The 1749 founding of Halifax is both a colonial act of territorial assertion and a turning point in the novel’s account of Mi’kmaw dispossession. When Edward Cornwallis declares Halifax an English settlement without regard for Mi’kmaw territorial rights, Theotiste’s band attacks English tree-choppers; Theotiste escapes the rangers but is killed soon afterward, her head made a bounty hunter’s prize. The new settlement thus enters the story not as neutral construction, but as an advance of occupation met by resistance and lethal reprisal.

Causes and Colonial Context

The founding belongs to a broader contest in which European powers speak of Indigenous land as theirs to grant, defend, or develop. Sosep tells Theotiste that the French king has given their lands to the British. She rejects the premise: the land is not the French king’s to give; it is theirs. That exchange makes the political conflict plain. European sovereignty claims do not merely change the name of the authority over the territory; they erase the Mi’kmaq’s own claim to it.

The novel sets that assertion against a competing account of settlement and improvement. In New France, Monsieur Trépagny defends river-to-forest strips as a supposedly equitable allocation, providing farm soil, ground above floodwater, and trees for timber and fuel. He describes clearing as the work of subduing wilderness and changing land so that men can live there. What he calls an orderly arrangement still depends on treating forest and territory as resources to be mastered. The logic surrounding Halifax extends that assumption: a colonial settlement can be declared on Indigenous land, regardless of Indigenous rights.

Resistance and Theotiste’s Death

Theotiste’s band attacks English tree-choppers after Cornwallis’s declaration in August 1749. The action is a direct response to a settlement imposed on land the Mi’kmaq consider their own. Theotiste survives the rangers’ pursuit, but only briefly: the following week an unknown assassin kills her. Her head becomes a bounty hunter’s prize, connecting the political violence of settlement to violence against an individual who resisted it.

The aftermath persists in Elphège’s memory. Six years later, he still recalls kneeling beside Theotiste’s headless corpse, and the sight remains part of his private grief. The episode makes the cost of the founding visible across time: the declaration establishes a settlement, while the death leaves a wound that outlasts the immediate confrontation.

Land, Law, and Dispossession

Elsewhere in the novel, colonial claims become material through farms, logging, and disputes over title. A later account describes Wobik’s expansion through the clearing and destruction of wilderness: farms have spread near René Sel’s place, where he cuts firewood and makes potash. Mari mourns the loss of woodland grottoes and the plants that once grew there, while settlers’ industry makes those places disappear. This change in the landscape shows how settlement alters not only ownership but also the conditions of Indigenous life and knowledge.

The conflict over René Sel’s property exposes the unequal force of written records. Démon Meillard asserts that René’s notarized title passed to his adopted daughter Renardette, dismisses the Mi’kmaq descendants’ claim, and proposes recording a sale in Captain Bouchard’s ledger. Achille counters that the ledger also records René’s marriage to Mari under white law. The scene places formal property documents at the center of a struggle over kinship and inheritance, while showing how colonial legal language can recognize some claims and deny others.

Consequences and Significance

Sosep describes the cumulative pressure of settlement through its effects on everyday subsistence. Settlers’ animals damage Mi’kmaq food sources; pigs root for clams on the beaches, leaving women less able to gather them, and a hog kills a Mi’kmaq toddler. New plants displace familiar ones, while boats and nets take fish. Sosep acknowledges that many settlers may not intend harm, but stresses the imbalance between their numbers and those of the Mi’kmaq. The loss is territorial, ecological, and social at once.

Against that encroachment, Sosep urges the Mi’kmaq to keep their own world alive in thought and practice: a world in which plants, animals, birds, and people are persons who help one another. The founding of Halifax belongs to the history that makes such continuity more difficult. The novel connects a single colonial declaration to armed resistance, Theotiste’s death, expanding settlement, contested property claims, and the narrowing of Indigenous access to land and food.