Tufts Cove is the site of a Mi’kmaw village destroyed by the 1917 Halifax Explosion. Its destruction forces the Sel family inland and places a sudden catastrophe within the novel’s broader history of Mi’kmaw displacement and the commercial transformation of forests and shorelands.

The village and the Sel family

In December 1917, Lobert Sel’s brother Jim and four of Jim’s children were among those killed when two ships collided in the Halifax Narrows. One vessel carried munitions and explosives intended for the war in Europe; the collision caused an enormous explosion and a tsunami that wiped out the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove. The passage presents the disaster as both local loss and an extension of a distant war’s consequences.

Displacement and rebuilding

Grieving and frightened, Lobert told his pregnant wife, Nanty, that they would go to Shubenacadie. They moved inland to the reserve, though Lobert did not regard it as a safe haven. There they found some balance despite poverty. He worked for a timber company, receiving pay in logs that he used to build a three-room house. The move thus brought neither security nor restoration of Tufts Cove; it began another precarious chapter shaped by wage labor and the need to establish a home elsewhere.

Place within the novel’s history

The destruction of Tufts Cove is one moment in a longer pattern of Mi’kmaw land loss and disruption. Earlier, the novel depicts New Zealand shore forests being taken over by logging camps and trading stations, with timber and other goods carried into wider markets while waste and ecological damage remain at the site of extraction. The contrast is not that these histories are identical, but that the novel repeatedly locates large economic and political forces in particular places, where their consequences are borne by people with limited power over them.

Tufts Cove’s significance is therefore carried by what follows its destruction: the Sel family’s forced move, Lobert’s timber-company work, and the house he builds from his wages in logs. The village’s loss is not treated as an isolated historical fact; it changes where the family can live and the conditions under which they try to continue.