Theotiste

Theotiste, a son of Mari and Monsieur Trépagny, grows up in a household shaped by both Mi’kmaw knowledge and French colonial authority. His early training at Odanak gives him skills and affiliations that his father’s household does not value; later, his departure from Wobik toward the communities gathering at Odanak marks a widening separation from René Sel and from the labor on which the settlement depends.

Identity and Family Background

Theotiste is one of Mari’s French-named children. When René first enters the family’s single-room home, the children’s names—Elphège, Theotiste, and Jean-Baptiste—are difficult for him to distinguish, and he soon forgets them. The passage makes clear how little René initially sees them as individuals, even as it locates them within a household whose language and customs are not simply French: Mari speaks a mixture of Mi’kmaq and terse French, with Portuguese phrases, while the children carry French names.

Theotiste’s upbringing connects the household to Odanak. He and Elphège return from there with traps, snares, whistles, and calls for luring game. Their mother is keenly interested in what they have brought back, but Monsieur Trépagny dismisses the equipment as rubbish and throws Theotiste’s beaver funnel trap into the fire. René notices the boy’s face harden and his eyes remain lowered. In that brief act of quiet resistance, the trap becomes more than a discarded tool: it embodies knowledge learned beyond the father’s control, and the conflict over whether that knowledge has value.

Knowledge and the Forest

Theotiste’s skills are part of a practical body of Mi’kmaw learning organized around animals, seasons, and the particular methods suited to each. When he works beside René after Jean-Baptiste’s death, René asks whether he learned hunting skills at Odanak. Theotiste answers that he learned many ways to catch every animal, with different methods for different seasons, and points toward uncut forest. His competence contrasts with the colonial household’s reliance on clearing and cutting: he can read the woods as a varied living environment rather than merely as a supply of timber or game.

That contrast belongs to a wider disagreement about how knowledge is recognized. Père Crème’s account of Mi’kmaw life describes a seasonal ordering attuned to the abundance of animals, fruits, and fish, and a worldview in which trees, plants, and animals are regarded as equals. Elsewhere, Mari’s eel traps and guidance show how practical expertise can be shared directly through demonstration. Theotiste’s return from Odanak with hunting equipment places him within this tradition of learned practice, even when Monsieur Trépagny refuses to acknowledge its worth.

Departure from Wobik

As a young man, Theotiste travels with René by canoe to Wobik. He is old enough to march in the militia and hear Captain Bouchard’s lectures on Indigenous warfare, but René recognizes that Theotiste has learned more among the fighters at Odanak than the captain could teach him. Theotiste now wants to see Kébec and Trois-Rivières, then plans to join the broad gathering of Indigenous refugees at Odanak, among them Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, Sokoki, Cowasucks, Penobscots, Androscoggins, and Missisquois.

His decision has a material consequence for René. Workmen are scarce and expensive, and René admits that without Theotiste’s labor some work will not be done. Yet the departure is not presented merely as an employment loss: Theotiste is choosing movement toward Indigenous communities and connections over remaining in the settlement. His route reflects the political pressures that have made such gathering necessary, while retaining his personal wish to see other places before joining it.

Land, Displacement, and Significance

Theotiste’s plans take shape amid a dispute over who can claim the land. When he later returns toward his country with other Mi’kmaq, Sosep warns that the French king has given their lands to the British. Theotiste challenges the premise at once: the land is theirs, not the French king’s to give. The exchange gives direct expression to a political understanding that colonial transfers cannot erase Indigenous belonging.

The pressures around that claim are cumulative. Sosep describes settlers and their animals taking more land, damaging food sources, and displacing plants; he urges the Mi’kmaq to preserve their own world in thought and practice even as they are forced to live in two worlds. In this context, Theotiste’s knowledge of seasonal hunting, his connection to Odanak, and his plan to join displaced communities are not incidental details of a young man’s travels. Together they show a life oriented toward Mi’kmaw learning and collective survival, while the narrative records the narrowing conditions under which that life can continue.