Mi’kma’ki is the homeland at the heart of the Sel family’s return journey and a contested territory transformed by colonial settlement. In the novel, its significance lies not only in the country’s resources and landscapes, but in the relationships, knowledge, and memory that bind Mi’kmaw people to it—even as political decisions, settlement, and resource extraction make that connection harder to sustain.

Homeland and remembered country

Before reaching Mi’kma’ki, Noë and Zoë hear their mother Mari’s descriptions of its regions, including Wild Potato Place, Skin Dresser’s Territory, and Land of Fog. The names convey a homeland understood through particular places and their uses, rather than as an undifferentiated tract of land. Their brothers’ stories also fill the journey with images of berries, fish, shellfish, and game. The sisters’ anticipation is shaped by these accounts, and by the hope that returning will reconnect them with their mother’s country.

At Odanak, where the family waits through more than four lunar cycles, the return is prepared as a practical journey as well as an emotional one. Theotiste, Elphège, and Achille discuss the route with hunters and fishers, while women help Noë and Zoë dry and smoke venison and eel for the road. Noë works at basket-making until her fingers blister. Theotiste tells Zoë that Mari’s spirit may be found in the trees, plants, rocks, fish, and animals of the homeland. Zoë’s wish that they had brought their mother’s bones makes the journey’s purpose especially clear: the family hopes to recover a relationship with Mari through the place to which she belonged.

Return to an altered landscape

The family reaches Mi’kma’ki in late March, as bird migrations begin and small fish move upstream in a stream. Sosep points out French families living along the shore, but the country they encounter is not the abundant summer world described in stories. Woodland edges that once supplied berries and edible roots have been plowed for maize and turnips; salt marshes have been drained to produce hay for livestock. Moose, caribou, and bears have retreated, while beavers have been so heavily taken for the fur trade that their skins have become a form of colonial money. The practice of placing beaver skins on graves has also fallen away.

The difference between remembered plenty and present conditions is not simply a disappointment in the sisters’ expectations. It records the material reorganization of the homeland. Acadian farms, fields, drainage, livestock, and commercial hunting alter the places and species on which Mi’kmaw life depends. Sosep explains that winter in Mi’kma’ki can be severe unless provisions have been cached, correcting the idea that its resources are available in every season without preparation. The country’s abundance is seasonal, and its use depends on knowledge of when and where food can be found.

That knowledge appears in everyday practices as well as in stories. Earlier, Mari teaches René Sel to fish for eels: she weaves three traps, supplies scraps for bait, and shows him where to set them. He thereafter brings her eels almost every day. She explains that Mi’kmaq people have many ways of catching them and that traps suit him best. Such instruction presents Mi’kmaw ecological knowledge as specific, practical, and adapted to the river—not as a vague inheritance or a relic of the past.

Land, law, and colonial claims

The novel places the return against a political history in which Mi’kma’ki is treated by European powers as territory that can be transferred. On the journey, Sosep warns the Sels that the French king has given their land to the British. Theotiste rejects the premise: the land is theirs, not the French king’s to give. Her response sets Indigenous belonging against a colonial framework that claims authority to dispose of a homeland without the consent of its people.

That conflict also appears in disputes over individual property. When René Sel’s property is contested after his death, Démon Meillard insists that Renardette, René’s adopted daughter, owns it because she is French, and dismisses the Sel children’s claim to be René’s children. He presents the transaction as white legal business and proposes recording it in Captain Bouchard’s ledger. Achille counters that the ledger records René’s ownership and that René married Mari under white law. The episode shows how written title and colonial categories can be invoked to deny the very family relationships through which the property might otherwise be understood.

Colonial power is also expressed through violence and demographic vulnerability. Sosep says the English king pays for Mi’kmaw scalps and that Mi’kmaq people are making war against the English, capturing boats in canoes despite being few and often ill. Père Crème, in a separate discussion of French policy, recognizes that Mi’kmaq people love the country France is taking and the children whose lives French goods and forceful ways are changing. His recognition does not reverse the dispossession, but makes visible the distance between an empire’s territorial claims and the people who already inhabit the land.

Living in two worlds

As settlement grows, Mi’kmaw people must confront harms that accumulate through apparently ordinary economic activity. Sosep describes settlers’ animals destroying food, boats and nets taking fish, and introduced plants displacing local ones. A hog attacks and kills a Mi’kmaw toddler who has followed clam diggers onto the shore. The loss is both immediate and part of a larger change in access to food: hogs rooting on the beaches also make clams harder for Mi’kmaw women to gather.

Sosep does not frame survival as a simple choice between adopting settler ways and rejecting every new object. He tells the community that Mi’kmaw people will live in two worlds, and insists that they must keep their own world present in their minds and lives: a world in which plants, animals, birds, and people are persons who help one another. Noë’s question about whether this means giving up metal pots registers a practical uncertainty; Sosep’s emphasis is on sustaining a way of understanding relationships, not on pretending that contact and change can be undone.

The same question of transmission recurs in Kuntaw’s family. Ashamed that he has left Mi’kma’ki, his people, and his son, he fears that he is helping destroy the old ways. He eventually understands Beatrix’s need for him as a need to learn her Mi’kmaw inheritance, rather than simply to acquire book learning. He leads her into the forest and teaches her to read animal tracks and seasonal signs, and to understand the relationships among forest and shore. His instruction makes homeland knowledge something learned through attention and practice, and turns the forest into a place of teaching as well as a place under pressure.

Dispossession and persistence

The homeland’s changing conditions continue across generations. The 1917 Halifax Explosion destroys the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove, killing members of Lobert’s family and prompting him to move with his pregnant wife, Nanty, to Shubenacadie. He does not regard the reserve as a safe haven, although the family finds some measure of balance there. This later displacement echoes the earlier movement toward Mi’kma’ki: return, residence, and belonging remain vulnerable to colonial decisions and events beyond the family’s control.

The novel’s account of Mi’kma’ki therefore holds loss and continuity together. The altered landscape, reduced wildlife, land transfers, and migration do not erase the homeland’s meaning. Its place-names, seasonal knowledge, stories, fishing practices, and teachings remain ways of recognizing relationships that colonial ownership and extraction fail to acknowledge. Mi’kma’ki is both a country changed by settlement and a living source of identity whose meaning persists through the people who remember, teach, and return to it.