Nova Scotia is not simply a destination on the map of the novel: it is Mi’kmaw homeland repeatedly claimed, renamed, and reorganized by colonial power, while remaining a place to which families seek return. Its history is rendered through intimate consequences—lost food, children separated from their language, a village destroyed—and through later acts of reconnection and ecological care. The province’s changing forests and communities make visible how dispossession accumulates over generations, and how belonging persists without being reducible to official borders or institutions.

Homeland and the disputed transfer of land

When Theotiste and Elphège’s family approached their destination, their children had been kept alive through stories of Mi’kma’ki: blueberry patches, berry trees, crayfish, beaver, eels, walrus, and the abundance available just outside a wikuom. The remembered country they pictured stood in painful contrast to the place they were about to encounter. The stories were not merely nostalgic scenery; they carried knowledge of a homeland in which people could live through relationships with plants, animals, and the land.

Sosep warned that the return was especially difficult because the French king had given their land to the British. Theotiste rejected the premise of that transfer: the land was not the French king’s to give, because it was theirs. The exchange exposes the basic conflict between colonial sovereignty, which treats territory as a possession to be transferred between crowns, and Mi’kmaw belonging, grounded in generations of life on the land. Theotiste’s objection makes the political question immediate and personal: the purported change of ownership does not erase the people whose country is being claimed.

That conflict also appears in Père Crème’s confrontation with a French authority. He insists that the Mi’kmaq suffer, feel, love their country, and love their children, even as France takes the land and corrupts the young through its goods and coercive ways. He reports their sense that France regards them as having little value, and stresses that their ancestors had lived there undisturbed for generations. His compassion is treated as a lack of zeal for France, revealing how imperial loyalty can demand that Indigenous suffering be minimized even when it is plainly recognized. The passage gives the Mi’kmaq a political and emotional claim to Nova Scotia that contradicts the language of strategic possession.

Encroachment in everyday life

The loss of country is shown not only through royal claims but through changes that reach into ordinary subsistence. Acadian settlers’ pigs forage freely in the woods and learn to dig clams. As they rush onto the exposed sands when the tide ebbs, Mi’kmaw women have difficulty gathering clams themselves. One hog attacks and partially eats a toddler who had lagged behind while imitating the clam diggers. The tragedy makes the costs of settlement concrete: introduced animals compete with people for food, alter access to familiar places, and turn a child’s imitation of communal work into a fatal encounter.

Sosep reads these changes as part of a widening pattern. The settlers’ beasts destroy food, their boats and nets take fish, and imported plants displace local ones. He does not claim that most newcomers intend harm; the pressure comes also from the imbalance of numbers, as many arrive where the Mi’kmaq are few. He compares their advance to a great wave, then recalls that the woods once belonged to his people and that they could travel where they wished without hindrance. That freedom, he says, has passed. In Nova Scotia, dispossession is therefore not a single transfer of title but an accumulating restriction on movement, food, and the capacity to sustain a way of life.

Sosep’s answer is cultural as well as political. The Mi’kmaq, he says, must keep their own world alive in mind and practice: a world in which plants, animals, birds, and people are persons who help one another. They must renew and revere that vision so they can endure the encroaching outside force. Noë’s question about whether this means giving up metal pots shows that the younger generation hears the warning as a practical dilemma, not an abstract doctrine. Sosep’s counsel does not require a simple retreat from change; it insists that the community preserve the relationships and values by which it understands itself while living under pressure in two worlds.

Displacement, return, and divided belonging

For Jinot, Nova Scotia is both a place of Mi’kmaw history and an unexpected site of injury. After the great fire in New Brunswick, he finds himself at Indiantown near Shubenacadie, where Jim Sillyboy treats burn victims. Jim explains that he too was badly burned when, as an infant, he fell into a fire; he now helps Mi’kmaq, Iroquois, and white people suffering burns, though some die. Jinot recognizes Shubenacadie as part of old Mi’kmaw territory but does not know how he came there from New Brunswick or whether Vic Goochey brought him. The confusion of location mirrors his disorientation after injury: the province is familiar as ancestral geography, yet he reaches it through displacement and dependence on others.

A later family visit recalls how thoroughly the old homeland has changed. Jinot hears that his grandfather Kuntaw returned to the old place, now occupied by English settlers except for areas called Frenchtown and the Diggins. The Diggins is where the remaining Mi’kmaw people live; the family has heard that fewer than a hundred remain. Kuntaw married a Mi’kmaw woman and had more children there. The news joins persistence to loss: a family line continues in the homeland, but within a diminished community surrounded by settler settlement. Jinot keeps silent about the death of his brother Amboise, imagining that Amboise would have been run over by a freight wagon as he lay in the road. After the visit, rain turns to sleet and snow; the weather intensifies Jinot’s return to grief, bringing his dead child back into thought as the family leaves.

