Skerry Hallagher

Skerry Hallagher, the son of Elise Sel and Dr. Hallagher, moves from a promising but alienating Dartmouth education to a practical role in his Mi’kmaw community. His story makes education a contested question: Dartmouth may admit students of Indigenous descent, but its missionary expectations restrict what they can study, while Skerry’s later offers to teach reading, writing, and law and to organize wage work put knowledge in the service of community survival.

Identity and Family Background

Skerry is Elise’s oldest son and carries a Hallagher name. His mother describes him as clever, widely read, and powerfully inquisitive. His prospects seem markedly different from the childhood she and Jinot Sel remember at the trading post: Elise wonders whether Skerry’s Mi’kmaw ancestry might help him gain a place at Dartmouth, where she has heard that people take an interest in Indian scholars.

That possibility sits within a family history shaped by separation and change. Elise and Jinot talk about their children and recall their grandfather Kuntaw, who returned to the old place, then mostly occupied by English settlers. The remaining Mi’kmaw people lived in areas called Frenchtown and the Diggins, and were said to number fewer than a hundred. Kuntaw had married a Mi’kmaw woman and had more children. For Elise, Skerry’s possible education belongs to a longer, unsettled story of Mi’kmaw survival and kinship.

Dartmouth and the Limits of Opportunity

Skerry attends Dartmouth College for half a year. On returning home, he is unusually quiet. Dr. Hallagher tries to comfort him with a venison pasty, his favorite food, and at first wonders whether he is grieving Humphrey. Skerry explains that the college’s expectations are the real source of his distress: students admitted because they have Indian blood are expected to become missionaries and return to preach the gospel to their tribe.

Skerry objects that he has never belonged to such a tribe and has no one to preach to. He wants to study law, but is told that theology and missionary work are the only studies available to Indians. The college’s offer of education thus becomes a restriction: it recognizes Skerry by ancestry while denying him the academic choice he seeks. The distinction between being admitted and being permitted to pursue his own ambitions drives his departure.

He asks his father to let him study law with Judge Foster. Dr. Hallagher cannot make that request because he had treated the judge’s daughter, Laura Rose, for consumption; although he explained that her illness was already too advanced to be saved, the judge turned his grief into hostility toward him. With that route blocked, Skerry leaves home angry, saying he will go to Canada and find his tribe. His departure follows from both the college’s imposed missionary role and the failure of a local alternative.

Belonging and Kinship

Skerry’s search for belonging does not simply resolve into a ready-made identity. He comes to Kuntaw’s band much as Aaron Sel does. Although the two are close in age, Skerry is thin and intense, speaks little, and feels like an outsider. He is afraid of the old Kuntaw, who tells him he cannot become a real Mi’kmaw man until he has killed a moose. Skerry’s uncertain place is therefore tested both by the institution that treats ancestry as a reason to prescribe his education and by a community standard that he has not met.

Yet Skerry’s connection to the community develops through kinship and practical action. He carries a letter from his mother to Kuntaw’s band, explaining that Elise wants to visit in summer and hopes to bring Catherine Flute, a fourteen-year-old Mi’kmaw girl raised in Boston whose parents have died. Elise believes the girl is unhappy and asks whether the community will take her in. Skerry adds that there are other Mi’kmaw girls in Boston who have become separated from their community and asks whether they, too, could be welcomed. His appeal turns his family connection into a request for care and reconnection.

Teaching and Work

At a later gathering, Skerry takes the talking stick and offers what his own education has made possible: he can read and write and knows a little about the laws. If supplied with books and paper, he says, he can teach children and anyone else who wants to learn. He is clear that literacy takes time, comparing its acquisition to learning to hunt. The comparison places book learning alongside practical knowledge rather than above it.

Skerry’s proposal expands beyond schooling. Standing with weary, red eyes, he insists that the children must learn to read, but that Mi’kmaw men must also obtain paid employment. He names work that white settlers do not want: cutting trees and firewood, carrying supplies for surveyors who lay out routes for further land-taking, turning hunting paths into wagon roads, digging potatoes in Maine, and cutting wood there. His program is neither an endorsement of the conditions imposed on his people nor a promise that labor will be easy; it is a claim that they can take on this work without being crushed by it.

The two parts of his appeal—education and wages—are connected. Reading and writing offer skills that can be shared, while paid work offers a means of meeting immediate material pressures. But Skerry also names the cost built into the available jobs: some of them assist the surveying and road-making through which Mi’kmaw land is taken. His speech holds survival and dispossession in the same frame rather than pretending that work under colonial conditions is free of contradiction.

Narrative Significance

Skerry’s course is defined by repeated limits on what others imagine he may become. Dartmouth directs him toward missionary service; his father’s conflict with Judge Foster closes the proposed route into legal study; and Kuntaw’s test of belonging makes his status in the community uncertain. Against these limits, Skerry does not offer a single dramatic triumph. He uses the literacy and legal knowledge he has acquired to propose teaching, welcomes separated young people back into community life, and argues for paid work.

His role connects personal aspiration to collective continuity. The institution that offers education also narrows its terms; the community that might offer belonging is itself diminished and pressured by colonial expansion. Skerry’s effort to teach and organize work does not erase those tensions. It shows instead how knowledge can be redirected from an imposed purpose toward Mi’kmaw children, families, and survival.