel repeatedly places family survival under pressure from colonial institutions and commercial arrangements. Malaan, for example, is kept at an English trading post after Kuntaw leaves; her son Tonny grows up there among dogs and neglected children. When women from the Mi’kmaw village urge that Tonny be raised by Mi’kmaw people, Malaan insists that he remain at the post and learn white ways, saying Mi’kmaw ways are no longer good. Her despair leaves her on a narrow ledge between communities, neither fully Mi’kmaw nor white. Against that later fracture, Mari’s account of Sipekne’katik makes visible what a forced departure can sever: not merely a dwelling, but belonging and a way of life.

The same conflict between imposed schooling and lived knowledge appears in the later story of Egga. Lobert sends his son to Shubenacadie believing that reading and writing will lead to better work than cutting trees. Yet the school makes Egga shovel coal, teaches him only to read pressure gauges, and subjects him to racist abuse and violence. His parents’ monthly visits, carrying smoked eel, special bread, sardines, and yellow cake, sustain a family connection the institution does not recognize. Elsewhere, Bren works the night shift at a fish plant and puts nearly all her wages into an education fund so her daughters can attend university rather than repeat that labor. These later episodes do not make Mari’s removal identical to theirs; they enlarge the book’s account of how power determines where people live, what work they do, and which knowledge is valued.

Meaning and consequences

At the center of the episode is a sharp reversal: Monsieur Trépagny treats Mari’s food and identity as signs of inferiority, but his household cannot dispense with her cooking. His finery advertises a gentleman’s self-fashioning, while his violence toward Mari and Elphège and his dependence on her labor expose the limits of that pose. The wedding order confirms that the authority to dismiss and summon her remains his, even after she has reached the mission.

Mari’s restrained speech and practical gestures provide a counterpoint to that authority. She identifies Sipekne’katik, describes a place organized around rivers and food, gives the children cakes, reveals her literacy, and writes when the circumstances call for it. René accompanies her yet repeatedly fails to understand her: he assumes Wobik is her home, misreads her silence, and is surprised by her education. The episode therefore makes the expulsion both a physical displacement and a revelation of the distance between René’s assumptions and Mari’s independent knowledge of home, community, and survival.