Extractive colonialism

Extractive colonialism is the novel’s recurring conversion of inhabited land and living forests into commodities, territory, and corporate wealth. Its methods range from the settler claim that wilderness must be subdued to the seizure of Indigenous lands, the displacement of Mi’kmaq communities, and industrial logging across oceans. The pattern also reaches into labor and knowledge: people and forests are treated as resources, while those best placed to understand the damage are marginalized or their knowledge is put to commercial use.

Improvement as a Colonial Claim

In New France, the contrast between a clearing and a forest exposes how settlement frames appropriation as necessity. René Sel asks why settlers cut trees when open meadows would make building easier. Monsieur Trépagny answers that the purpose is to clear and subdue the wilderness, then defends the river-to-forest strips of land as an equitable arrangement: each settler receives farmland, high ground, and timber. The practical account of property thus sits beside a larger assertion that the land must be changed by its new occupants in order for them to live there. The forest appears not as a place with its own inhabitants and value, but as an obstacle and a store of useful materials.

That logic is contradicted by the lives of the people already connected to the land. When Père Crème tells a French official that the Mi’kmaq love their country and their children, and that France is taking the land while imposing its goods and ways, he names the human consequences that imperial strategy would prefer to treat as incidental. The official’s concern is the military importance of Acadie and its sea access; Père Crème insists that the Mi’kmaq have lived there for generations and are suffering loss. The disagreement makes clear that colonial possession is not merely a claim written on a map: it is enforced through political power, material intrusion, and the denial of Indigenous people’s standing.

The transfer of Mi’kmaq territory from France to Britain sharpens that conflict. Sosep tells Theotiste that the French king has given their lands to the British; she objects that the land was not his to give. Her response rejects the premise that a European sovereign’s authority can make Indigenous territory transferable. The episode places colonial jurisdiction and Mi’kmaq belonging in direct opposition, revealing how imperial agreements can recast another people’s home as property available for exchange.

Settler Expansion and Unequal Costs

As settlement spreads around Wobik, the clearing of the forest becomes a visible measure of colonial progress. René Sel is described as a woodcutter with a few cows and sheep, cutting firewood and making potash; several farms have appeared nearby. The same expansion that settlers celebrate as progress destroys woodland habitats and the plants Mari uses in healing. She mourns the loss of grottoes where medicinal plants once grew and speaks against white settlers, while the account casts her objections through the dismissive colonial language of those who regard Indigenous resistance as a defect of character. The contrast is consequential: what settlers call development is, for Mari, the disappearance of places and resources that sustain both knowledge and life.

Sosep describes the cumulative pressure of settlement through everyday changes to land and subsistence. Settlers’ animals destroy food, their boats and nets take fish, and introduced plants displace local ones. Hogs rooting along the shore make it harder for Mi’kmaw women to gather clams; one hog kills a Mi’kmaw toddler. Sosep recognizes that many newcomers may not intend harm, but stresses the imbalance between their numbers and those of the Mi’kmaq, and the steady enlargement of the intrusion. His warning that the woods were once theirs and that they could travel freely connects ecological change to territorial loss. His response is not to call for a return to an untouched past, but to urge the community to keep Mi’kmaw ways alive while living in two worlds, preserving a vision in which plants, animals, birds, and people are persons who help one another.

Dispossession also operates through institutions that describe their actions as benevolent. After the 1917 Halifax Explosion destroys the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove, Lobert Sel moves his family to Shubenacadie. He accepts the residential school partly because he wants his children to gain an education and avoid forest work, and he signs consent papers after being told the children could otherwise be taken by welfare authorities. The school’s promised education conceals a coercive reality: Mi’kmaw children are made to labor, and their culture and language suffer a decades-long assault. The episode extends extractive colonialism beyond land and timber; it shows a system seeking to reshape people themselves, while presenting forced assimilation as advancement.

