The sorest point is [the Indians’] refusal to grasp the fact that land belongs to the man who improved 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 and 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.
Barkskins, winner of the 2017 Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a historical fiction with a modern message—save the trees to save the planet. Following the descendants of two 17th C. indentured servants from France, it chronicles the rape of North America’s forests by homesteaders, loggers, and paper barons, in tandem with the Mic Mac natives who bore witness, then bore axes, and finally brought hope of returning the forest to equilibrium. It reads like a cross between a James Michener epic and a Barbara Kingsolver environmental novel: thoroughly researched with intriguing characters, though so ambitious and condensed that it is sometimes hard to keep track of them all. I therefore wished that this 736-page saga (nearly 26 hours on Audible) were broken up into multiple volumes.
Although it was made into a National Geographic miniseries, the trailer leads me to believe it sacrifices the author’s focus on the Mic Macs in favor of heightened drama with more combative First Nations, and that is counter to the overall message of their decimation. I therefore leave you with an image to ponder regarding Canada’s boreal forest, the largest remaining in the world.