Kuntaw Sel
BarkskinsKuntaw Sel is a Mi’kmaw man whose estrangement from his first family and later return to community give personal form to the novel’s account of cultural disruption and renewal. Once known as Grasshopper Slayer for his skill with a bow, he becomes a logging-camp worker, a guide for white hunters, and eventually an elder who urges his people to rebuild their community. His life is marked by a recurring failure to remain with those who need him, followed by an effort—never able to undo the past—to pass on knowledge and make a different future possible.
Identity and Background
Kuntaw married Malaan when they were both children, not long after he, Auguste, and Achille returned from a moose hunt to find devastation. Achille, grieving and isolated, left his son behind. Kuntaw insisted he was a man because he had killed a moose, and married despite Elphège’s objection that the young couple were too young. Malaan was thirteen when their son Tonny was born, after a long and painful labor. Before Tonny turned three, Kuntaw left for the lumber camps; Malaan turned to whiskey, while Tonny grew up among other abandoned children.
The name Grasshopper Slayer preserves a memory of Kuntaw’s earlier skill with a bow and arrow, at a time when Mi’kmaw men increasingly used guns. To Tonny, hearing older women tell stories of his father’s hunting ability was embarrassing: the bow had become a vestige of older practice, while guns made hunting easier and reduced the need for prolonged tracking. The change in tools also marks a change in the transmission of skill. What older people remembered as knowledge and craft could appear to a child as an obsolete name.
Separation and Return to Family
Years later, Kuntaw’s household at the Penobscot Bay home included Beatrix. When Tonny arrived with his children, Kuntaw recognized the strangers and struggled to speak before asking them to stay. He looked to Beatrix with an imploring expression. The reunion brought Tonny’s children into a house where Beatrix could offer what their precarious lives had lacked: she showed them the rooms, explained that the large-table room would be their schoolroom, and said she would teach them to read and write.
Kuntaw and Tonny went together to mend a weir after rain had disturbed it. As they worked in the river, Tonny told him about Malaan’s withdrawal and about Hanah, the mother of Tonny’s children, who had been killed by a trader. Kuntaw acknowledged the scale of his past neglect: he should have cared for Malaan and Tonny, and had failed to teach his son what he needed to know. He began recounting old stories of Mi’kmaw ancestors, warriors, and hunters, but could not bring himself to speak of the earlier family horrors and his years searching for Achille. His confession did not restore intimacy. Tonny grew colder as Kuntaw spoke and called him by name rather than treating him as a reconciled father.
Kuntaw’s regret continued at home. He was distressed that he could not make Tonny an instant Mi’kmaw, and felt ashamed that he had left Mi’kma’ki, his people, and his son. He compared his people to trees that lose their leaves and put out new ones, but feared that Mi’kmaw people were producing few new leaves—and that he himself was producing none. The image makes his return an attempt at renewal, but also registers how little one person can repair after a long rupture.
Teaching, Work, and Cultural Knowledge
Kuntaw’s relationship with Beatrix develops through a reversal in what each can teach the other. He comes to understand that her need for him is not simply practical or sexual: as a woman of mixed ancestry raised as a white girl, she wants to learn Mi’kmaw ways. Although Beatrix had been leading him into books, Kuntaw pushes them aside and takes her into the forest. He teaches her to read animal tracks, seasonal signs in plants and trees, the indications of bears and approaching rain, the condition of leaves and water, and the connections among these observations. He describes this knowledge as something every Mi’kmaw person knows, and presents the forest and shore as bound together by innumerable fine connections. His instruction is a form of literacy grounded in place, and a deliberate effort to give Beatrix knowledge that his earlier choices had kept from Tonny.
