Colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands

Colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands is a sustained political and ecological force in the novel, not a settled event in the distant past. Across generations and places, imperial grants, settler property claims, commercial access, and the suppression of Indigenous cultures recast lived territories as resources to be owned and exploited. Against those claims, Mi’kmaq and Māori characters insist that their relationships to land precede colonial law and cannot be erased by it.

Land Made into Property

The conflict is visible from the earliest settlement. René Sel asks why settlers cut forest when open clearings already offer places to build. Monsieur Trépagny answers that the purpose is to clear and subdue the wilderness; he also describes New France’s river-to-forest strips as an equitable arrangement, giving each settler farmland, higher ground, and timber. The language of improvement presents forest clearing as both practical necessity and civilizing work, while treating the inhabited landscape as something awaiting transformation.

A later account of Wobik measures progress in farms and destruction. René is described as a woodcutter with a few cows and sheep, living amid a growing cluster of farms; he also cuts firewood and makes potash. Mari, by contrast, mourns the disappearance of woodland grottoes and the plants settlers’ industry has eliminated. The same expansion that appears to settlers as productive settlement registers for her as the loss of specific places, useful knowledge, and the conditions of her healing practice.

Colonial ownership also turns on which histories count as evidence. When René’s property is placed in dispute, Démon Meillard tells Jean Mague that René’s notarized title passed to his adopted daughter, Renardette, and denies that René and Mari’s children are his heirs. He dismisses their parentage as demonstrably false and insists that the land belongs to Renardette, not to the Indigenous claimants. His proposed sale is to be entered in Captain Bouchard’s ledger and declared legal and binding. Yet Achille points to the same record’s evidence that René owned the house and married Mari under white law. The ledger can thus support a family claim even as the speaker invokes colonial racial categories to exclude the children from it.

Imperial Transfers and Settler Expansion

The novel places local property disputes within contests among colonial powers. When Sosep warns Theotiste that the French king has given their lands to the British, she objects that the king had no right to give what was not his: the country belonged to her people. The exchange exposes the difference between imperial sovereignty asserted through transfer and Indigenous sovereignty grounded in prior occupation. A change of colonial ruler does not resolve the underlying question of whose land it is.

The same disjunction appears in the dispute over mast pines in Maine. In 1730 the Crown grants Ralph Gulston a five-year license to cut mast trees on lands classed as Crown property in 1691. William Leighton cuts and removes the pines during the winter of 1733–34, although title has since passed to John Frost, who sues for trespass when spring comes. The court finds for Frost. The case concerns the clash between royal timber rights and a settler’s later title, but its framing also shows how claims to forests are organized through Crown grants, colonial courts, and private ownership—not through the prior relationships of Indigenous inhabitants to the land.

Imperial expansion is also defended as strategic necessity. Père Crème’s superior describes the French position in Acadia as vital to sea access and the defense of the territory, while acknowledging that Indigenous people are used as fighters when the French fort at Louisbourg is threatened. Crème counters that they love the country being taken from them and suffer as their children are corrupted by French goods and forceful ways. His appeal makes clear that military alliance does not undo dispossession: Indigenous people may be enlisted in imperial defense even as their land and independence are diminished.

Encroachment on Mi’kmaw Land and Life

In Sosep’s account, dispossession is experienced through everyday material changes as much as through formal transfers. Settlers’ animals eat Indigenous food; their boats and nets take fish; introduced plants displace local ones. A hog kills a Mi’kmaw toddler while the child is trying to imitate clam diggers, an immediate human consequence within a wider transformation of access to food and shore. Sosep describes a growing imbalance—settlers are many, his people few—and remembers a time when Mi’kmaq could travel freely through woods that were theirs.

His response is not to define cultural continuity as a return to an untouched past. He urges his people to hold Mi’kmaw ways in mind and live in two worlds, preserving a vision in which people, plants, animals, and birds are persons who help one another. That teaching answers encroachment by sustaining a relationship to land and other living beings that colonial ownership does not recognize. It is a practice of survival under changing conditions, not an assertion that the changes have caused no harm.

The history of Kuntaw’s family makes the pressure concrete. Settlers destroy eel weirs and burn wikuoms; the government gives the family’s reserve to Scottish settlers, leading Kuntaw to take his people across the water to K’taqmkuk, where they find good eel rivers, fish, and Mi’kmaq community. The move preserves a place to live, but it follows the seizure of the family’s reserve. When Etienne and Joseph Dogg later seek Jinot in New Zealand, they explain that their people remain in the rough country partly because white visitors come chiefly to fish and hunt rather than to build houses. Joseph warns that even visitors who are shown a trail remember it and soon begin to want the country. The exchange connects displacement in one generation to guarded access in another: hospitality itself can expose territory to future appropriation.

Māori Stewardship and Competing Claims

The account of Māori country provides a parallel to the Mi’kmaw struggle without making the histories identical. Arana and Kahu explain that land belongs to Māori tribes and clans, whose stewardship keeps forests intact for birds and permits selective cutting. Aihe complicates the account by noting that some chiefs sell relatives’ land to settlers associated with the New Zealand Company. The conflict therefore includes internal disagreement over land sales as well as the external pressure of colonization.

The visitors encounter a landscape understood through relationships and obligations. Kahu points out sacred pohutukawa trees and springs of pure water; she leads them through the forest of Tāne, identifying its layered canopy and the birds moving above them. This knowledge differs from a view of land primarily as timber for sale. The journey makes stewardship legible through particular trees, waters, and forms of attention, while the prospect of sale shows how those relations can be overridden by transactions made in the name of property.

Dispossession Across Generations

The novel gives cultural dispossession its own devastating institutional form in the residential school. After the 1917 Halifax Explosion destroys the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove, Lobert and his family move inland to Shubenacadie. He accepts the school because he hopes education will spare his son Egga forest labor, and he signs the consent papers presented by a government representative. The school’s treatment of Mi’kmaw children, culture, and language is described as a forty-year implosion, placing the suppression of identity beside the longer history of land loss. The promise of advancement and the reality of coercive assimilation pull in opposite directions: a parent seeks a future for his child through the very institution that attacks the child’s cultural inheritance.

Across these episodes, dispossession operates through distinct but connected instruments: settlement schemes that treat forest as wilderness, imperial transfers that presume a king can give away another people’s country, ledgers and courts that recognize some property claims while rejecting others, ecological changes that restrict access to food and useful plants, and institutions that suppress language and culture. The counterclaims are equally varied—family memory, legal records, migration, guarded access, ecological knowledge, and Sosep’s insistence on keeping a Mi’kmaw world alive. The novel’s long chronology makes clear that colonial rule changes hands and methods, while the question of who belongs to the land remains unresolved.