Roman Catholic Church

The Roman Catholic Church appears in the novel not simply as a source of worship, but as a colonial institution whose missions connect religious instruction to education, social control, and competing claims over land. Its priests teach and assist individuals, while Church-aligned arguments also portray Indigenous ways of life as deficient and European settlement as divinely sanctioned. Against that institutional authority, Claude Trépagny rejects Catholic theology outright, and Indigenous characters preserve forms of knowledge and belonging that the Church’s program seeks to reshape.

Doctrine and Colonial Authority

Claude Trépagny describes his family as people persecuted in France as heretics by the Catholic Church. He claims they secretly maintained their beliefs for generations and expects New France to offer the conditions in which they can grow strong again. His account makes religious dissent part of a larger ambition for the colony, which he imagines eventually extending across the continent. René Sel agrees that New France is valuable, but sees himself as carried along by forces larger than himself rather than as an architect of that future.

Trépagny’s dissent is more than a private disagreement with Catholic practice. When Monsieur Bouchard raises suspicions about his religious beliefs, Trépagny rejects the suggestion that he venerates the devil and reverses the accusation: he regards the Catholics’ God as a cruel demiurge and identifies that figure with the demon. The exchange turns the language of orthodoxy and evil against the institution that ordinarily controls it. Trépagny’s hostility toward village life and the Jesuits further marks him as opposed to the settled religious authority of the colony, even as he embraces the colonial project of clearing and possessing land.

That contradiction is central to the Church’s role. Trépagny’s attack on Catholic authority does not make him an opponent of colonial transformation. When René asks why settlers cut forest rather than build on existing clearings, Trépagny insists that they have come to subdue the wilderness. He defends the river-to-forest strips as an equitable way to combine farmland, flood-safe ground, and timber, and insists that men must change the land to live in it. The Church is one participant in a broader colonial order in which religious and material claims reinforce one another, even when individual settlers challenge Catholic doctrine.

Mission, Literacy, and Cultural Change

The mission at Wobik embodies the Church’s practical reach. Mari identifies confession, mass, and learning French, reading, and writing as activities connected with the mission and Père Perreault. René is astonished to discover that she is learning literacy; her brief assurance that she will soon read and write makes the mission both a site of instruction and a place where knowledge can be acquired without being immediately visible to outsiders. Later, at the mission house, she takes a pen and ink and makes marks on paper, explaining that she has written an instruction. The scene complicates any simple opposition between Indigenous knowledge and Christian institutions: Mari engages with the mission’s tools, but the knowledge she records is directed toward her own purposes.

A different form of clerical education appears in the story of Père Naufragé, whom Duquet captures to learn to read and write. Fernand supplies the priest with a worn copy of Les Quatrains de Pibrac, and the captive agrees to join the group while insisting on daily devotions, weekly mass, and regular theological disputation. The arrangement shows that the priest’s religious discipline persists even in captivity, while his literacy teaching serves Duquet’s ambition. Duquet learns letters, numbers, and arithmetic by writing on birch bark; he remembers the priest’s lessons and the contents of the book. The Church’s learning is thus detached from its intended institutional setting and turned into a resource for a pupil whose purposes are not those of the mission.

The Church’s educational program is also a site of anxiety about Indigenous autonomy. Père Crème objects when Sosep and the Sel family return from Odanak. He considers their French speech and the older brothers’ ability to read and write dangerous, and regards their preference for seasonal work, hunting, trapping, and life in the woods as resistance to the settled agricultural order he advocates. In his letter to Sister Marguerite, he frames land ownership through an improvement doctrine: settlers who clear trees, build houses, and keep livestock have earned the right to the land, while Indigenous people who hunt, fish, and gather have supposedly failed to improve it. His religious argument converts a disputed colonial claim into a moral entitlement supposedly granted by God.

