The Treaty of Utrecht is presented not as a neutral adjustment of borders but as a European decision to transfer territory that the Mi’kmaq regard as their own. Its significance lies in the distance between colonial claims to authority and Mi’kmaq sovereignty: the French king is said to have given away land that was not his to give, while French and British expansion continues to make Mi’kmaq life on that land less possible.

News of the Cession

The transfer enters the narrative through a conversation about the family’s return to Mi’kma’ki. Sosep warns Theotiste that it is a bad time to go back, both because the weather is untimely and because the French king has given Mi’kmaq lands to the British. Theotiste initially takes the report for foolish talk. She has heard that the British seized Port Royal, but has not understood that the loss concerns their country as a whole. Sosep makes the political consequence explicit: the territory is theirs, yet both French and English press into it.

Sosep’s account distinguishes alliance from subjection. The Mi’kmaq, he says, are allies of the French king, not his subjects, and are not obliged to him. French gifts are therefore not proof of French ownership; they are a means of seeking Mi’kmaq favor. The British, by contrast, claim still more land than the French king transferred, although the king had no right to transfer it, and offer no gifts. The Treaty thus appears within a history of competing colonial advances rather than as a settlement that resolves the question of whose land it is.

Competing Claims to Land

The novel connects the cession to a broader settler vision of territory as something to divide, improve, and exploit. Monsieur Trépagny explains that settlers are there to clear the forest and subdue the wilderness. He describes New France’s river-to-forest land strips as an equitable system, giving each settler farm soil, higher ground above floods, and trees for timber and fuel. His defense of the arrangement treats the landscape as a resource to be organized for settlement; René, by contrast, has asked why a house should not be built in an existing clearing.

That conflict becomes sharper in later accounts of the land around Wobik. René Sel is described as a woodcutter with a few cows and sheep, while farms multiply between his home and the settlement. The clearing of the wilderness is called progress, but Mari mourns the woodland grottoes and medicinal plants that have disappeared under settler industry. Her knowledge and public importance as a healer do not protect the places on which that knowledge depends. The Treaty’s political transfer is therefore set beside an ongoing material transformation: land changes hands in colonial accounts even as its forests, habitats, and uses are altered on the ground.

Law, Ownership, and Dispossession

The narrative repeatedly shows how official records can give colonial or settler claims the appearance of settled legality while excluding Mi’kmaq claims. When René Sel’s property is disputed, Démon Meillard asserts that René’s notarized title and his bequest make Renardette the owner. He dismisses the claim of René’s Mi’kmaq children and invokes the ledger and the formal sale as proof that the transaction will be legal and binding. Achille counters that the ledger records René’s marriage to Mari under white law. The scene exposes a contradiction: colonial legal forms may recognize a relationship when it serves an inheritance claim, yet the same forms are used to deny the children’s kinship and entitlement.

A separate account of the John Frost–William Leighton trespass case supplies a parallel example of how official authority and private title collide. A Crown license, issued in 1730, allowed Ralph Gulston’s contractor to cut mast pines on lands considered Crown property in 1691. By the time Leighton felled trees in the winter of 1733–34, however, John Frost held title to the land; he sued in spring 1734, and the court found for Frost. The episode concerns a later legal dispute rather than the Treaty itself, but it extends the book’s scrutiny of land claims: authority depends on which title, date, and jurisdiction the law recognizes, while the Mi’kmaq’s prior relationship to the territory remains outside these settler proceedings.

Consequences for Mi’kmaq Life

Sosep describes the cession as part of a larger pattern in which Mi’kmaq are treated as instruments of colonial power rather than as a people entitled to determine their own future. The French expect them to fight when French territory is threatened; priests seek converts; and colonial goods and forceful practices undermine family and cultural life. Theotiste’s return makes the consequences immediate: going home does not mean returning to a country free of colonial pressure, but entering a landscape claimed by both empires.

The pressure extends beyond formal transfers. Sosep points to settlers’ animals damaging food sources, boats and nets taking fish, and introduced plants displacing local ones. He recalls that Mi’kmaq once moved freely through the woods, a freedom now lost. His response is not simply to demand a return to an untouched past. He urges the community to keep Mi’kmaq ways alive while living in two worlds, preserving the understanding that plants, animals, birds, and people are persons who help one another. The cession’s lasting significance is thus both territorial and cultural: colonial rule narrows access to land, while continuity depends on sustaining knowledge and relations that the colonial order does not recognize.