Malaan

Malaan is Kuntaw’s wife and Tonny Sel’s mother, a Mi’kmaw woman whose life at an English trading post is marked by separation, precarious dependence, and a contested sense of belonging. Her story connects Kuntaw’s departure to Tonny’s decision to leave the post with his children: she insists that her son remain and learn white ways, while he eventually seeks a life beyond the place where he grew up.

Identity and Background

Malaan and Kuntaw married as children, after Kuntaw returned from a moose hunt with Auguste and Achille to find devastation. Kuntaw was grieving and resisted the view that he and Malaan were too young to marry. Elphège forbade the union, but Kuntaw argued that having killed a moose made him a man; Elphège, who was not his father, could not stop him. Malaan gave birth to Tonny at thirteen, after a long and difficult labor.

Before Tonny was three, Kuntaw left for the lumber camps, and Malaan began drinking white men’s whiskey. Her life became tied to the trading post and to the men who provided her with food or kept her with them. The narrative presents her not as securely belonging to either Mi’kmaw community or white society, but as living in an unstable space between them.

Life at the Trading Post

A month after Kuntaw’s departure in 1754, Malaan sat outside the English trading post when Simon, a white man, gestured for her to follow him. He kept her in his room through the winter, then returned to England in the spring; Malaan went with Richard Tarbox. Her son grew up around the post, among its dogs and a group of untended children who made a den beneath old canoes.

Malaan showed little sustained interest in Tonny or in the Mi’kmaw women who came to coax her away from the white men with whom she lived. Yet she became angry when they tried to take the boy. When the women said he should be raised by Mi’kmaw people, Malaan answered that she too was Mi’kmaw and insisted that he stay at the post, where he would learn white ways. She judged Mi’kmaw ways no longer suitable, a declaration that makes her own divided circumstances explicit.

Older women remembered a very different Malaan: as a girl she had been clever and skilled in quill embroidery. They could not agree on what had changed her. Some attributed her condition to whiskey; others thought it arose from love for Kuntaw and shame at his abandonment. They had heard he was living with a white woman in Maine and had not returned. Some believed Malaan had divorced him, but the account leaves that as community speculation rather than a confirmed fact.

Motherhood and Separation

Although Malaan was distant from Tonny, his connection to her remained consequential. Tonny grew up without the hunting skills or weapons expected of a man in his community, relying instead on errands, theft, and begging for food and shelter. Older Mi’kmaw women sometimes brought him into their wikuoms, fed him moose meat, and offered him a place to return to. Their care contrasted with the insecure life he experienced around the post.

When Tonny announced that he was leaving, he told Malaan that he was a father and that his children would go with him. She replied that she had always known he would leave, then turned away. Her response neither prevents his departure nor opens a reconciliation between them. Tonny despised her and did not explain his plans; he understood her life to be bound to the post.

Narrative Role and Significance

Malaan’s insistence that Tonny learn white ways stands against the kinship claim made by the women who wanted to raise him among Mi’kmaw people. The conflict is not simply between a mother and her visitors: it stages the pressure of colonial change within family life, as Malaan’s own precarious position informs what she believes her son needs. The narrative also preserves the limits of what is known about her. Her withdrawal is visible, but its cause remains unresolved, divided among the community’s explanations of alcohol, grief, love, and abandonment.

Tonny ultimately leaves because he refuses to leave his children at the trading post. He knows only that his father lives at Penobscot Bay, and he travels there with the children, carrying the youngest, Jinot. Malaan’s story thus ends at a separation rather than a reunion: her son departs for the kinship he believes his children need, while she remains associated with the post that has shaped and confined her life.