Missionary Accounts and Indigenous Ways of Knowing

The novel sets missionary descriptions against Indigenous relationships with the natural world. One clerical account observes that Mi’kmaq life follows the seasonal abundance of animals, fruit, and fish, and that people treat trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals. The writer describes stories of marriages between women and animals, men becoming bears, and people speaking to small creatures in the forest. He admits that he may be getting this understanding wrong and that the Mi’kmaq seem to be teaching him. The account therefore reveals both the missionary’s effort to interpret another worldview and the limits of his authority to define it.

The same account makes the conflict explicit: the missionary insists that trees are for human use in houses and ships and urges people to farm and organize their days according to European norms. He records their refusal, then notes that French people call them lazy because they do not till the soil. The word “lazy” does ideological work: it translates a different system of subsistence and ecological relationships into a moral defect. The Church’s civilizing program does not merely seek conversion; it treats agriculture, fixed settlement, and human dominion over trees as evidence of proper life.

Mari’s knowledge provides a concrete counterpoint. She teaches René to fish for eels by weaving three traps, providing scraps for bait, and showing him where to place them in the river. He brings her eels almost every day afterward. She explains that the Mi’kmaq have many ways to catch them and that the traps are best for him, while her sons, when they return from Odanak, can teach him other methods. This practical expertise is learned through demonstration and reciprocal use, not through clerical instruction. Elsewhere, Mari grieves the loss of woodland places where medicinal plants once grew as settlers clear the forest, and she becomes known for healing the sick. Her knowledge serves her community even as the colonial landscape diminishes the conditions that sustain it.

Care, Discipline, and Unequal Power

The Church’s presence cannot be reduced to coercion: mission instruction and clerical service have practical value within the story. But the novel repeatedly shows that such service is bound up with an unequal authority to define what Indigenous people need. Père Crème urges the Sel family to take wage work in the timber industry, arguing that the money can buy flour and salt pork. The family members are already skilled with axes from clearing land with René, and several find work for Duquet et Fils. The narrative registers the change as a necessity rather than a freely chosen replacement for their own way of life.

Père Crème’s letter makes the underlying hierarchy unmistakable. He calls fishing idle, describes forest gathering as a failure to improve land, and presents French displacement from their homelands as a source of moral title. His account turns the experience of Indigenous people who have lost land into evidence for the legitimacy of the settlers who take it. The religious language does not settle the conflict so much as conceal its asymmetry: one group’s practices are treated as proof of rightful possession, while another’s are made to signify that it has no claim.

A later encounter repeats this logic through a different clerical voice. When Aaron Sel seeks vegetables for starving Indigenous people, the pastor describes their disappearance from the scene as inevitable and says they must learn to work, garden, and store food for winter. He nevertheless allows vegetables to be gathered and sold, after first consulting the pastor’s household. Aaron pays, and as he leaves he insists that the potato he carries means life to those people; the pastor answers that God’s will, rather than a potato, decides the outcome. The exchange places abstract providence beside immediate material need. The Church offers limited relief, but its representative interprets that relief through a worldview that treats Indigenous dispossession as an inevitable process rather than an injustice.

The Church as a Contested Institution

Across the novel, the Roman Catholic Church combines spiritual teaching with colonial administration, but it never exercises uncontested authority. Trépagny attacks Catholic theology while pursuing forest clearance and territorial expansion; Mari uses the mission’s literacy practices while maintaining her own purposes and knowledge; Père Naufragé’s education becomes a tool for Duquet; and Père Crème’s advocacy of work and farming serves a colonial vision of landownership. Clerical care, instruction, and discipline therefore appear together, not as separate aspects of the Church but as functions that can coexist within the same institution.

The Church’s most consequential role is its power to make particular ways of living appear morally legitimate. By identifying cultivation and forest clearance with improvement, and by treating seasonal Indigenous practices as idleness, its representatives help turn colonial possession into a story of divine and civilizational right. Yet the narrative preserves evidence the clerical framework cannot absorb: Mari’s ecological skill, the Sel family’s literacy and adaptability, and the missionary’s own admission that Indigenous people may be teaching him. The institution’s reach is substantial, but the knowledge and agency of those it seeks to convert or reform remain present throughout the novel.