French government

The French government is the imperial authority whose claims to territory and civilizing purpose repeatedly collide with Mi’kmaw sovereignty in the novel. It presents land as something a monarch may transfer, forests as wilderness to be subdued, and Indigenous people as instruments of French defense; the consequences reach from settler expansion and wage labor to the erosion of Indigenous culture and language.

Territorial Claims and Indigenous Sovereignty

The conflict is made explicit when Sosep tells Theotiste that the French king has given their lands to the British. Theotiste rejects the premise beneath the news: the land is not the French king’s to give, because it belongs to her people. The exchange sets imperial diplomacy against an Indigenous understanding of prior and continuing possession. The French government’s power to negotiate a transfer does not make its claim legitimate in the eyes of those whose country is being transferred.

That contradiction shadows the settlement around Wobik. René Sel is described as a woodcutter with a few cows and sheep, while farms multiply between the town and his home. Settlers call the clearing of the wilderness progress, but Mari mourns the loss of woodland places where medicinal plants once grew. Her healing knowledge makes the damage concrete: clearing does not merely alter scenery but destroys places and resources on which Mi’kmaw life and practice depend. The novel places imperial claims within this accumulating occupation of land.

The French government’s territorial ambitions also rely on strategic geography. An official argues that Acadie is vital to New France because it provides sea access, and that the fortress being built at Louisbourg will serve as a gateway to French possessions in North America. In the same argument, Mi’kmaq are treated as men who can be used as fighters when French territory is threatened. The state’s language of defense thus presumes both a right to the territory and a right to call its Indigenous inhabitants into its service.

Settlement, Labor, and the Forest

The colonial vision is expressed at the level of settlement as well as imperial policy. Monsieur Trépagny explains that settlers are in the country to clear and subdue what he calls an evil wilderness. He defends the river-to-forest land strips as an orderly allocation: each settler receives fertile ground, high land safe from floods, and forest for timber and fuel. This arrangement is presented as equitable, but its order depends on treating inhabited country as land awaiting division and improvement.

Road building extends that logic inland. Sosep says the French king sends money for roads intended to push the Mi’kmaq into the interior. The projects also create paid work: Mi’kmaq men, including Theotiste and Elphège, serve as surveyors’ chainmen and laborers. When a sawmill begins cutting trees farther inland, the French company Duquet et Fils hires people skilled with axes. The work brings cash for goods at the trading post, including flour, which some have come to enjoy, but the characters recognize that chopping trees for the new settlers is not the Mi’kmaw way. Employment is therefore both a means of adapting to changed conditions and a sign that the economy and landscape are being reorganized around colonial demands.

Sosep describes the cumulative pressure in ecological terms: settlers’ animals damage food sources, their boats and nets take fish, and introduced plants overwhelm local ones. Though many newcomers may not intend harm, their numbers make the result overwhelming. He remembers a time when his people could travel freely through the woods and insists that survival requires keeping Mi’kmaw ways alive in their minds and lives. The French government’s expansion is thus measured not only in grants or roads but in shrinking access to food, land, and customary movement.

Imperial Strategy and Colonial Hierarchy

In a discussion of French military aims, an official dismisses concern for Indigenous suffering and insists that Mi’kmaq are no more than men, unreliable but useful as fighters. The fortress at Louisbourg and the struggle with the English take precedence; Acadie matters as a route to the sea and a strategic possession. Père Crème answers that the Mi’kmaq have feelings, love the country being taken from them, and suffer as their children are corrupted by French goods and forceful ways. His protest makes the moral cost of imperial strategy audible, even as the official accuses him of lacking zeal for France.

This hierarchy is reinforced by the treatment of Indigenous claims as legally and socially negligible. When René Sel’s property is disputed, Démon Meillard invokes the notarized title and claims that René bequeathed the property to his adopted daughter, Renardette. He calls her French and the Mi’kmaq who claim to be René’s children squatters, dismissing their parentage and right to the land. His insistence that the sale is white men’s business shows how colonial legal forms can validate one claim while excluding another. The scene echoes the broader imperial premise: written title and settler classification are treated as authoritative, while Mi’kmaw belonging is denied.

Cultural Continuity and Lasting Consequences

The pressure of colonial rule persists beyond the era of French authority. In a later generation, Mi’kmaw children at Shubenacadie residential school endure the destruction of their culture and language over decades. The novel’s description of that forty-year implosion links institutional assimilation to the same larger history of imposed authority: Indigenous life is not simply displaced from territory but subjected to efforts that damage its means of cultural transmission.

Against that pressure, Sosep’s insistence on keeping the Mi’kmaw world alive in thought offers a strategy of continuity rather than a retreat into an untouched past. His world includes plants, animals, and birds as persons who help one another; remembering it becomes necessary because the external force continues to encroach. The French government’s significance in the novel lies in how its claims and projects initiate and normalize a lasting structure of dispossession—one that later institutions perpetuate, while Mi’kmaw knowledge and identity persist through deliberate remembrance.