The Sel family returns to Shubenacadie and turns to wage labor in forestry

The Sel family returns to Shubenacadie and turns to wage labor in forestry as a response to colonial dispossession: with land, traditional livelihoods, and access to resources steadily constrained, Mi’kmaq men take work in the woods to help their families survive. The choice secures income and food, but places the Sels inside a dangerous industry that consumes the forests and depends on Indigenous workers for its riskiest tasks.

Return to Shubenacadie

Most of Kuntaw’s people, many of them Sels, drift back to Sipekne’katik, now called Shubenacadie. The place had been designated a reserve in 1820, but the return is not a movement toward better conditions. The land the white settlers allow them is poor, the community is crowded, racist jeering and government restrictions persist, and the memory of past massacres remains. The people come because they are lonely for their own kind and carry their former homes within them, even as the places they remember have been transformed.

That inward continuity cannot reverse the material loss. Wikuoms can no longer be made, sawmills have ruined the best eel grounds, and the rivers feed a proliferation of mills that bring down trees in great numbers. A return to a named village therefore offers belonging without restoring the landscape or the means of life that once supported it. The family’s movement back to Shubenacadie is at once an act of attachment and an encounter with the reduced choices left by settlement.

The turn toward wages

At a community discussion, Etienne argues that basket-making by women is not enough to meet the community’s needs: men must find paid work to buy food. Fishing as a guide offers one possibility, but not a sufficient one. Skerry Hallagher expands the argument, stressing both children’s need to learn reading and the need for Mi’kmaw men to earn wages. The jobs available to them, he says, are the hardest ones: cutting trees, preparing settlers’ firewood, carrying supplies for surveyors, turning hunting paths into wagon roads, digging potatoes in Maine, and further woods work.

The discussion makes the terms of adaptation explicit. To protect even a claim to old land, the people are told, they must contend with English-language papers and laws, and the children must learn to read and write in English. A speaker insists that money alone would not make the settlers permit Mi’kmaw people to own their land; the reserve itself reflects that exclusion. Wage labor is consequently not presented as a free choice among equal occupations. It is a means of obtaining food and money within a system that has restricted access to land and requires fluency in the colonists’ legal order.

The talking stick and the decision to leave

The young men agree to seek work in lumber camps. Alik says that at least they will eat there, although his father, Peter, wants him to remain on the boat with passenger and fishing work. Etienne’s oldest son, Molti, takes the talking stick and says the young men can bring money to everyone. The decision is communal in its aim, even as it will separate sons from the older generation’s immediate protection and occupations.

At the gathering’s end, someone throws the talking stick into the fire. The narration marks it as only a stick, but also identifies it as the last talking stick held by a Sel: the old way of deliberating ends alongside the choice to enter the wage economy. Alik leaves secretly at night rather than obeying Peter, and ultimately nine younger men go to lumber camps across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine. The camps offer a place where men are valued by the work they can perform, but that measure of worth is itself the measure imposed by the labor market.

Forestry across generations

For three generations, the Sels work throughout Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and down into Maine. Their tasks span the changing production chain: falling and spudding trees, making and cranking booms, driving logs down rivers, operating sawmills, building corduroy roads, and cutting cordwood, pulp, and pit props. The family’s move into forestry thus becomes sustained wage work rather than a single generation’s expedient.

The larger lumber economy treats water as indispensable infrastructure. A camp boss explains that logs must reach the sawmill and that water moves the logs and powers the mills; the company, he argues, must accept the expense of the drive because there is no other way to deliver its timber. In the scene, two Mi’kmaq men and a Montagnais worker guide logs through the river. Their skill makes the industrial system function, while the danger of the work falls disproportionately on Indigenous laborers.

That allocation is part of a longer pattern: river driving is described as the most dangerous work, and the task is assigned to Indians, who are treated as if they were naturally suited to violent water. The Sels’ employment therefore gives them indispensable roles without removing the unequal conditions under which their labor is recruited. Across the family’s working generations, economic inclusion and colonial subordination proceed together.

Technology, risk, and forest loss

The Sels witness successive changes in logging technology: the poll ax gives way to the double-bitted ax, then to the crosscut saw; up-and-down gang saws yield to circular saws, double circulars, and long band saws. Oxen give way to horses, then to donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads penetrate forests farther from navigable water, trucks and roads replace the river drives. These changes alter both the work and the routes through which timber moves, shifting labor from the river toward machinery and road access.

Mechanization does not make the work benign. The Sels endure accidents and deaths in an occupation in which a worker must remain watchful and fortunate to live more than seven years. Meanwhile, increasingly powerful equipment helps turn what had once been daydreams into machines capable of leveling the continent’s remaining ancient forests. The family’s occupational history consequently records two linked transformations: the growing industrial scale of extraction and the heightened danger faced by the people who operate within it.

The return to Shubenacadie begins in the face of lost land and diminished subsistence, and the decision to seek camp wages answers the immediate need to eat. Over generations, that adaptation connects the Sel family to a vast timber economy, from forest cutting and river transport to sawmills and mechanized logging. The same work that helps sustain the family also participates in the destruction of the forests and waters that had supported Mi’kmaw life, making wage labor both a strategy of survival and evidence of the constrained world in which that survival must be pursued.