Water is whiteman. Oil is Mi’kmaw
Barkskins“Water is whiteman. Oil is Mi’kmaw” is Kuntaw’s metaphor for cultural mixture and persistence, spoken to Aaron during a feast on the riverbank. By stirring water and mackerel oil into a temporary froth and watching the oil rise again, Kuntaw recasts Aaron’s divided sense of identity as something that can change without losing its Mi’kmaw substance.
The bowl as demonstration
The day after the Sel family’s reunion, the community gathers around a feast. Aaron sits beside Kuntaw and tries to explain that he has changed, but the older man waves away the explanation as though shooing flies. Instead of answering in abstractions, he takes an empty wooden bowl, adds water, then has Maudi bring a dipper of mackerel oil from the cooking pot. He whirls the two together with a forked twig until they form a frothy amalgam.
The sequence makes the image an experiment witnessed by those present. The water and oil appear mixed while the bowl is stirred; left to settle, the glistening oil rises and floats on top. Kuntaw identifies the water with the white man and the oil with the Mi’kmaw, and calls the temporary mixture “mix-up métis.” The demonstration gives visible form to the difference between contact and disappearance: the two substances meet, but the oil remains discernible.
Aaron’s divided identity
Kuntaw connects the bowl to his own past. He tells Aaron that he once tried to become white, but that the Mi’kmaw “oil” within him came to the surface. He sees the same process in Aaron: despite the changes he has undergone, his Mi’kmaw identity will rise into view. The metaphor thus answers Aaron’s effort to describe himself not by denying change, but by distinguishing change from the loss of belonging.
The image does not promise an untouched return to an earlier state. Kuntaw imagines a future Canada in which Mi’kmaw oil and water will blend, with the Mi’kmaw people holding their country again while both Mi’kmaw people and white people have become “a little bit” altered by one another. The bowl’s temporary froth and eventual separation therefore hold two possibilities together: cultural mixture is real, but it need not mean that the colonized identity is dissolved.
From metaphor to hope
The expression’s force lies in the contrast between the materials’ visible mingling and the oil’s return to the surface. Kuntaw does not claim that the two peoples are already equal or that mixture has ended dispossession; his hope that the Mi’kmaw will hold their country again makes the political loss explicit. Instead, he uses the ordinary contents of a cooking pot to imagine continuity amid imposed change.
After the exchange, Aaron and Etienne walk some distance away and sit on the ground, drawing strength from contact with the earth. Their gesture carries the scene’s concern with belonging beyond Kuntaw’s words: identity is not only something to explain, but a connection to land and community that can be felt and renewed. The bowl’s image accordingly links Aaron’s personal recognition to Kuntaw’s collective hope for a changed yet enduring Mi’kmaw future.
