Mari’s forced deportation to France and return to Mi’kma’ki

Mari’s forced deportation to France and return to Mi’kma’ki is both a formative event in Mari’s life and a catastrophe for her community: taken from an ocean camp as a child, she survived the voyage to Paris and the return across the Atlantic, but the illness she carried home preceded the deaths of nearly all her people. The episode reaches the reader through Mari’s account, where remembered abduction, family loss, and the devastation that followed become an inherited history rather than a private misfortune.

Abduction and the voyage to France

Mari tells the story while explaining her fear of losing Elphège. As a child, she lived with her people at a shore far to the east. When a French ship arrived, her community welcomed the newcomers and shared knowledge of gathering shellfish and berries. Among the French was Père Perreault, whom Mari called Père Pillow. The visitors said they would return to France and that some Mi’kmaq would accompany them; no one volunteered. The sailors then seized seven people, including Mari, and took them aboard before the people on shore understood what was happening. The ship departed while those left behind ran after it. Mari’s account emphasizes the gap between the French visitors’ outward reassurance and the suddenness of the seizure. What had begun as an encounter involving shared food and local knowledge became forced removal. The voyage lasted many days, and Mari remembers the captives becoming sick before they reached France.

Captivity, illness, and family losses

In Paris, Mari remembers riding in a noisy wagon, weeping with the others, eating badly, and sleeping in a confined space. Her brother became gravely ill and died after being taken away by the French. Her mother also died. Mari herself fell sick and developed smallpox, but survived; a baby who had been with her died during the later sea passage. The account records the family’s losses as successive separations and deaths, not as a single misfortune. Père Pillow eventually said that they would go home. The return voyage was long, and Mari recalls the ocean as difficult. When the ship reached their homeland, Mi’kmaq people came running to meet them. That homecoming offered a brief reversal of the earlier separation, but it did not restore the community’s former life. The relief of return was followed by a far greater outbreak of illness.

The epidemic after her return

Mari says that nearly the entire community died in the months after she came back. Smallpox spread among her people, and the small village became a place of widespread suffering. When she speaks of the sickness, she points to the scars on her cheeks, linking her own survival to the illness that afflicted the community. She had survived the disease and the crossing, but returned carrying sickness that proved devastating to others. The contrast between the people’s joyful reception of Mari and the deaths that followed makes the return an especially bitter turning point. It was not a simple homecoming: the survivors had come back to their homeland, but the community that received them was soon shattered. The account presents Mari as both a survivor of the forced voyage and someone whose return was entangled with consequences she could not control.

What followed in Mari’s life

After describing the deportation and epidemic, Mari explains that Père Pillow brought her to Kébec. At the mission she married Lolan, a Mi’kmaq man she remembers as good. Elphège, Theotiste, and Jean-Baptiste were his children. Mari also says that one of her babies died and that Lolan later died; she went with Père Pillow to Wobik with the children who survived. The account therefore places her later family life in the wake of repeated loss and displacement, while preserving the names and relationships that continued beyond the crisis. The story is told years later, when Mari is afraid of losing Elphège. Its immediate purpose is to explain the depth of that fear, but its scope extends beyond one mother’s anxiety. The history of her separation from her people, the deaths in France, the epidemic after her return, and the later formation of her family show how colonial coercion and disease continue to shape personal life long after the voyage itself has ended.

Memory and historical consequence

The episode is transmitted through Mari’s speech rather than through an official record. Her recollection gives the event a family and community scale: the ship’s departure, the deaths of her mother and brother, the return of a small number of survivors, and the subsequent losses among her people. The account also preserves the distinction between the initial welcome extended to the French and the violence of the captives’ removal. Hospitality did not prevent abduction, and returning home did not undo the damage. Mari’s story becomes one strand in the novel’s wider transmission of family history. Later generations speak of relatives, losses, and places across separation, and the past remains consequential even when it is not directly witnessed by those who inherit it. Here, the forced crossing and epidemic establish a recurring pattern: survival may preserve a person and a story, while leaving an enduring record of community loss and displacement.