Dear Sister Marguerite.
While I have great Sympathy for the Indians, they are difficult. The sorest Point is their Refusal to grasp the Fact that Land belongs to the Man who improves it as Scriptures show. They only fish (an idler’s occupation) and wander through the Forest taking Animals and Plants for Sustenance, but when a White Man comes and cuts the oppressive encroaching Forest, builds a House for his Family and Shelter for his Beasts, the Indians complain that he takes their Land, Land they have done nothing to improve, but rather have allowed to ever thicken with more and more Trees. They do not understand that the White Man who struggles and strives to reduce the Forest’s grip has exerted his God-given Right to claim the cleared Land as his own. By virtue of the suffering of Indian Attack and severe Labor as well as the adversities of removing from their Homelands to take up a Place in the Wilderness it is the Destiny of the French to hold this Land as they have earned moral Title to it from God.
Nor did Sosep like what he saw. He immediately counted harmful changes. One of the French settlers, Philippe Null, had inherited a sum of money from an uncle in France, and with this windfall he bought three cows, a bull and two horses. The huge animals roamed freely and within days had consumed all the nutritious and medicinal plants within a day’s walk.
“Those animals must have been very sick,” said old grandmother Loze, “for they have eaten herbs to cure headache, lingering cough, prolapsed uterus, fevers, broken bones and sore throats.” Sosep added that once butchered and cooked, the cows, though not as tasty as moose or caribou, looked the same in the pot. But one had to be very private about it.
Other Acadians, sharpened with envy of Null’s increasing livestock herd, bought pigs. No pasture nor pen was necessary as the animals grew fat on forest forage and very quickly learned to dig clams. Now the Mi’kmaw women had difficulty getting clams, for the hogs were on the sands as soon as the tide ebbed, rooting and gobbling. There was a tragic loss when a hog attacked and killed a lagging Mi’kmaw toddler who was trying to imitate the clam diggers. The child was dead and partially eaten when the others finally saw.
It took hours, even days, to find many once-common things. But of uncommon weeds there was no lack — mallows, dock, stinging nettles, sow thistle, knotgrass and adder’s-tongue, aggressive clovers. Sosep filled his lobster-claw pipe with dried wild tobacco and spoke out one evening.
“We are sharing our land with the Wenuj and they take more and more. You see how their beasts destroy our food, how their boats and nets take our fish. They bring plants that vanquish our plants. Most do not mean to hurt us, but they are many and we are few. I believe they will become as a great wave sweeping over us.” His deep voice became charged with intensity, a conduit of spiritual power. “All these woods once ours,” he said, “and we went anywhere we wished without hindrance. That time has passed. But I wish to tell you that if we Mi’kmaw people are to survive we must constantly hold to the thought of Mi’kmaw ways in our minds. We will live in two worlds. We must keep our Mi’kmaw world — where we, the plants, animals and birds are all persons together who help each other — fresh in our thoughts and lives. We must renew and revere the vision in our minds so it can stand against this outside force that encroaches. Otherwise we could not bear it.”
Noë muttered to Zoë, “Does he mean we must give up metal pots and go back to boiling food with hot rocks in a hollow wood pot as Loze said they did in the old days?”
Sosep had not heard this and continued. “If we had not harmed so many animal beings they would fight with us against the outsiders. Especially the beaver. But no longer. I know that some of you love the French, and that is unavoidable lest we die out, but remember that you are Mi’kmaw, remember.”
Achille told himself he would live the Mi’kmaw way, imagining all was well. He would take a wife and he would tell his children that they, too, must imagine that they lived in a Mi’kmaw world though it was ceasing to exist. They must remember how that life had been, not how it now had become.
But even as old Sosep spoke he knew very well that many Mi’kmaq welcomed the ways of the Acadian French — their clothing, their stout boats, their vegetables and pork roasts, the metal tools, glass ornaments and bolts of fabric, their intoxicating spirits and bright flags and even their hot bare bodies, so pale. Already the Mi’kmaw language was awash in French words with remnants of Portuguese and Basque from the days of those earlier European fishermen on their shores. And he himself, as a connection to the spiritual, as a former sagmaw, saw that the priests had already replaced him and the wise old men of former times.
28. the secret of green leaves
The years went by and the white settlers, many from La Rochelle in France, doubled and redoubled in number. Familiar with the arts of drainage dike and ditch, they were demons to reshape the great grassy marshes into farm fields, and where there was forest they felled the trees. They set their immovable houses in rows along mud-thick streets where hogs wallowed and domestic fowl strutted. They encased themselves in thick woolen clothes so that bodily odors were never wafted away in the wind. The Mi’kmaq tolerated and even befriended them, although they did not understand the newcomers’ zeal for surplus — clams, berries, fish, logs, hay, moose hides — which they sold or exchanged for more cows and horses, more chickens and pigs.
The Sels married: Noë to Zephirin Desautels, an Acadian fisherman who was a cousin of the dead boy who had fathered Auguste; Zoë to Paul, an older Mi’kmaw man whose left shoulder in childhood had been grievously hurt by an enraged moose, an injury that damaged his hunting abilities. But he became a superior eeler and their wikuom was never empty of food. Achille married a Mi’kmaw beauty named Isobel, already well known for her strong fingers and skill in making the new kind of basket, not of roots but of thin cedar and ash splints — always she had a splint, ligpete’gnapi, in her hand. Elphège had found and courted Delima, the widow of a man killed in an ambush, and Theotiste at last married Anne-Marie, the woman who had been his first wife’s friend. They settled into a way of living away from the white settlers, though more and more men went to cut pine in the winter camps.
Achille grew proud of his hunting skill and he imagined there was no beast he could not understand and kill.
“To be sure, on the land,” said Rouge Emil, “but you avoid the creatures of the sea. You are no fish hunter,” and he laughed.
This remark smarted and Achille kept thinking of the stories of old times, when the Mi’kmaq had hunted whales in their bark canoes. Everyone said canoes were best in rivers and along the seashore; in deep water they could be dangerous when certain bad fish attacked. Achille did not believe that a fish could harm a canoe; this was a story to frighten children. He said he would go far out in the bay and fish alone in a canoe, and twice he did so and caught cod half his own length each time. He carried a fish spear — in case of English attackers, he said. But one hour’s experience changed his opinion of fish.
He persuaded two others, his friends Barth Nocout and Alit Spot, to paddle their canoes out with him. They could see the people onshore as small as their little fingers. From the corner of his eye Achille saw something briefly rise from the water farther out. The fishing was good; they made jokes. Then his canoe lurched. He peered into the water but could see nothing. A few moments later Nocout’s canoe rose high out of the water and they saw the enormous black and white orca that had lifted it up on its back. The whale sank and Nocout’s canoe tipped and rocked but did not go over.