Forests Become Global Commodities

The novel carries the logic of extraction from New France’s fur economy into the timber business. Charles Duquet sees the fur trade’s vulnerability in its cycles of scarcity and surplus, and rejects beaver and other animals as the basis of lasting wealth. He instead imagines the forest as an effectively inexhaustible commodity Europe lacks, capable of providing wood for ships, houses, and fuel. Timber’s appeal rests on the belief that it can yield profit indefinitely. Duquet’s plan reveals how a commercial vision can convert an ecological assumption—the forest will replace itself—into a rationale for sustained extraction.

The trade’s geography widens into overseas networks. When Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of pine to Sydney, Australia, a buyer seeks a decade-long supply and raises the possibility of a New Zealand logging partnership. The exchange makes the forest legible as a dependable international supply chain: a timber merchant can move from one source to another in pursuit of continued access. The company’s interest in new supplies echoes Duquet’s earlier ambition, but now operates at corporate scale and across continents.

In New Zealand, the consequences are shown on the ground. Logging camps and trading posts handle flax, spars, and lumber, while warehouses, sawmills, and small shipyards draw Europeans to the shore. Enterprises take the most valuable coastal forest, move on, and leave stumps and extensive waste. After kahikatea, they cut kauri; fallen timber can carpet the land for miles, and fire is used to clear the remains. The destruction reaches beyond trees to birds, insects, fruit, bats, vines, ferns, and forest litter. The newcomers’ narrow attention to profitable materials is condensed in the belief that the forest exists for them. The passage makes waste part of the system rather than an accidental by-product: extraction removes what has value to the company and leaves ecological costs at the site.

The Amazon chapters connect commercial knowledge and coercive labor to another extractive frontier. Charley Breitsprecher tries to catalogue the region’s tree species but finds the diversity too extensive to master quickly. He follows rubber tappers’ paths and learns that the workers live in lifelong debt servitude. A charred corpse makes credible the rumor that people attempting to escape may be punished by being burned with flammable latex. Charley’s observation links commodity production to violence against workers, while his inability to name the forest’s many species underscores how little a profit-seeking enterprise needs to understand of the living system it takes from.

Knowledge, Inheritance, and Repair

The forest knowledge Charley painstakingly records does not remain separate from the company’s ambitions. He fills notebooks with names, observations, and drawings of tropical trees, gathering identifications with help from Senhor Davi Fagundes. After Charley bequeaths the notebooks to Conrad, James Bardawulf discovers their commercial usefulness and shows them to Andrew Harkiss. Breitsprecher-Duke then joins with banks and industries connected to mining and agricultural imports, entering a new phase of colonial expansion. Charley’s notes, made through close attention to a forest he struggles to comprehend, are used to help plunder it. Inheritance therefore becomes a route by which knowledge changes purpose: material assembled through observation is detached from its context and mobilized for extraction.

The novel does not treat every form of human engagement with forests as equivalent. Jeanne questions whether the idea of forest peoples as idyllic inhabitants of a pristine wilderness is itself a myth, and whether bringing them into modern life could be considered a favor. Felix rejects that reasoning by recalling the French and English effort to impose their own idea of modernity on the Mi’kmaq. The exchange exposes how benevolent language can repeat colonial assumptions, even when it speaks of help rather than conquest. It also unsettles a simplistic division between modernity and forest life: the issue is not whether people should encounter change, but who defines it and who bears its costs.

A forest-restoration project offers a competing model. Tom Paulin explains that Indigenous people in many regions, including Mi’kmaw workers, are among those repairing forests and damaged rivers; people displaced from forest homelands often understand how to help heal them. He emphasizes the time involved: restoring ancient forests will take thousands of years, far beyond the lives of the people planting seedlings. Their work remains necessary even when its mature results cannot be witnessed, and the forest also has its own capacity to recover. Against the colonial fantasy of limitless supply, restoration makes time, diversity, and responsibility central. Extractive colonialism is thus both a repeated economic practice and a contested way of seeing: it treats land as available, nature as inventory, and Indigenous knowledge as usable material, while the novel’s countervision insists on relationship, continuity, and repair.