Review: 

N’in D’la Owey Innklan: Mi’kmaq sojourns in England by

Bonita Lawrence
Chris Searle

First Published October 1, 2020 Book Review

https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/10.1177/0306396820954030

Article information 

 
N’in D’la Owey Innklan: Mi’kmaq sojourns in England
Bonita Lawrence (London: Austin Macauley, 2020) 438pp., £18.99.

Bonita Lawrence has written a unique and extraordinary novel in her account of the
Mi’kmaq native Canadian people, in their homelands and in exile. It is a narrative of
historical memory, now-times memory and of the future. And in generating its
testimony she has forged a story that manifests Sivanandan’s imperative; that
memory – personal, popular, political – must never be left to wither and to die, for
upon it we build every new creation.

Its title is in Mi’kmaq, yet its myriad of stories are set not only along Canada’s
eastern coastlands within the Kouchibouguac first nation and America’s robbed and
ravaged Atlantic perimeter from 1497 onwards, but in East London squats in Mile
End, Limehouse and Bethnal Green in the 1970s; in Goa and across the oceans of
the world in whaling vessels in 1801; in the trenches of the Western Front in 1917,
and all the epochs in between. Everywhere the book goes, its narrators discover,
across centuries and eras, life, death and survival in war, colonisation, genocide,
resistance, kidnap, slavery, starvation, the most oppressed and abject working and
living conditions, disease and pestilence, violent racism and relentless land-grab. It
is anything but a comfortable read, yet it also tells of human beings in their most
desperate moments reaching out and finding co-operation, comradeship and love
across race, gender and age. As such, it is a collective story of irrepressible
optimism, as far from contemporary themes of fashionable alienation, escapist
fantasy and individualist vexation as could be imagined. It has a quality of the
cosmos, crossing continents, oceans and centuries in an awe-inspiring amalgam of
real life, hope and will.

Its author is of mixed Mi’kmaq and English heritage and her transatlantic blood flows
in every word. She confesses: ‘Living in London as an outsider in my late teens and
early twenties shaped me; it changed me. Leaving it behind it haunted me.’ Braced
with the lands of the Mi’kmaq, London also becomes the alien cityscape for the
multiple protagonists who tell the diverse stories of survival that unify this novel. In
1499, Henry Bear, kidnapped by John Cabot from his canoe on the Mi’kmaq shores
of Tagumkuk, later living with friars near Ludgate in London, is ‘amazed at the
bewildering layers of different cultures and histories that he meets’. In 1725 for
Sosep O’ Ceallachain, whose mother is Mi’kmaq mother and father Irish, and is
returned to his homelands, ‘England is . . . consuming us,’ he declares. ‘We have
been at war my entire life. The stench of death, the smell of powder and the roar of
the muskets, and the cries and moans of the dying have surrounded me for so long
that the horror of it has slowly leached away.’ Yet it has delved its way inside him,
leaving a ‘wreck of humanity that warfare has wreaked upon him’ as ‘all of Europe is
feeding on our homelands’.

By 1783, his descendant Mali Sequaquet muses that ‘only the hunger tells us that
we are still here . . . like the animals, like the trees we are to be cut down,
destroyed . . . my body is consuming itself because there is nothing else for it to eat’.
For all who came before and come after, ‘our struggle is to keep our land and way of
life, to refuse to be destroyed’. These composite words come from the mouth of one
of those ‘native women who are the strong ones. They can survive almost anything.’
For the most enduring quality of this novel is its epic story of the heart’s-blood of a
people who, despite everything, survive. Never prospering, rarely thriving, they
endure to live and continue. As Marie Sampass decides irrevocably in 1926, having
returned again from East London to Kouchibouguac: ‘I think at any given moment it
might appear we cannot hold back the water that is flooding over us, that the attacks
on us from all sides are bound to destroy us. And then at other moments our
resilience is demonstrated, our sheer stubborn determination to survive as who we
are.’
 It’s a message of life and will-power for post-pandemic generations, a profoundly
singular novel transmitting the communal wisdom that rises from history as a marker
for humanity.

Sheffield                        CHRIS SEARLE

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