Mi’kma’ki, rendered by colonial authorities under shifting political names and claims, is the homeland of the Mi’kmaq and a central measure of belonging in the novel. Its significance is not merely geographic: it is a lived network of seasonal abundance, ecological knowledge, kinship, and reciprocal relations among people, plants, and animals. As settlers and their institutions encroach, the loss of access to the country’s resources becomes inseparable from the pressure to abandon Mi’kmaw ways of understanding and inhabiting it.

Homeland and political claims

Mi’kma’ki is understood by its people as their own country, not as property that a European sovereign may transfer. When Sosep tells Theotiste that the French king has given their lands to the British, she objects that the land is theirs and was never the French king’s to give. The exchange places the conflict over territory in direct terms: colonial governments speak as if sovereignty over Mi’kma’ki were theirs to dispose of, while Mi’kmaw characters recognize that claim as illegitimate.

Père Crème’s account to a French official similarly insists that the Mi’kmaq love their country and that it is being taken from them. He describes the harm not only as territorial loss but as pressure on their children through imported goods and coercive customs. His defense contrasts with the official’s framing of Mi’kmaq people as instruments of French military strategy, needed when French territory and the fort at Louisbourg are threatened. In this exchange, the country is both homeland and contested resource within imperial rivalry.

A seasonal and relational world

The novel presents Mi’kma’ki as a country known through its seasons and the abundance of animals, fruit, and fish. In a letter, Père Crème observes that Mi’kmaw life follows the changing availability of food rather than the settled routine he associates with European households. He is struck by the understanding of trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals, and by stories in which humans and animals can enter into kinship or change form. He recalls that people speak to toads and beetles as acquaintances, and admits that he sometimes feels they are teaching him. His account registers the limits of his own assumptions even as he describes the world he is learning to see.

That relationship is also practical knowledge. Mari teaches René Sel to fish for eels, weaving three traps, supplying bait, and showing him where to set them along the river. She explains that the Mi’kmaq have many ways of catching eels and that traps are best for him; when her sons return from Odanak, they can teach him other methods. Elsewhere, Mari makes marks on paper to communicate instructions about preparing a duck, using a system René does not know how to read. Such scenes show knowledge being conveyed through observation, tools, practice, and adaptation, rather than existing only in written records.

Père Crème’s letter makes the contrast between worldviews explicit. He says that Mi’kmaw people regard trees as persons, whereas he has been taught to regard them as materials for houses and ships. His advice that they cultivate gardens and grains in order to impose a more orderly routine goes unheeded. The passage reveals not a lack of knowledge on the Mi’kmaq’s part, but a disagreement over what land and nonhuman life are for—and over whose knowledge counts as order.

Encroachment and diminishing abundance

The pressure on Mi’kma’ki accumulates through changes to everyday subsistence. Settlers’ pigs forage along the shore and learn to dig clams, making it harder for Mi’kmaw women to gather food. The animals also kill a Mi’kmaw toddler near the clam-digging grounds. Plants brought by settlers displace local plants, while boats and nets take fish. Sosep describes these changes as the effects of a growing population pressing upon a people who are few, even when individual newcomers may not intend harm.

Sosep recalls that the woods were once theirs to travel without hindrance, but that time has passed. He urges the Mi’kmaq to keep their own world alive in thought and practice: a world in which people, plants, animals, and birds are all persons who help one another. His warning links ecological change to cultural survival. Holding fast to Mi’kmaw ways is not a retreat from the present but a means of enduring the force that is closing in around them.

For later generations, loss is also evident in the difficulty of finding things that were once common and in the fading of older forms of knowledge. At the English post, Tonny describes animals as scarce and says that settlers take berries, clams, and fish to sell. He feels alienated from English, Mi’kmaq, French, and American communities alike, and names Mi’kma’ki as a country he no longer feels he can belong to. The depletion of food and the disruption of customary life have therefore become personal as well as collective: land loss is experienced as a loss of livelihood, identity, and place.

Kinship, displacement, and return

The country remains a point of reference even for people raised far from it. Tonny leaves the post with his children because he does not want them growing up there without kin. Though he says he belongs nowhere, he still believes his children should live with blood relatives. He travels to the house on Penobscot Bay, where his father Kuntaw lives, carrying the youngest child for part of the journey. Mi’kma’ki is the homeland Tonny has left, but the need for family belonging still shapes where he goes and what he hopes his children may find.

Kuntaw’s response exposes the difficulty of restoring a connection after displacement. He tells Tonny about the old stories and regrets leaving his son and Malaan, but Tonny says he cannot pretend that life in Mi’kma’ki remains as it was: animals are scarce, people have lost the correct ways to live, and food is taken for sale. He says he has no place there or elsewhere. Kuntaw recognizes the damage in his son’s estrangement and asks him to stay, but a declaration of kinship cannot instantly undo a history of abandonment and colonial disruption.

The novel also makes return a practical family undertaking. From Penobscot Bay, Amboise and Jinot travel by ship to Halifax and then walk to the post to look for Elise and inquire after their relative Auguste. Amboise brings a small wooden turkey he carved long ago, hoping Elise’s children may play with it. The journey carries family memory back toward Mi’kma’ki, while the uncertainty surrounding Elise’s life shows how distance and separation have scattered kin across the region.

Colonial institutions and cultural survival

The later history of Mi’kma’ki includes the forced movement of families and the confinement of children in institutions intended to assimilate them. After the 1917 Halifax Explosion and tsunami destroy the Mi’kmaw village in Tufts Cove, Lobert takes his pregnant wife Nanty to Shubenacadie. There, their family finds some measure of stability, though Lobert does not regard the reserve as a safe haven. He works for a timber company and builds a three-room house with logs received as pay.

Lobert signs consent forms after being told that his children may otherwise be taken by welfare authorities. He believes that residential school will give Egga an education and better employment than cutting trees. In practice, Mi’kmaw children’s culture and language undergo what the novel calls a forty-year implosion. Egga is made to do labor instead of attend class, and his parents’ monthly visits—bringing smoked eel, bread, sardines, and yellow cake—cannot reveal to them what the school is doing to him. The episode extends the novel’s account of dispossession beyond land: institutions also threaten the transmission of language, knowledge, and identity.

Mi’kma’ki thus persists in the novel as more than a place left behind or a territory claimed by competing governments. It is the basis of a relational way of life that survives in stories, skills, family obligations, and efforts to return, even as settlement, commercial extraction, displacement, and assimilation steadily narrow the conditions under which that life can continue.