Glory Days (1836–1870)

Glory Days (1836–1870) is a named period in the novel, marking a stretch of its multigenerational history in which family ties and inherited memory repeatedly become ways to reckon with separation, loss, and cultural belonging. The heading gives this section a broad historical frame, while the events around it unfold through private letters, remembered stories, and arguments about where home can be found.

A Period Marked by Family Memory

The period is introduced by the heading “glory days” and the dates 1836–1870, followed by the section title “vegetable wealth.” The label establishes a chronological span, but the supplied scenes do not present it as an uncomplicated age of prosperity. Instead, they place the period’s human concerns in the work of remembering relatives, recovering family knowledge, and confronting what has been lost.

One form of remembrance is Père Crème’s letter-writing. Several days after an encounter with the governor, he writes to an imagined sister, Marguerite, one of hundreds of letters he never sends. He has no sister; inventing a confidante gives him a private means of ordering thoughts that can otherwise feel chaotic. The practice makes correspondence an inward refuge as well as a record of feelings that have no actual recipient.

Kinship as a Plan for Return

In another family conversation, Theotiste recalls that Trépagny destroyed a snow snake made for their brother, while their mother later carved him a better one. The small remembered object becomes evidence of shared childhood and maternal care. Theotiste connects that memory to a larger claim: the children of one mother should live together because they share blood. He and Elphège consider bringing their siblings to Odanak, then returning with them to their mother’s country to make a home there. The plan also depends on other Mi’kmaw people at Odanak, including Sosep, who wishes to return, and on the hope of building family life in the place they identify as home.

The proposal meets a practical and emotional uncertainty: whether the siblings would leave René’s house. The conversation therefore holds together kinship as an inherited bond and migration as a difficult choice. Return is imagined not as a simple reversal of separation but as a new community to be made, with the family’s shared past serving as its basis.

Stories, Loss, and Cultural Belonging

Kuntaw’s attempt to speak with Tonny turns family history into an act of care. After hearing Tonny describe the suffering of Malaan and the death of Hanah, Kuntaw acknowledges his earlier neglect and says he failed to teach his son what he needed to know. He begins telling stories of ancestors, warriors, and hunters, but cannot recount the family’s losses: his mother’s severed arm, Achille’s disappearance, or the years he spent searching for his missing father. His account thus passes on lineage while revealing the violence and absences that interrupt it. Kuntaw also admits that he should have remained with Tonny and Malaan rather than pursuing Achille, and urges Tonny not to leave his own children.

Tonny does not accept this appeal as a restoration of belonging. He tells Kuntaw that he has no place among English, Mi’kmaq, French, or American people. He describes a village where animals have become scarce, where people no longer know how to live, and where white settlers take berries, clams, and fish to sell. He refuses to pretend that all is well and says he intends to leave, even if he may die. The exchange makes the period’s family reunion inseparable from a wider crisis: remembered kinship can offer connection, but it cannot by itself undo dispossession or the damage to ways of life.

Letters Carry News Across Distance

Correspondence also provides a practical means of reconnecting separated relatives. After Amboise’s loss renews Jinot’s desire to find Elise and Josime, he writes to Francis-Outger, a half brother living on Penobscot Bay, asking for news. Francis-Outger replies with information about the family: Elise and Dr. Hallagher live in Boston, while he has no recent word of Josime. His letter acknowledges Jinot’s account of the Miramichi fire, his injuries, and the deaths of Amboise and Jinot’s young son, and it offers the possibility of a visit or continued correspondence. Jinot then travels to Boston in search of Elise. The sequence shows how written messages can bridge distance, convey grief, and turn a vague longing for family into a concrete journey.

Inherited Identity and the Period’s Significance

At a family gathering, Kuntaw explains identity through a bowl of water and mackerel oil. He compares water to white people and oil to Mi’kmaw identity: when stirred together, the oil rises to the surface. He recalls having tried to become white, but says his Mi’kmaw self remained. He applies the same image to Aaron, and imagines a future in which the two communities influence one another without Mi’kmaw identity disappearing. The image gives physical form to the novel’s recurring tension between assimilation and continuity.

Taken together, these scenes make Glory Days (1836–1870) a period defined less by a single public event than by the work of transmission: letters preserve news, stories carry lineage, and remembered objects anchor family claims. Their intimacies are set against losses and the weakening of Mi’kmaw access to land and resources. The period’s significance lies in that contrast: connection survives and is actively rebuilt, but it does not erase the historical forces that have scattered families and unsettled their sense of home.