Eels

Eels recur throughout the novel as food, livelihood, inherited knowledge, and a measure of whether people remain connected to a river and to one another. Their importance is practical rather than symbolic alone: Mari teaches René how to catch them, families continue to eat and prepare them, and later generations carry eel-fishing practices across territories. Against that continuity, damaged weirs and the loss of access to traditional lands show how colonial settlement disrupts both sustenance and culture.

Food, Knowledge, and Teaching

When René struggles to fish with the equipment Monsieur Trépagny has given him, Mari dismisses his catch as small and explains that her people make weirs capable of catching many fish. She identifies eels as a particular resource of river people, then weaves three traps, supplies fish scraps for bait, and takes him to suitable fishing places. Afterward, he brings her fat eels almost every day. She explains that the Mi’kmaq have many ways of catching them and that traps are best for him; when her sons return from Odanak, they can teach him other methods.

This instruction makes eel fishing a form of knowledge carried through practice. Mari does not merely provide René with food: she selects the method, prepares the equipment, and guides him to where it will work. Her knowledge also belongs to a wider understanding of the land. When she later describes Sipekne’katik as home, she connects its rivers and food with medicinal plants and a life made possible by the country. Eels are one part of that sustaining relationship, not an isolated commodity.

Mari’s care for the household likewise includes the work surrounding fish. She asks to clean the catch herself and buries the entrails in the garden; later, as she gathers wild plants and prepares for a wedding, her collecting and cooking draw on knowledge extending beyond cultivated food. The narrative places such practices beside René’s limited fishing success and his assumption that gardening is the natural measure of useful land, setting practical Mi’kmaq knowledge against settler habits of possession and improvement.

Household Meals and Changing Status

Eels become an ordinary and recurring food in the household. When Monsieur Trépagny returns after more than two years away, Mari serves stewed eels and dried salmon in a thick fish pudding. He rejects the meal as unsuitable for a seigneur and calls eels savages’ food, even though he had previously enjoyed them. He orders Mari and her children to leave the following day, offering a coin for her passage east and announcing his plan to marry a French woman. His new clothes and altered taste accompany his effort to distinguish himself from the people and food he now disparages.

The contrast becomes especially sharp at the wedding feast. Mari lays out stewed eels alongside roasted sturgeon, duck, venison, corn cakes, porridges, sauces, and cherry brandy. The spread demonstrates her central role in feeding the community, even as Monsieur Trépagny stages the occasion as a display of rank and property. Later, after the formal assignment of land makes René a property holder, Mari still prepares a separate supper for their household: hot eels with sour-grass sauce, bread, and the last of the butter. The cow has gone with the seigneur’s provisions, but the meal remains grounded in the food and skills Mari has sustained.

These scenes give eels a social meaning without making them merely an emblem. The food itself is dependable and familiar; what changes is its standing in Monsieur Trépagny’s household. His rejection of it helps enact his new public identity, while Mari’s continued cooking preserves a different account of what sustains a home.

Family Continuity and Cultural Loss

Later, Kuntaw teaches his grandchildren to hunt, paddle, mend clothing, and prepare familiar foods, including eels. He tells them that they have Mi’kmaw blood but know little of Mi’kmaw ways, and he teaches through shared activity in the shrinking woodlands. Yet he doubts that these lessons can reproduce a whole way of life: without living within Mi’kmaw life, the children receive something like play rather than the world he wants them to know. Eel preparation thus belongs to a broader transmission of knowledge that the family struggles to maintain under changed conditions.

The children’s experience of the village makes that change visible. They find eel weirs in disrepair and see that men rarely restore them; bread and pork supplied by the agency have become easier to obtain than eels. They also encounter poverty and damaged homes in lands that were once part of Mi’kma’ki. The weakening of the weirs is not simply a change in diet: it registers the diminishing use of a practice tied to local rivers, collective labor, and self-sufficiency.

The family history explains the pressures behind that decline. Settlers destroy eel weirs and burn wikuoms, and the government gives Kuntaw’s family’s reserve to settlers. Kuntaw leads his people across the water to K’taqmkuk, where they find good eel rivers, fish, and Mi’kmaw people. Eels connect the new home to an older river-based life, even as the move records the loss of land and the need to find places where that life can continue.

Across Rivers and Forest Frontiers

The novel carries eel knowledge beyond the earlier New France setting. In New Zealand, Jinot and Arana compare the ways their peoples build eel traps. Jinot describes Mi’kmaq weirs made with river stones, which require attention because the river shifts them. Arana explains how brush and ferns can be set among manuka stakes to guide eels into a hinaki, and stresses the importance of making a strong, beautiful net that does the eels honor. Their conversation establishes a connection through shared knowledge while preserving the differences between methods and materials.

That exchange takes place against the destruction of the forest frontier around them. Logging and trading stations move from one good stand to the next, leaving waste and burning the accumulated timber; the newcomers take what can profit them without understanding the country they are cutting. Eel weirs, by contrast, require attention to the movement of water and to the craft of making a trap. The contrast is not that one practice leaves nature untouched, but that the novel sets place-specific knowledge and ongoing care against an extractive trade that treats forests as there for the taking.

The repeated presence of eels therefore binds domestic meals to migration, teaching, and resistance to cultural erasure. They sustain households, give people from different communities something practical to exchange, and make visible the consequences when access to rivers and the means of fishing them are disrupted. Their recurrence offers a counterpoint to the timber merchants’ confidence in limitless resources: eel knowledge depends on attentiveness to a changing river and on the continued transmission of skills between generations.