Mi’kmaq livelihood hardship and decline of traditional life

Mi’kmaq livelihood hardship and decline of traditional life is a long, uneven transition in which ecological depletion and colonial economic expansion narrow the means of subsistence, drawing Mi’kmaq families into wage labor while their customary ways of living become harder to sustain. The novel links that transition to specific changes in the land: forests cleared for settlement and crops, game retreating, beaver taken for trade, and rivers obstructed by the waste of mills. The loss is material and cultural at once, and it accumulates across generations rather than arriving as one decisive rupture.

Ecological and Economic Pressures

As French settlement expands, the forest around René Sel is repeatedly felled for fields and roads. Maize is planted between stumps, deer and moose retreat, and wolves follow them north. The scene presents deforestation not as a distant commercial abstraction but as a transformation of the habitat and food sources on which people depend. Even René, who contributes to the clearing, feels dwarfed by the forest’s apparent extent; the trees seem to continue beyond the reach of his ax, while living roots send up new sprouts.

The arrival of Acadian families in Mi’kmaw country makes the transformation more explicit. Woodlands and their fruitful edges had supplied berries and edible roots for generations, but land is plowed for maize and turnips, and salt marshes are drained to grow hay for livestock. Moose, caribou, and bear have retreated, while beaver numbers have fallen severely under trapping. Beaver skins have become a form of settler currency, and the older practice of placing a skin on a grave has waned. The account thus connects market demand with changes in both subsistence and custom.

The wider trade economy treats natural abundance as a commercial opportunity. Charles Duquet rejects beaver, fish, seals, game, and birds as the basis of lasting wealth because they can disappear or lose market value, then decides that the forest is an apparently enduring commodity from which timber can be sold for ships, houses, and fuel. His calculation contrasts with the precariousness experienced by communities whose lives depend on animals and usable land: what looks to a merchant like a substitute resource becomes, for others, a changing landscape and a shrinking basis for customary life.

From Subsistence to Wage Labor

By the time Jinot and Amboise Sel work in the woods, their people can no longer live without settler goods and food. Instead of relying solely on hunting and making what they need, they work for pay. The brothers take up logging in New Brunswick after a season on the heavily cut Penobscot. Jinot is able to fell a small pine quickly, but the efficiency of that skill also places him within an industry that removes the smaller trees as well as the larger ones. The brothers settle back into woods work while caught between the white world and a culture they know only in part and see disappearing.

That work is not safe or secure. In the camps, crews rise before daylight, eat salt pork and tea, carry sharpened axes to the cut, and return near dark to crowded, makeshift shelter. The narrative calls them a brotherhood of the ax, but the shared hardship does not erase the brutal limits of the work: river driving is considered especially dangerous, and employers assign it to Indigenous laborers. A later account of the logging economy makes the commercial logic plain: water moves logs and powers mills, so the company must pay the drive expense. Yet the people doing the work remain exposed to the river’s risks.

Over time, wage work spreads through the Sel family and changes with the industry. For three generations, the Sels work in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine, falling and preparing trees, building and cranking booms, driving logs, working sawmills, and cutting cordwood, pulp, and pit props. Their work follows the supply chain from forest to river to mill. The machinery and transport change around them: axes give way to crosscut saws, mills grow more powerful, horses and oxen are displaced by engines and locomotives, and roads and trucks replace river drives. The new technologies reach remote forests and raise the scale of extraction, but do not make the laborers’ lives safe; injury and death remain a constant possibility.

Adaptation, Cultural Loss, and Kinship

In Indiantown, Jinot learns that many Mi’kmaq are poor and lack enough food. Hunting grounds and game have been destroyed, while salmon rivers are clogged with logs, bark, and sawdust from mills. Jim Sillyboy explains that his people are discussing whether to change their ways and grow gardens like white settlers so that they can eat. The chief has gone to London to ask the king how to make a garden, a striking sign of how survival now requires seeking instruction within the colonial order. Jinot wonders whether the Mi’kmaq are adopting still more settler practices; the question is personal as well as political, bringing to mind his brother Amboise’s bitterness toward white culture.

The loss of customary life is not presented as a simple rejection of adaptation. Settled farming and paid work emerge under conditions in which hunting grounds, fisheries, and access to food have been damaged. Nor does wage labor immediately resolve hardship: the Sels depend on it because they need settler goods and food, but their employment ties their livelihood to an industry that further alters the forests and rivers. The result is a narrowing circle in which ecological damage makes customary subsistence less viable and the available replacement work contributes to further damage.

Family ties make the uneven survival of tradition visible. Jinot is told that his uncle Josime returned to the old ways on Manitoulin Island, though not to Mi’kmaq ways: he loved an Odaawa woman, and the old Mi’kmaq forest life no longer exists as it once did. Jinot offers to accompany his son Aaron there after returning from New Zealand, but Aaron refuses the voyage overseas and writes that he will go to Nova Scotia and later seek Josime. His choice gives the search for kin a practical destination, while the distance between generations shows that cultural inheritance can no longer be passed on as an intact way of life.

Generational Consequences and Narrative Significance

When Jinot reconnects with Elise, she recounts news of their grandfather Kuntaw: he returned to the old place, now largely occupied by English settlers, and had more children with a Mi’kmaw woman. The remaining Mi’kmaw population there is said to number fewer than a hundred. The family story preserves continuity through kinship, but its details register dispossession and demographic decline: the old homeland remains a point of reference even as its population and social landscape have changed.

Across the novel, the decline of traditional livelihood is therefore neither a single historical episode nor a story of voluntary modernization. It is a cumulative process shaped by settlement, commercial demand, altered habitats, and the expansion of logging. The forest and river are not merely backdrops to the change: they are food sources, routes, workplaces, and living conditions, all reshaped by the same economy that absorbs Mi’kmaq labor. The Sels’ work sustains their families, yet the industry’s expanding reach makes the conditions for customary life more difficult to recover. That tension—survival through work that helps transform the land—gives the state its enduring force.