Mi’kmaw ecological and medicinal knowledge

Mi’kmaw ecological and medicinal knowledge in the novel is not an abstract store of facts but a practiced way of living with forests, rivers, plants, animals, and seasons. Mari uses it to care for people and animals and to make food from the river; Kuntaw later describes learning the forest as a way to read the relationships among its signs. Against this practical and relational expertise, the story sets colonial judgments that label Mi’kmaw lifeways idle or disorderly, even as French settlers and institutions seek to benefit from Indigenous knowledge.

Knowledge in Everyday Practice

At Monsieur Trépagny’s settlement, Mari tends the oxen when Monsieur Trépagny’s treatment cannot ease their irritated eyes. She steeped tamarack bark in spring water and sluiced their eyes twice daily. The garden Monsieur Trépagny assigned her is less a sign of her acceptance of French agriculture than an imposed task: she regards gardening as foolishness, and when she can, she and Renardette leave it to gather medicinal plants. Her expertise ranges from healing barks to moldy substances used on infected wounds and fungi worked into salves. What the seigneur regards as a neglected garden thus sits alongside a body of knowledge with immediate uses in animal care and healing.

Mari’s fishing lessons likewise expose the limits of René Sel’s confidence in his own methods. Given a line, hooks, and a basket, René loses hooks when the line parts and brings back what Mari considers small fish. She explains that Mi’kmaq people build weirs and catch fish in quantity, including night fishing for sturgeon with torches and spears. Rather than adopting the knowledge she offers, René persists with hooks and line, though he accepts the eel traps she has made, reasoning that eels are not fish. The contrast is not simply between two kinds of equipment: it shows knowledge being offered through instruction and demonstration, then only partly taken up by a newcomer who treats his preference as the measure of what works.

Mari makes that instruction concrete when she weaves three eel traps, supplies fish scraps for bait, and takes René to the river to show him promising locations. He then brings her fat eels almost every day. The traps work because she joins an understanding of the river’s inhabitants to knowledge of where and how to fish; her statement that Mi’kmaq people have many ways to catch eels places the particular method within a larger repertoire. She also tells him that her sons, when they return from Odanak, can teach him other methods. Knowledge here travels through family and community relationships, as well as through a learner’s repeated practice on the land.

Food, Land, and Competing Ways of Knowing

Mari’s handling of fish extends her ecological practice beyond capture. She asks René to leave the fish intact so she can clean them, then buries the entrails in the garden. When he asks whether this is an Indigenous custom, she answers that it is common practice for fools who garden rather than gather the riches of the country. The episode places two ideas of sustenance beside one another: a bounded cultivated plot, prized by the settler, and a broader landscape whose existing abundance can be gathered and used. The fish scraps returned to the garden also connect river food with cultivated ground rather than treating either as an isolated resource.

The larger conflict becomes explicit in Père Crème’s writing and instruction. He describes Mi’kmaw people as organizing their lives around seasonal abundance and the hunt, berries, and fish, rather than the supposedly orderly routines of French agriculture. He observes that they regard trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals, and that their stories and everyday speech blur boundaries between human and other-than-human life. Yet he also frames this difference through the missionary project: trees, he argues, should be used to build houses and ships, and people should give up hunting for gardens and grain. He says that Mi’kmaw people reject that program, and that French observers call them lazy because they do not till the earth.

That description of difference becomes a justification for dispossession. Père Crème presents the forest as an encroaching obstacle and clearing it as labor that grants the French a God-given right to the land. In this account, Mi’kmaw practices of fishing, gathering, and moving through the forest are misread as evidence that people have done nothing to improve or own their homeland. The novel sets that claim against Mari’s demonstrable knowledge of plants, fish, animals, and soil: what the missionary calls idleness is skilled activity, though it does not take the form of permanent agricultural settlement that colonial doctrine recognizes as improvement.

Healing Knowledge and Its Recognition

Mari’s healing knowledge attracts attention beyond her household. When René learns that Theotiste plans to travel and join the displaced communities at Odanak, Captain Bouchard tells him that a French doctor in Kébec has asked to meet Mari. The doctor, Michel Sarrazine, is interested in forest plants and gathers information from Indigenous people about their uses. He proposes paying Mari to show him the curing plants in the area, although Bouchard does not know how much. The arrangement acknowledges that the doctor needs what Mari knows, but it routes recognition and potential payment through colonial intermediaries: Bouchard conveys the request, and Sarrazine sets the terms of the proposed exchange.

