Indigenous identity, assimilation, and cultural continuity

Indigenous identity, assimilation, and cultural continuity are intertwined throughout the novel’s history of Mi’kmaw life under colonial expansion. Settler claims to land and to the authority to define useful knowledge press against Mi’kmaw relationships with territory, plants, animals, and one another. The result is not simply cultural loss: across generations, people name what is being taken, transmit practical knowledge, seek relatives and ancestral ways, and try to preserve a Mi’kmaw world even as the conditions for living it narrow.

Colonial Claims and Mi’kmaw Belonging

The conflict begins with competing understandings of land. When René asks why settlers cut forest rather than build in existing clearings, Monsieur Trépagny presents forest clearing as the purpose of settlement and describes river-to-forest strips as an equitable arrangement that provides farmland, high ground, and timber. His account treats transformation of the wilderness as necessary and orderly. The land is thereby made legible as property and potential improvement, while the question of who already belongs there is left outside the settler rationale.

Père Crème articulates the human consequences of this colonial project from within French authority. He tells an official that Mi’kmaq people suffer, love the country being taken from them, and love children being changed through colonial goods and forceful ways. He also insists that generations had lived there before the French presence. When Theotiste learns that the French king has given their lands to the British, she rejects the premise behind the transfer: the land was not the French king’s to give. Her response makes the contrast between a monarch’s claim to dispose of territory and the people’s existing relation to it explicit.

Sosep describes dispossession as an accumulation of changes in everyday life. Settlers’ animals damage food sources, their boats and nets take fish, and introduced plants displace local ones; meanwhile, settlers multiply while Mi’kmaq people are few. The loss of freedom to travel through woods that had once been theirs is political and material, not merely symbolic. Sosep urges his people to keep Mi’kmaw ways alive in thought and practice, describing a world in which plants, animals, birds, and people are persons who help one another. Remembering that world becomes a means of endurance against encroachment, not a claim that outside pressures can simply be undone.

Knowledge, Work, and Changing Conditions

The novel sets Mi’kmaw ecological knowledge against colonial assumptions about what counts as useful work and learning. In his letter, Père Crème observes that Mi’kmaw life follows seasonal abundance rather than the French organization of time, and that Mi’kmaq regard trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals. Their stories and everyday familiarity with other beings challenge the idea that nature exists chiefly for human use. Yet French observers call them lazy for not cultivating the earth, turning a difference in relationships to land into a judgment of character.

That knowledge is practical as well as philosophical. Mari makes eel traps, supplies bait, and takes René to suitable places along the river; he thereafter brings her eels almost daily. Her instruction situates her expertise in observation and practice, while the episode also shows how settlers can depend on knowledge they may not recognize as equal to their own. Later, Kuntaw teaches Beatrix to read animal tracks, seasonal signs, plants, the smell of bears and approaching rain, and changes in water. He explains these observations as connected parts of a larger whole. The forest is not a store of separate resources in this account, but a network that can be learned through sustained attention.

Colonial change also reshapes livelihood. By the time Jinot and Amboise work in New Brunswick’s lumber camps, their people can no longer rely on hunting and making what they need; they work for wages to obtain settler goods and food. Jinot can fell a small pine quickly, but this skill places him within an economy that cuts the forests on which older ways of life depended. In Indiantown, he learns from Jim Sillyboy that hunting places and game have been destroyed and that mills have clogged salmon rivers with logs, bark, and sawdust. The community considers gardens as a way to secure food, even though that practice follows a settler model. Adaptation here arises from material pressure, not from an uncomplicated abandonment of Mi’kmaw identity.

Joseph Dogg’s account of leaving Iroquois country adds another dimension to that pressure. He says that white settlers took his people’s property even when the Iroquois believed land they had sold remained theirs; gifts and whiskey accompanied the transfer, followed by demands that Indigenous people give up their ways and become civilized. Dogg leaves to seek work and describes Mr. Bone as helping him when he was hungry and teaching him smithing. The episode places individual assistance within a wider history of dispossession: learning a trade may offer a means of survival, but it does not make the unequal conditions that made the work necessary disappear.

Kinship, Assimilation, and Cultural Continuity

The family becomes one of the places where different expectations of identity meet. Kuntaw regrets leaving Mi’kma’ki, his people, and his son, and feels that he has failed to pass on the old ways. He had initially misunderstood Beatrix’s request for an Indian man as a need for practical help or sexual companionship. He eventually understands that, as a woman of mixed ancestry brought up as a white girl, she wants his help to learn an inheritance she has not been taught. He responds by setting books aside and taking her into the forest to learn from its signs. Their exchange reverses the assumed direction of instruction: Beatrix’s education in Mi’kmaw knowledge depends on Kuntaw’s authority as a teacher, while his earlier failure with their son remains a source of regret.

Jinot’s son Aaron expresses a different approach to continuity. He does not want to travel with his father to New Zealand; he wants to go to Nova Scotia to find Sel relatives and learn that life. Jinot proposes instead that he seek his uncle Josime on Manitoulin Island, whom he associates with older forest life. Aaron objects that Josime is not Mi’kmaq, and Jinot acknowledges that the old Mi’kmaw ways no longer exist as they once did. He nevertheless believes that the old ways may be found through Josime, while privately fearing that settler influence has reached even Manitoulin Island. Aaron leaves a note explaining his choice and walks north, hopeful that the old ways cannot have been wholly lost. Their disagreement shows continuity as a search undertaken under uncertainty, rather than a tradition that can be transferred intact on demand.

The novel also links assimilation to institutions that define Indigenous identity from outside. Skerry tells his family that Dartmouth College expects students with Indian blood to become missionaries and return to preach to a tribe. He has never belonged to such a tribe and wants to study law, but is told that theology and missionary work are the available course for Indigenous students. The imposed role narrows both education and self-definition: Skerry leaves rather than accept a future assigned by the school. His account is relayed in Jinot’s letter to Elise, connecting family correspondence to the circulation of experiences that institutional authority might otherwise frame for itself.

Schools, Loss, and the Limits of Assimilation

The residential school represents assimilation as organized harm to cultural continuity. Lobert sends Egga there believing education will lead to better work than cutting trees, and he and Nanty visit monthly with food from home, including smoked eel, special bread, sardines, and yellow cake. Their trust is reinforced by the priests’ pleasant manner. Egga cannot tell his parents that he is not receiving the education they expect: he is made to work, learns to read pressure gauges rather than through lessons, and is called degrading names. The account emphasizes the gulf between the family’s hope for schooling and the institution’s treatment of Mi’kmaw children.

The consequences extend beyond any single student. Mi’kmaw children’s culture and language undergo what the novel calls a forty-year implosion. The scale of that damage makes the school part of a broader history of assimilation, in which formal education is presented as a route to advancement while separating children from the language and cultural life that sustain them. The family’s monthly visits preserve a connection to home, but cannot shield Egga from what happens inside the school.

Across these episodes, continuity is neither untouched nor guaranteed. Some people turn to wage labor or consider gardens because familiar food sources have been damaged; others seek relatives, teach ecological knowledge, or refuse roles imposed by colonial institutions. The novel’s recurring contrast is between a Mi’kmaw world founded on relationships among people and other living beings and colonial systems that make land, education, and identity subject to outside ownership and definition. Cultural endurance lies in the work of remembering, teaching, and choosing within those pressures, even when the older conditions of life cannot be restored.