Mari’s abduction and forced voyage to France

Mari’s abduction and forced voyage to France is a defining episode in her family history and a concentrated account of colonial violence: French sailors seize her and six others from their coastal camp, transport them across the ocean against their will, and return a survivor whose illness devastates her community. Years later, Mari tells the story to René Sel, linking the coercion of one child to the deaths of relatives and the loss of most of her people.

The abduction and voyage

Mari recounts the event after René asks what is troubling her, while their children Achille, Noë, and Zoë sleep. He takes both her hands, urging her to speak, and she explains that, as a child, she lived with her people at a shore far to the east. When a French ship arrived, the Mi’kmaq welcomed its crew, showed them how to gather shellfish and berries, and shared food. The visitors initially seemed friendly; among them was Père Perreault, whom Mari calls Père Pillow.

The change from exchange to force is abrupt. The French announce that they are returning to France and that some Mi’kmaq will go with them. No one agrees to leave. Sailors nevertheless seize seven people, including Mari, and take them to the ship. Those left ashore run after it along the coast, gesturing and crying out as it sails away. The abduction thus breaks a relationship that had begun with hospitality, converting contact into involuntary removal.

Mari’s fragmentary account conveys the long passage and the conditions that followed without turning them into a travel adventure. In Paris, the captives are carried by wagon amid noise and made to sleep in a confined space; food is bad, and the journey through France continues for a long time. Her brother becomes gravely ill and dies after being taken away. Her mother also dies. Mari herself falls sick, while the abducted group suffers further losses. The account makes clear that France is not a destination the captives chose, but the setting of their separation, illness, and deaths.

Return and epidemic

Mari survives smallpox, which leaves scars on her cheeks, and eventually crosses the ocean back with a baby. The baby dies during the return voyage. When Mari reaches her homeland, her people run to meet her, laughing with joy; the reunion, however, does not restore what the voyage has taken. In the months that follow, nearly the entire community dies. Mari explains that the returning captives carried disease, and René understands that she had brought the infection home after being forced to France.

The episode therefore extends beyond Mari’s personal ordeal. Her survival is inseparable from the subsequent deaths among her people: she returns as one of the few who lived through the passage, but also as the unwitting bearer of an epidemic. The novel presents this consequence without blaming Mari for an illness she did not choose to contract or carry. The sequence instead exposes the human cost of forced movement and the danger created when colonial power treats people as cargo to be transported.

Family history and the telling

Mari’s account also explains the origins of her family. After her return, Père Perreault brings her to Kébec, where she marries Lolan, a Mi’kmaw man. Their children include Elphège, Theotiste, and Jean-Baptiste; Mari also remembers a baby who died. The forced voyage thus becomes part of the history through which her children and later descendants understand their kinship, separations, and losses.

The story reaches the reader as a remembered experience spoken within an intimate family scene, not as an impersonal report. René’s questions and his gesture of holding Mari’s hands make space for an account she has carried for years. Elsewhere, her children return to their mother’s stories of Mi’kma’ki, and relatives use family memories to explain their own searches for kin. This pattern of retelling does not undo the abduction, but it preserves Mari’s account within a living family record.

Colonial power and historical memory

The episode resonates with a wider conflict over who can claim authority over Mi’kmaw lives and homeland. Père Crème later objects to a French governor’s contemptuous view of the Mi’kmaq, insisting that they suffer, love their country and children, and have lived on that land for generations. The abduction gives concrete history to that argument: French claims of imperial power are shown not only in disputes over territory, but in the forced seizure of people and their transport across the ocean.

The community’s later losses make the voyage part of a cumulative history rather than an isolated misfortune. Sosep warns that French and British power alike encroach on Mi’kmaw land and that settlers’ animals and practices diminish access to food. When Theotiste objects that the French king had no right to give Mi’kmaw land to the British, the question of possession is stated from the perspective of those whose homeland is being transferred without their consent. Mari’s childhood abduction is an earlier, personal instance of the same denial: others decide where she will go, while her people’s wishes count for nothing.

The decisive significance of the episode lies in its passage across generations. Mari’s own account connects capture, illness, bereavement, and return; later family stories preserve that history alongside memories of Mi’kma’ki and continuing dispossession. The voyage is therefore both an individual trauma and a narrative hinge, revealing how colonial coercion enters family memory and how the act of telling keeps the experience from disappearing with those who endured it.