Queen Anne’s War is presented not as a clean break from earlier conflict but as the continuation of old antagonisms, disrupting trade while intensifying colonial pressure on Indigenous communities. The war’s significance lies in the contrast between competing claims of allegiance and territory: French and English powers treat the region as a strategic possession, while Mi’kmaq speakers insist that it is their homeland, not a gift any European monarch can bestow.

War and the fur trade

When Charles Duquet returns to New France, he finds signs of wartime disruption across the settlements: clearings crowded with stumps, charcoal kilns, and cabins. Settlers are cutting maple for charcoal, which the English buy for glass and gunpowder production. Spies and armed bands move through the region, and Duquet initially cannot locate Toussaint and Fernand Trépagny. His priority, however, is commercial: he wants the brothers ready for another season of fur trading and expects them to avoid the fighting.

The brothers are eventually reunited at their old hut on the Rivière des Fourres, where they are tearing out a beaver dam. Toussaint names the conflict Queen Anne’s War but describes it as a continuation of longstanding enmities. He blames shifting Indigenous alliances, observing that a people might be an enemy one day, a fighting partner the next, or remain apart from a battle. Duquet, sour at the suggestion, makes clear that he has not returned to fight either Indigenous people or the English. His response puts the immediate commercial purpose of his return beside a conflict that others understand in political and territorial terms.

Allegiance and colonial strategy

The war’s divided loyalties also appear in Toussaint’s account of travel on the Mississippi with Pierre LeMoyne. He describes French ambitions to establish forts across the land and a journey through a maze of waterways in search of the river’s mouth. Duquet senses that Toussaint is eager for forts and a fight against the English, and suspects that the brothers do not believe his story about being captured by pirates. The exchange shows that the war affects trust as well as trade: Duquet needs the brothers’ cooperation, while they have their own experience of the wider contest and their own political concerns.

The conflict is also part of a French strategy that treats Indigenous people as necessary allies in defending imperial territory while diminishing their standing. In a later exchange about the threatened French position and the fortress at Louisbourg, Père Crème argues that Mi’kmaq people have feelings, love their country, and are losing it as French power expands. His appeal exposes the contradiction in a colonial order that can call Indigenous fighters useful when territory is threatened yet regard their interests as secondary. For Mi’kmaq communities, the stakes are not simply which European power prevails, but whether they can continue living on their own land.

Land, memory, and consequence

The novel places the war within a longer history of contested sovereignty. When Sosep warns that the French king has given Mi’kmaw land to the British, Theotiste rejects the premise: the land, he says, is not the French king’s to give. The exchange sharply distinguishes imperial claims made through European power from Indigenous claims grounded in enduring possession and belonging.

Sosep later describes the accumulating effects of settlement: introduced livestock damages food sources, boats and nets take fish, and imported plants displace local ones. He warns that the newcomers are numerous while Mi’kmaq people are few, and urges his community to keep Mi’kmaw ways alive while living in two worlds. That counsel gives the war’s consequences a reach beyond battlefield allegiance. Conflict and colonial expansion alter access to land and subsistence, while cultural continuity becomes a deliberate necessity. Across the novel, Queen Anne’s War is therefore one episode in a much longer struggle over who may claim the land and whose knowledge and way of life will endure.