King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War enters the novel as a memory of Indigenous resistance and defeat, invoked to challenge the colonial claim that land becomes properly used only when it is cleared, farmed, or turned to timber. Its significance lies less in a narrated battle than in the way its aftermath shapes arguments about land, belonging, and whose account of history is heard.

A remembered struggle over land

At a later conversation about Indigenous people and land use, Bernard Duke silently rejects the idea that King Philip’s War arose from an inexplicable impulse. He understands it instead as a fight to keep Indigenous lands, one in which the people who resisted ultimately lost. His recollection makes the war a counterexample to the comforting language of improvement: what settlers describe as progress was preceded and accompanied by the dispossession of those who already inhabited the land.

Bernard also questions the assumption that hunting and gathering do not count as using land. He keeps that question to himself rather than challenging his interlocutor openly. The silence is part of the scene’s meaning: the colonial standard of cultivation is voiced as common sense, while the alternative understanding of land remains a private objection.

Colonial claims and Indigenous sovereignty

The novel places this recollection alongside other encounters in which colonial authority treats Indigenous territory as available for transfer or transformation. Père Crème tells a French official that Indigenous people love the country being taken from them, and stresses that their generations have lived there. Later, when Sosep warns that the French king has given their lands to the British, Theotiste objects that the king had no right to give away land that was not his.

These moments sharpen the implication of Bernard’s memory. The conflict is not merely over competing techniques of land use: it is also over who has the authority to define ownership and decide a territory’s future. Settler talk of clearing and cultivation makes Indigenous presence appear unproductive or illegitimate; the remembered war exposes the coercion concealed by that judgment.

Memory and continuing consequences

The war’s remembered defeat forms one part of a longer pattern of encroachment in the novel. Sosep describes settlers’ animals damaging food sources, their boats and nets taking fish, and introduced plants displacing local ones. He recalls that the woods once belonged to his people and that they could travel freely, then urges the Mi’kmaq to sustain their own ways of understanding a world in which plants, animals, birds, and people exist in reciprocal relations.

Across these episodes, King Philip’s War functions as historical memory rather than a self-contained military episode. Its defeat does not end the struggle over land: later generations face further transfers of territory, pressure to change their livelihood, and attacks on cultural continuity. Bernard’s private doubt about what counts as land use therefore connects the war’s legacy to the novel’s wider contrast between Indigenous relationships to place and colonial systems that equate possession with development.