Sarrazine arrives with a notebook, stiffeners, drying papers, and French needles for Mari. After riding west to see her, he returns ten days later with a bag full of wild plant specimens, some intended for the Jardin des Plantes. The scene makes the passage from situated practice to scientific collection visible. Mari’s knowledge is rooted in knowing which plants grow nearby and how they are used; the doctor carries specimens away for an institution in France. The narrative records both the opening this creates for her expertise to be recognized and the asymmetry of a process in which the collector possesses the equipment, institutional destination, and power to decide what becomes a specimen.

Earlier, Mari’s knowledge is already visible in the care she gives Elphège. When he returns emaciated and unable to speak, with a badly swollen ankle, she prepares a sleep potion and nourishing moose broth, then pounds white cedar cones and combines them with fern root and leaf for a sprain poultice. She treats him over the period in which he lies half-conscious, and he later recovers enough strength to return to the woods. The episode presents medicine as coordinated care: remedies drawn from plants, food, rest, and attention to the injured person, rather than as a single abstract cure.

Knowledge, Writing, and Relationship

The novel distinguishes writing from knowledge without treating them as interchangeable. At the mission house, Mari uses a pen and ink to make marks on a scrap of paper. When René asks what she wrote, she explains that the feather means to cook for three suns. The marks are meaningful within her own account of what the message says, but the scene does not equate literacy with the totality of knowledge. It sets an act of writing beside the far wider practical expertise she demonstrates in food, medicine, and the landscape.

Kuntaw’s relationship with Beatrix gives this distinction a later, intimate form. He initially understands her repeated declaration that she needs him in bodily or practical terms; eventually he recognizes that she seeks help because she is a half-Mi’kmaw woman brought up as a white girl and wants to learn to be Mi’kmaw. He had been leading her into books, but after understanding her need, he sets the books aside and takes her into the forest. There he teaches her to read animal tracks, seasonal signs in plants and trees, odors that signal bears or approaching rain, frost-marked leaves, and changes in the water. He presents these signs not as disconnected facts but as elements joined together, explaining that forest and shore are bound by countless fine connections. Beatrix says it is too much to remember, a response that emphasizes the difficulty of learning a whole system rather than acquiring a few isolated observations.

The knowledge is also shown under pressure from work and cultural change. Père Crème objects to the Sel family’s return because they speak French, and especially because the older brothers can read and write in the Roman alphabet; he fears their capacity to cause trouble. At the same time, he wants them to abandon trapping and fishing for farming. The family resists that demand, working in woods, rivers, and seasonal jobs while retaining autumn and winter for hunting and trapping. Later, when logging offers wages for salt pork and flour, Elphège, Theotiste, and Achille take work with Duquet et Fils, and Rouge Emil joins them. They are skilled with axes, but the source explicitly marks wage labor in the woods as something that is not the Mi’kmaw way and has become necessary. The change is not a simple exchange of old knowledge for new employment; it is a narrowing of choices under economic and colonial pressure.

From River Knowledge to Industrial Risk

As logging expands, the novel shows how a skill developed in relation to rivers is appropriated by an industry that also assigns danger along racial lines. A camp boss argues that water is essential because it carries logs to the sawmill and powers the mills; he points to Mi’kmaq and Montagnais workers moving logs along the river. The company’s dependence on their river skill does not protect them from the hazards of the work. Elsewhere, the narrative describes river driving as the most dangerous logging task and says bosses give it to Indigenous workers because they are presumed to be born to violent water. That stereotype converts expertise into an occupational burden, while the company treats the drive’s expense as unavoidable because there is no other way to move the logs.

Across three generations, the Sel barkskins witness the tools and infrastructure of forestry change: poll axes yield to double-bitted axes, then to crosscut saws; up-and-down gang saws give way to circular saws and band saws; oxen and horses are replaced by engines and geared locomotives. Once roads reach forests away from waterways, trucks and roads displace the river drives. The account links this transformation to the end of a dangerous kind of labor but not to a halt in extraction. Instead, increasingly powerful machines make it possible to level the continent’s remaining ancient forests. Read alongside Kuntaw’s teaching that forest and shore are interconnected, industrial logging presents a rival way of knowing the woods: one that sees water as transport and power, trees as production, and Indigenous skill as labor to be allocated, while obscuring the relationships and costs that the traditional knowledge makes legible.