Halifax is a recurring port of passage and return in the family’s history, linking Mi’kmaw communities and relatives across the coast while exposing the pressures of settlement and displacement. Its role shifts from a practical stop on journeys to a homecoming landmark, and finally to the harbor site of the 1917 explosion that destroys the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove.

Port of Passage and Family Search

Amboise and Jinot travel by ship up the coast to Halifax before continuing on foot to a Mi’kmaw post. Their journey is undertaken at Kuntaw’s request: Jinot is to see whether Elise is well and has children, and to ask after their cousin Auguste. The trip turns family inquiry into a physical route through the region, with Halifax serving as the entry point to a longer overland search. Amboise carries a small wooden turkey he carved years earlier, hoping Elise’s children might enjoy it; the token gives the journey a personal purpose beyond finding names and news.

At the post, Kuntaw’s sister Aledonia identifies people bearing the Sel patronym and confirms that Auguste is still alive. The travelers also encounter a village marked by hardship: wikuoms stand among settlers’ cabins, eel weirs have fallen into disrepair, and Elise’s husband, Luçon Brassua, is found drunk beside their damaged home. Elise tells them that she has lost a baby girl named Bee, after Beatrix. The news and the conditions around it shape what the travelers do next. Rather than leave Elise in place, Amboise uses Kuntaw’s money to arrange a return journey by sea.

The return route runs from Halifax to Boston and then by fishing boat toward Penobscot Bay. When the boat reaches the home port, Elise takes a deep breath. Beatrix sees her coming from the wharf, recognizes her distress, opens her arms, and welcomes her home. Elise calls her mother, and the two embrace and weep; Amboise and Jinot are struck by seeing Beatrix cry. Halifax is thus part of a passage that ends not in reunion with an absent relative alone, but in Elise’s removal from a troubled marriage and restoration to her family home.

A Route Back to Mi’kmaw Kin

Halifax also becomes a point of return for Aaron Sel. After serving as an able seaman, he considers going directly there rather than face the difficult overland journey from Boston. From Halifax, he expects to be able to walk to Pitu’pok in two or three days, find Mi’kmaq who might take him to K’taqmkuk, and continue toward his relatives. The prospect of returning raises an unresolved question: he now has a sailor’s livelihood and could go back to sea, yet he is drawn toward Mi’kmaw life and family.

When Aaron reaches Halifax, the familiar smell of softwood smoke and drying cod mingles with the salt air, and the thought of home fills him with joy. He receives his pay and parts from Conny Binney, who offers him another berth on the Excel for a future voyage to China. Aaron hurries through the city imagining how he will explain his return to Etienne, who had been angry when Aaron left. His understanding of belonging has changed: he no longer assumes that relatives must honor him simply because he is Jinot’s son. Instead, he is prepared to trap, build weirs, and fish, and considers that his seafaring skills may also be useful among his people.

The road away from Halifax makes return more complicated than arrival. Aaron sees cleared land, settlements, farms, and woodland being burned by settlers. White children insult him and throw clamshells as he passes. A remembered Mi’kmaw family had once fed him and provided shelter on this route, telling him that the Sels had gone to K’taqmkuk and that someone would come if he sent word from Sydney. The landscape and the memory of that earlier kindness meet on the journey out from the city: the way home is also a record of settlement’s spread and of the family’s dispersal.

Colonial Attitudes and Mi’kmaw Identity

The narrative places Halifax within a wider colonial geography in which Mi’kmaw communities face declining access to food and land. When Aaron seeks vegetables for hungry people living in damaged wikuoms, a pastor describes Indigenous people as destined to disappear and presents European settlement as their replacement. He argues that charity merely delays this outcome, yet he still sells vegetables after becoming frightened by Aaron’s appearance. Aaron pays for the food and returns with it. The encounter makes the contrast between asserted benevolence and colonial dispossession concrete: aid is offered within a discourse that treats the people needing it as already vanishing.

On Aaron’s return, Kuntaw explains identity through a bowl containing water and mackerel oil. He identifies water with white people and oil with Mi’kmaw people; when stirred together, the oil rises to the surface. Kuntaw uses the demonstration to describe his own earlier attempt to become white and his recognition that Mi’kmaw identity remained within him. He hopes for a future in which the two peoples can mix without Mi’kmaw identity being submerged, and in which they can again hold their country, changed by contact but not erased. The bowl gives material form to the family’s problem of belonging, a question already present in Aaron’s uncertainty about whether to return from the sea.

Harbor Disaster and Displacement

Halifax’s harbor becomes the setting of a catastrophe in December 1917. Two ships collide in the narrows; one is carrying munitions and explosives intended for the war in Europe. The resulting explosion and tsunami destroy the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove. Among the dead are Jim Sel, Lobert’s brother, and four of Jim’s children. The disaster reaches a family already shaped by separation and migration, turning the port associated with arrival and return into the scene of sudden loss.

Grieving and frightened, Lobert tells his pregnant wife, Nanty, that they will go to Shubenacadie. They move inland to the reserve, though Lobert does not regard it as a safe haven. There they find some balance despite poverty: Lobert works for a timber company for wages in logs and uses the timber to build a three-room house. The move offers a way to continue after the harbor disaster, but it does not end the family’s vulnerability. Lobert worries about the work his children might do and eventually signs residential-school consent forms after being warned that the children could otherwise be taken by welfare authorities. The trajectory from Halifax to Shubenacadie therefore links physical displacement with the next generation’s exposure to assimilation.

Narrative Significance

Across different generations, Halifax is neither simply a home nor merely a transit point. For Amboise and Jinot it opens a coastal search that leads to Elise’s rescue and return; for Aaron it is the harbor gateway to a deliberate return to relatives and community. Those journeys make the city a hinge between separation and reconnection, while the changing landscape beyond it shows that homecoming takes place amid settlement and shrinking Indigenous resources.

The 1917 explosion reverses that pattern. Instead of facilitating movement toward family, the harbor becomes the source of a loss that forces survivors inland. The city’s narrative significance lies in this accumulated contrast: travel through Halifax can restore family ties, but the same maritime geography is bound to colonial expansion, community destruction, and the difficult work of carrying Mi’kmaw identity forward after displacement.