Kukum, the novel of the forest and the river

‘Life on the farm is a kind of vocation. Farmers are convinced that the land protects them from barbarism. In reality, it enslaves them.’ Orphaned at a very young age, Almanda grows up with a couple of ‘uncles’ who work tirelessly on the land cleared from the forest in a settler village on the shores of Lake Pekuakami, on the Labrador Peninsula (eastern Canada): ‘a sea amongst the trees. Water as far as the eye can see, grey or blue depending on the mood of the sky, crossed by icy currents. The lake is at once beautiful and terrifying. Immeasurable. And life there is as fragile as it is passionate.” She is fifteen and milking the cows when she sees a young Native American man coming down the river in a canoe. Their eyes meet, that evening and then on other occasions too. Almanda falls in love with the man who is, to her, ‘a sort of vagabond carried by the wind’: Thomas. ‘I was young, I know that well. Surrounded by people imprisoned by their own lands, I discovered that someone was free.’ She asks Thomas to take her with him to the winter hunting grounds, to the mountains beyond which ‘the white plain of the Far North stretched as far as the eye could see’.

They paddled their canoe up the lake and then along the Péribonka River: ‘To the right, the water. To the left, a strip of sand and rocks stood out against the forest. For me, it was the passage between two worlds, immersed in a sense of exhilaration I had never felt before’. She will learn that human beings are not superior to anyone else; that fear paralyses, whilst caution invites prudence; that learning perseverance is a long journey; she will learn to hunt and to respect the prey: it is the prey that decides to give itself. “By offering its life, the mush (the moose, ed ) allows the hunter to live. We must thank it,” Thomas explains to her.

In this way, the Innu—hunters, fishermen and nomadic gatherers—restore dignity to the animal, making the inevitable a matter of choice. He will learn Innu-Aimun, which has only eight consonants, seven vowels and fifteen distinct sounds. A language in which there is no feminine or masculine, but a distinction is made between the animate and the inanimate. He will learn to make snow food: a maple-flavoured syrup that the natives knew how to make from tree resin, ensuring they had a sweet treat in the depths of winter. The narrator of *i* *Kukum* */i*, a novel by the Innu writer and journalist Michel Jean, is Almanda, his great-grandmother. Now an old woman, she recalls her youth. And what begins as a tale of love for Thomas gradually transforms into a tale of love for the forest, the river, the lake, ‘the air heavy with the scent of pine’, ‘the thousands of hearts of different sizes and shapes’ beating in unison around her, and for the time that flows through it all, triggering a cyclical transformation. The Innu people and the sumptuous sub-Arctic nature are the true protagonists of the book, which then transforms once more, this time into an elegy. Whilst Thomas’s father had known the world before the arrival of the white settlers, his children will have to adapt to an alien life. Deforestation becomes intensive. Almanda recounts that ‘whenever he saw a clear-cut area, Thomas would fly into a rage: “It’s not enough for them to cut down the trees,” he would shout, “they have to destroy everything—the birds, the animals—they’re destroying the very spirit of the forest!”’ The woman observes that this is the reasoning of an Innu who knows he will always return to the same places. ‘The woodcutter, on the other hand, walks straight ahead, never looking back. He pursues progress.’

The story takes a dramatic and poignant turn when, as summer draws to a close, Almanda’s family sets off in their canoes to return to their winter hunting grounds and is soon overwhelmed by a sickening stench. Before them, they see thousands of felled tree trunks floating on Lake Pekuakami: ‘an immense, dark, undulating mass’. It is impossible to travel upriver: ‘before us, the Péribonka, choked by the weight of the logs, was spewing the forest into the lake’. The paper mills are devouring the woods, the dams are creating ‘a sort of Innu Atlantis’, the natives can no longer roam freely: now the land belongs to the ‘company’. But the tents are not suitable for wintering on the windswept shores of the lake, and there is not enough game in the reserve for everyone. The government distributes subsidies. The natives go from a life on the move to a sedentary existence, from autonomy to dependence: ‘we never got out of it’. After the land, they take their children away too. All children aged between six and 15 are sent to boarding schools (‘Try to imagine a village without children’).

Here, even speaking one’s own language is forbidden. ‘The priests punished those who dared to do so. Another bridge severed between the generations. They thought they could turn them into white people by depriving them of their language. But an Innu who speaks French remains an Innu. With one more wound.” Undernourished and mistreated, often abused by the priests, many children die. Those who return home no longer know who they are (the scale of this tragedy only came to light in 2021, two years after the book’s publication, when thousands of mass graves were discovered where tens of thousands of Indigenous children had been thrown). Some lose themselves to alcohol, others take their own lives. Still others hold on, like Jean, whom the world of the ancestors has rebuilt, for us too, in words, filling the gaps in lost memories with imagination.