After leaving logging work, Kuntaw finds employment guiding white men who want to hunt and fish in the Maine woods. His first customer, Mr. Williams, pays him to guide a trip north by train, buckboard, and canoe. Williams returns with stories of a strenuous wilderness adventure, having caught more than fifty trout in a day; Kuntaw’s knowledge and labor become part of the customer’s performance of being a woodsman. Kuntaw carries the packs and canoe, cuts trails, builds shelter and fires, and cooks food seasoned with wild ginger and garlic. As more customers seek moose or caribou hunts, he sees that they treat skills essential to his work as recreation. When a judge assumes Mi’kmaw people merely hunt and fish while women work, Kuntaw recognizes the misunderstanding: white customers call the labor of Indigenous guides play and then mistake that imposed distinction for laziness.
Elder, Kinship, and Community
After returning to Mi’kma’ki, Aaron Sel initially struggles to belong to Kuntaw’s family band. Aaron, Jinot’s only surviving son, has little knowledge of the local practices he needs: he cannot repair eel weirs, identify blueberries, or hunt caribou and beaver, and there are no guns available to him without money. Kuntaw tells him that in this community he must learn to give rather than take. Aaron leaves after two restless years, but later comes back.
Kuntaw’s response to Aaron’s return is an emphatic welcome. Waking in the predawn darkness, he embraces him, calls him a Mi’kmaw son who has come home, and asks the household to call everyone and prepare food for a celebration. The next day, family and community members bring mackerel, embrace Aaron, and help make a feast. Kuntaw does not demand that Aaron prove his transformation before being received; instead, he recognizes the experience of divided identity and explains it with water and mackerel oil. Whiteman identity is water, Mi’kmaw identity oil, and the mixed liquid in the bowl represents métis identity; after stirring, the oil rises to the top. The demonstration turns Kuntaw’s own history of trying to be white into a lesson about the persistence of Mi’kmaw belonging, while allowing that both peoples may change through their relationship.
At a gathering that continues through the day and into the next night, the community passes the traditional talking stick and names its problems: food, lost territory, oppressive laws, and the declining number of skilled canoe makers. Maudi identifies another urgent issue: the community needs women. Kuntaw agrees that women were once important decision-makers and that Mi’kmaw women were valued as equals, but that Mi’kmaw men had begun to imitate white men who did not respect women. His role as elder therefore includes more than preserving stories or practical knowledge. He helps the community name the social changes that have weakened it and remember values it can draw on in rebuilding.
Forest Ethics and Legacy
Kuntaw’s knowledge of the forest stands in sharp contrast to the extractive ambitions of Duke & Sons. When Armenius Breitsprecher sees the company’s hunger after the discovery of Michigan’s great pine, he understands that the Dukes intend to clear the continent. He condemns clear-cutting, waste of usable wood, soil destruction, erosion, and the assumption that another forest will always be available. Kuntaw’s forest teaching offers a counterpoint to that limitless-supply belief: it treats the forest as a network of relations to be read and respected, not merely timber to be taken.
Other characters carry this contrast into later generations. Dieter Breitsprecher corresponds with George Perkins Marsh, whose careful observations of trees, leaf mold, rain, soil, and birds reveal the consequences of removing forests. In the company, Dieter argues for setting aside cutover land to replant and manage, and for planning over decades rather than a few years. On a visit to New Zealand, he insists that planting kauri seedlings matters even when they will not mature within his lifetime, because the effort serves the health of the world and people yet unborn. Conrad later studies forestry and concludes that seedlings need effective site preparation; he decides that the company should offer this work as a service. Kuntaw is not presented as the author of these later policies, but his teaching makes the longer moral and ecological horizon legible: knowledge of how living systems connect is the opposite of treating forests as inexhaustible.
Kuntaw’s story remains unsettled. His return allows him to welcome descendants and teach Beatrix, Aaron, and others, but it does not erase the years when he left Malaan and Tonny, nor does it instantly restore cultural knowledge and community security. His significance lies in that tension: he is both a participant in rupture and an elder trying to make repair possible, carrying a practical understanding of the forest into a novel increasingly concerned with what happens when that understanding is subordinated to extraction.
