The Sel family migrates to Mi’kma’ki

The Sel family’s migration to Mi’kma’ki is a return toward ancestral country that becomes both a journey of reconnection and an encounter with dispossession. After René Sel’s children are driven from their father’s home, Achille chooses to go with his siblings to their mother’s country. Their passage from Odanak toward the Atlantic unfolds through winter delays, shared preparation, and stories of a homeland whose remembered abundance no longer matches the country they reach.

The decision to leave

At the property claimed through René Sel’s title, Renardette and Démon Meillard present themselves as its rightful owners. Démon insists that René be treated as French and that the children claiming him as their father have no legitimate claim; he proposes a sale that would be entered in Captain Bouchard’s ledger. Achille recognizes the force of that paperwork: he believes René’s claim has been removed from the record, and that the friendship shown to his white father did not extend to his mother or her children. When he says they will go to their mother’s country, the family’s departure is not simply a change of destination. It follows an argument over whose kinship counts and whose account of ownership the colonial record will preserve.

The first destination is Odanak. There, Zoë and Noë encounter a crowded community of wikuoms and log cabins, people working hides and canoe ribs, and women whose basket-making skill reveals how much knowledge and social life lie beyond the forest childhood the girls have known. Noë brings her own baskets but finds their work eclipsed by local makers’ intricately patterned birch-bark containers, stitched with spruce root, and baskets made with sweetgrass or dyed root. A woman tells them the story of Ai’ip and the first basket; Zoë, only ten winters old, admits that they know nothing. The welcome gives the children a first experience of learning and belonging in a community of women, rather than only a promise of the country ahead.

Waiting for a safe season

Theotiste, Elphège, and Achille want to set out immediately, but Sosep, an old trapper and sagmaw, warns that winter makes their destination a dangerous place to reach. Mi’kma’ki’s familiar riches—fish, shellfish, birds, and edible plants—are associated with summer; in winter, Sosep says, survival would require provisions on the scale of ten moose and sixteen bears. The family waits more than four lunar cycles at Odanak. The brothers hunt and fish while discussing routes, and the women dry and smoke venison and eel for the journey. Noë practices basket-making so intensely that her fingers blister.

The delay is also a period of imaginative preparation. The children have heard their mother Mari name places in their homeland, including Wild Potato Place, Skin Dresser’s Territory, and Land of Fog. They anticipate a return through stories of berries, crayfish, eels, roasted beaver, and abundant birds; Elphège later wonders whether such accounts of a summer world prepared them poorly for the country they would find. Theotiste offers Zoë another way to understand the destination: Mari’s spirit, he says, may be present in trees and wild plants, as well as in rocks, fish, and animals. Return is thus imagined not only as reaching a place but as recovering a relationship with the living world and with their dead mother.

When the group finally departs, it includes the woman friend of Theotiste’s dead wife and Sosep, whose experience as a trapper-hunter makes him a practical guide. He knows René’s favored trapping places through René’s brother, a discovery that prompts Theotiste to learn that they may have a living uncle. Sosep also distrusts the changes he sees even in Odanak, where a priest has been boring holes in waltes bowls to prevent their use for divination. The preparations are material as well as familial: the travelers make ash-wood snowshoe frames and weave close caribou-rawhide webbing to carry their loads.

The winter passage

The journey toward the ocean is arduous for a family that has never seen it except in imagination. They travel on dried meat and sacks of maize while streams remain edged with ice and wild plants have yet to emerge. In the second week, Theotiste catches two fat beavers, a concrete success amid the scarcity of the late season. Snowstorms then force the party to wait out the weather in temporary wikuoms, where the girls repeatedly ask their brothers to retell their mother’s stories of Mi’kma’ki. The expected spring keeps receding; Sosep warns that continued snow could force them to build a toboggan.

The route also carries political news that changes the meaning of homecoming. Sosep tells the travelers that the French king has given their land to the British. Theotiste objects that the land was never the French king’s to give. Sosep explains that English settlers are moving in and that the English king pays for Mi’kmaw scalps; Mi’kmaq fighters capture English boats, but their people are few and frequently ill. The family is not returning to an untouched refuge. It is moving toward territory claimed by competing colonial powers and endangered by violence and disease.

A homeland altered

The Sels reach Mi’kmaw country in late March, as bird migrations begin and small fish surge upstream. Sosep points out French families along the shore and describes the transformation of the landscape: land once supplying berries and edible roots has been plowed for maize and turnips, and salt marshes drained to grow hay for livestock. Moose, caribou, and bear have retreated; beavers have been so heavily taken that their pelts have become a kind of white-man’s money, displacing the custom of placing a beaver skin on a grave. The country retains signs of seasonal abundance, but settlement has already altered its food sources and practices.

The change is not confined to fields and forests. Pigs forage without pens and learn to dig clams, competing directly with Mi’kmaw women for food; one hog attacks and partially eats a toddler who has lagged behind the clam diggers. Sosep names the larger pattern: settlers’ animals destroy food, boats and nets take fish, and introduced plants crowd out native ones. Although he says most settlers may not intend harm, their numbers make the imbalance decisive. He remembers when Mi’kmaq could move freely through woods that were theirs and warns that this time has passed.

Sosep’s response is not to ask the family to abandon every new object or return unchanged to an earlier way of life. He urges them to keep Mi’kmaw ways alive in their minds and lives, maintaining a world in which people, plants, animals, and birds are persons who help one another. This vision must remain fresh enough to withstand the encroaching outside force. Noë wonders whether he means giving up metal pots and returning to cooking with hot stones, but his emphasis is on cultural continuity: the community must live in two worlds without allowing its own understanding of kinship with the living world to disappear.

The migration therefore ends not in a simple restoration of what was lost, but in a more complicated arrival. The children reach their mother’s country amid visible ecological depletion, colonial claims, and conflict, even as fish and birds still signal abundance. Their journey links the family’s dispossession from René’s property to the wider loss of Mi’kmaw land and resources, while the knowledge shared at Odanak and Sosep’s counsel offer practices of learning and remembrance. Homecoming becomes an act of rebuilding belonging under conditions that threaten to make the old freedom of movement impossible.