Kuntaw’s identity alienation and grief

Kuntaw’s identity alienation and grief emerge from a painful contradiction: he longs to sustain Mi’kmaw life, yet believes he has failed both his people and the family he left behind. His attempts to teach Beatrix and his grandchildren are acts of care, but they also expose how little can be passed on through lessons when the life that gave that knowledge meaning has been disrupted. After Beatrix’s death, he turns grief into rejection and plans to retreat north, carrying the hope that he can recover his strength and sense of himself in the forest.

Shame, Loss, and Self-Judgment

Kuntaw’s estrangement sharpens when Tonny arrives with his three children, bringing the old Mi’kmaw life into the household on Penobscot Bay. Kuntaw feels he has failed to make Tonny an instant Mi’kmaw, and the failure opens into a judgment of his own past: he has left Mi’kma’ki, his people, and his son. He sees himself as a person helping to destroy the old ways, while the image of trees renewing themselves after losing leaves offers a measure of hope that he cannot claim for himself. In his bleak comparison, Mi’kmaw people are producing few new leaves, and he none at all.

This shame changes how he experiences his marriage. He recalls that Beatrix once said she needed him, initially taking the words to mean practical help and then sexual need. He eventually understands that she wanted his help to become Mi’kmaw, having been raised as a white girl despite her Indigenous ancestry. That recognition recasts their bond as a mutual but unequal hope: Beatrix had led him toward books, while he had not yet answered her desire to learn from him. He pushes the books aside and offers to teach her what he knows.

Teaching and the Limits of Transmission

Kuntaw takes Beatrix into the forest and describes how to read animal tracks, seasonal changes in plants and trees, the signs of bears and approaching rain, and changes in leaves and water. He presents these signs not as isolated facts but as parts of an interconnected world, bound together by relationships as fine as spiderweb strands. His teaching defines knowledge as a way of feeling and understanding the living environment, not as a store of lessons to memorize. When Beatrix says there is too much to remember, he tells her that the aim is to know and feel rather than recall a lesson, even as he recognizes that the effort is hopeless.

Beatrix soon withdraws from the excursions. She explains that her Passamaquoddy mother died when she was very young and could not teach her; what she knows, including medicinal plants, came through her father, Outger, and his letters and parcels sent from abroad. Kuntaw is glad that an ocean and death separate him from Outger, whom he associates with white authority and command. The contrast leaves Beatrix’s wish unresolved: she wants access to a heritage she did not learn as a child, but Kuntaw cannot make that inheritance whole simply by naming the signs of the forest.

He tries again with the next generation. Beatrix teaches the children letters and numbers and gives them books, while Kuntaw shows his grandchildren, including Amboise and Jinot, how to hunt and paddle a canoe. He fashions small bows, takes the boys through the shrinking woodlands, and teaches them to carve, mend clothes, stew eels, catch fish, and recognize plants and animals. His insistence that they are Mi’kmaw by blood but know nothing conveys both affection and alarm. The skills matter, yet he believes they cannot substitute for living within Mi’kmaw life itself; to him, what the children learn risks becoming play in a world that has already vanished.

Beatrix’s Illness and Kuntaw’s Withdrawal

The distance Kuntaw feels from Beatrix predates her illness, but her decline makes it harder to ignore. When she is frightened and needs his care, he brings her tea; she drinks slowly, smiles, and is sick. He cannot restore the energetic woman he remembers, and instead of moving closer as her illness worsens, he turns away. His feelings have changed since Tonny and the children brought the old life into the household. Shame over his neglect of Tonny and Malaan leads him to regard Beatrix as Other, even during the years when they were happy together and surrounded by their children.

The thought that Beatrix is not Mi’kmaq becomes, in Kuntaw’s mind, an indictment of his choices. He believes he failed to make her Indian and betrayed his people by leaving Malaan and Tonny for her; at the same time, he believes he betrayed Beatrix by not fulfilling what she had asked of him. Each spring, when he takes a Boston man on a fishing trip, he feels increasingly glad to be away from her house and back in the forest. His longing for the forest is thus inseparable from the strain within his marriage: it offers distance from the relationship in which he sees both his failure and his loss.

After Beatrix dies, Kuntaw hardens himself against grief by telling himself that their years together were wasted. He describes her to himself as an overeducated white woman in an Indian body, and their marriage as a time in which he became weak and powerless. Yet the certainty of this rejection does not erase his attachment. His plan to leave is an attempt to manage the losses of Tonny, Malaan, and Beatrix, which he experiences as the loss of himself as well.

The Northern Forest and the One Who Would Come

Kuntaw resolves to go north, where he believes half-wild forest remains. He thinks of his father, Achille, carrying a dead bear that Kuntaw imagines weighed four hundred pounds, and measures his own diminished capacity against that remembered strength. He cannot carry a full-grown bear, but he hopes to live in the old way and know trees as his elders did. The contrast he draws is cultural as well as practical: white men see trees as material for houses and ships, while he wants to recover a relationship to the forest beyond their use as lumber.

His plan is made concrete by the clothing and equipment he has kept. The year before Beatrix became ill, he killed a moose and made a Mi’kmaw jacket. He has never exchanged his greased mkisn for white men’s shoes, and retains a beaver cloak and deer-hide leggings. Now he mends his bows and makes arrows. He intends to build a camp equipped for two, with clothing and bed robes for an expected companion, but without metal pots, which he believes would spoil the camp’s magic. He will prepare food for two and set out a dish for the One Who Would Come.

The imagined arrival gives his retreat its purpose. At first the companion will be no more than moving shadows among leaves; gradually the figure will become solid, until accepting the spare clothes makes it as real as a tree. Kuntaw imagines hunting with this companion and sharing the newcomer’s power. The fantasy expresses his wish to regain strength and become a Mi’kmaw man again, but it also shows the depth of his isolation: after trying and failing to make knowledge fully transmissible through teaching, he waits for a relationship that may restore what he cannot recover alone. The One Who Would Come remains an expectation, not an arrival, so his ending is a departure toward imagined renewal rather than a completed return.