The next generation’s choices make the province a focus of competing ideas about kinship and identity. Aaron refuses his father’s plan to go across the ocean and says he wants to go to Nova Scotia to find whatever Sel relatives may be there and learn their life. Jinot proposes instead that Aaron go west to Manitoulin Island to seek his uncle Josime, who has returned to the old ways. Aaron answers that Josime is not Mi’kmaq. The disagreement is not simply over travel: it reveals a struggle over where family belongs and what constitutes Mi’kmaw identity. Nova Scotia represents a possible reconnection for Aaron, while Jinot’s alternative directs him toward another relative and another way of life.

Shubenacadie, schooling, and cultural injury

In 1917, the Halifax explosion and its tsunami destroy the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove. Among those killed are Lobert’s brother Jim Sel and four of Jim’s children. Grieving and frightened, Lobert tells his pregnant wife, Nanty, that they will go to Shubenacadie. They move inland to the reserve, which does not feel to him like a secure refuge, though the family finds a measure of balance there despite poverty. Lobert works for a timber company for pay in logs and uses the wood to build a three-room house. Nova Scotia’s interior thus becomes a place of partial rebuilding after catastrophe, but not a guarantee against the forces that threaten the family.

When Lobert’s son Edgar-Jim, called Egga, reaches ten, he enters the residential school with his friend Johnny Stick. Lobert believes education will spare his children forest labor and give them better work. He signs the consent forms after being told that otherwise welfare workers will take the children. Yet the school fails the promise made to him: Egga is kept from classes and made to shovel coal in the furnace room, where he learns to read pressure gauges. He is called a lazy savage and beaten; a beating leaves him deaf in one ear and with a badly healed broken arm. The novel describes the institution’s attack on Mi’kmaw children, culture, and language as a forty-year implosion, likening its damage to that of an ammunition ship. Shubenacadie is therefore both a place of refuge from immediate displacement and a setting where colonial institutions reproduce dispossession through forced assimilation.

The harm is transmitted beyond the school years. Months after Sapatisia visits her family, she writes from Halifax that she has not yet met some relatives, describes her growing family connections, and says she is going to Winnipeg to study forestry. Her letter brings news of movement and ambition; it also gives Egga and Bren a glimpse of a daughter whose life they cannot fully follow. Soon afterward Lobert writes to Egga that Sapatisia’s visit meant a great deal because she asked about their people and old Sel stories. He asks whether Egga or another granddaughter might come, says he is growing old, and tells him that the school that hurt him has closed and burned down. Egga is moved to tears and plans to return to Shubenacadie with Bren for the next St. Anne’s Day. The destroyed school cannot undo what it did, but the invitation to come home restores a route toward family memory and conversation.

Return through land and forestry

In the novel’s later generations, Nova Scotia is also a setting for education and environmental work. Jeanne learns that botany offers a world of stems and leaves; Felix Mius sets his sights on forestry school, following the example of a relative who logged in Maine and later studied forest research at the University of Maine. The cousins move to Aunt Alice Sel’s house in Dartmouth, enroll at community college, and work part-time while trying to reach university. The effort is uncertain, but it gives the young people a way into fields of study that connect family experience of logging with more deliberate knowledge of forests.

Sapatisia brings Jeanne and Felix into the Breitsprecher Tree Project’s work in Nova Scotia. The crew is small—six people, fewer than the ten they would like—and is the only team working in the province that season. Its tasks include planting trees and monitoring test plots established three years earlier, with records kept for as long as ten years. One plot had shown extensive chlorosis the previous year. Sapatisia also describes a site examining how mycorrhizal fungi affect seedling growth: burned soil lacks these fungi, and seedlings fare poorly without them because the fungi help increase nutrient and mineral uptake. The project’s attention to specific plots, symptoms, and soil relationships offers a marked contrast to the earlier vision of forest and land as inexhaustible resources.

The team plans to visit Nova Scotia’s ecoregions, beginning with the highland plateau, so its members can learn what is distinctive about different small areas, including their geography, soils, and hydrology. Replanting is not presented as a simple reversal of past damage; the long monitoring period and the concern with burned soil make recovery contingent on local conditions and sustained attention. In this later return to Nova Scotia, the land remains the ground of Mi’kmaw family history, but it is also approached through scientific study and collaborative restoration. Across the generations, the province’s significance lies in that unresolved conjunction: dispossession and cultural injury persist, while family ties, remembered knowledge, education, and care for damaged forests make forms of return possible.