King Philip’s War appears as a remembered struggle over Indigenous land, not as an isolated episode of colonial history. Bernard Duke reflects that Indigenous people fought to keep their lands and lost; this recollection challenges the settlers’ claim that clearing and cultivation alone count as legitimate use, and anticipates the novel’s wider account of dispossession and cultural endurance.

The War as a Struggle for Land

The novel gives no battle narrative or detailed chronology of the war. Instead, it enters the story through Bernard’s private disagreement with a settler assumption: that Indigenous hunting and gathering amount to improper use of the land. His thought that the war did not arise from a vague whim insists on a political cause—people resisted the loss of their territory, and were defeated.

The reference is sharpened by the conversation around it. Old Hitchbone presents clearing, tilling, planting, raising livestock, mining, and timber production as the proper uses of land, and characterizes Indigenous people who do not follow those practices as uncivilized and un-Christian. Bernard does not openly challenge him, but his inward question—why hunting and gathering should not count as land use—exposes the narrow standard beneath that judgment. The war’s remembered outcome, Indigenous defeat, gives this dispute its historical weight.

Colonial Claims and Indigenous Belonging

Elsewhere, the novel makes explicit the contradiction that Bernard’s recollection implies. Père Crème tells a French authority that Indigenous people love the country being taken from them, and that generations had lived there before European claims. When Theotiste learns that the French king has given their lands to the British, she objects that the king had no right to give away land that belonged to her people. These scenes frame sovereignty as contested rather than settled by the decisions of colonial rulers.

The later displacement described by Sosep extends the same conflict beyond a single war or transfer of power. Settlers and their animals, boats, nets, and introduced plants increasingly affect Indigenous access to food and land. Sosep recalls that the woods were once theirs to travel freely, while urging his people to sustain Mi’kmaw ways and their understanding of humans, plants, animals, and birds as persons living together. King Philip’s War thus belongs to a long history in which military defeat and colonial expansion threaten both territorial freedom and the practices grounded in that territory.

Memory, Land Use, and Narrative Significance

The war’s significance lies in the contrast between two ways of understanding land. Settler discourse treats productive transformation as proof of rightful use; Bernard’s unspoken objection recognizes that hunting and gathering are also forms of living on and relating to a place. The remembered defeat helps expose how the language of improvement can make Indigenous presence appear illegitimate even where it precedes settlement.

Across the novel, this history resonates with further losses: the French crown’s transfer of Indigenous territory, the pressure of settler expansion, and the later suppression of Mi’kmaw culture and language in residential schools. The war is not presented as the sole cause of those events, but as an earlier instance of the violence behind a recurring pattern. Its brief recollection gives the broader narrative a historical measure of continuity: land loss is not a passing misunderstanding, and cultural survival requires more than remembering who once held the land.