The Lookout Tree: A Family's Escape from the Acadian Deportation

The people of Acadia, a small but thriving French colony along the Bay of Fundy, were on friendly terms with the Mi’kmaw people. The Acadians, farmers, built dykes to hold back the high tides and sluice gates to irrigate their fields. Then their territory was ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. Although the early British governors let the Acadians be, they felt threatened when France built the fortress of Louisbourg on present-day Cape Breton Island and established a naval base at Halifax in 1749. When the British took the French fort, Fort Béausejour, in 1755, Governor Lawrence pressed the Acadians to take an unqualified oath of allegiance to Britain. When they refused, he ordered them deported to the Thirteen Colonies. The remainder fled to New France or hid in the woods with the help of the Mi’kmaw.

The fictional family in The Lookout Tree is among the latter group. Pétard, the grandfather of the family; his lady friend, Rosalie, and his grandchildren, Fidèle and Prémélia, flee to the woods with the help of Kitpou, a Mi’kmaw friend, after news comes that the Redcoats are capturing Acadians. Jacques, the father of the family, and his wife, Marie, have to stay behind in their village of La Butte à Pétard in the Memramook Valley because Marie is about to give birth. They promise to join the others in a designated area, but they never come.

Fidèle goes to the edge of the forest, climbs a beech tree and sees his village in the distance being burned by British soldiers. Then three Redcoats appear under his lookout tree, aiming their rifles at a Mi’kmaw woman dressed in a cloak of shiny black feathers. They fire, but their musket balls don’t harm her. When she floats toward them, they run, and she vanishes with a loud caw.

Throughout the novel, this bird woman acts as a guardian angel to the family though her powers obviously are not strong enough to prevent the “ethnic cleansing” to which the British are subjecting the Acadians. In Mi’kaw culture, people who have supernatural powers are called “bouhine”, and, according to legend, a bouhine comes back as a spirit in bird form during the flow of the “refoul”, the tidal bore. The bouhine appears as a blue jay, helping the children find Kikpou after he is severely injured by the enemy, and, in the quotation at the beginning of this review, one sees her take over the body of a sea gull and use the wave of the tidal bore against the British. She appears later as a yellow warbler. Her recurrence in the novel is one of its best features.

The cooperation between the indigenous and Acadian people is shown when the family’s Mi’kmaw friend, Kikpou, helps them to build a wigwam, and also when he guides Fidèle to join the forces of Beausoleil, an Acadian resistance fighter. Most of the novel is taken up with the family’s 12 years in hiding in the woods where they use skills learned from the Mi’kmaw and face a number of challenges. After Fidèle has left, Prémélia increasingly becomes caregiver to her grandfather and his friend, and she hunts wild game with bow and arrow for food. She has a narrow escape from the British when she returns to the ruins of their old home to search the root cellar for food.

The novel has a happier ending than “Evangeline”, the famous epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in which an Acadian girl travels across America in search of her fiancé, Gabriel, only to find him on his deathbed. As one might expect in a novel for children, readers learn what became of the children’s parents and their unknown sibling.

The Lookout Tree is the English translation of La Butte à Pétard, first published in 1989. A “Pétard” was a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications. It was usually a cone of gunpowder with a slow match for a fuse. Léger’s title in French is a clever play on words since the grandfather in the story, nicknamed Pétard, is a big personality with a unique laugh, a fondness for spruce beer and an eye for the widow Rosalie. He is the most vivid, best-developed character in a novel where plot is paramount.

Much is attempted in this novel of only 110 pages: an account of the “Grand Dérangement” in terms children can understand; a story about survival in the woods, and an appreciation of the Mi’kmaw’s skills, customs and legends. The author’s note summarizes the history behind this tragedy, and a glossary explains the many French terms used in the novel. Since the novel uses old Acadian place names, such as Baie Francais for Bay of Fundy, the author has provided a glossary. The map at the beginning, showing the setting of the story, might have been more helpful to young readers who don’t know much Canadian history and geography if the present-day names of places like La Coude (Moncton) had been included.

Diane Carmel Léger grew up in the village of Memramcook, New Brunswick, and taught for 20 years in Victoria, British Columbia. Her New Brunswick Writers’ Federation bio note states that homesickness led her to write La butte à Pétard which won the Hackmatack Award from the New Brunswick Public Library system. In 2014 she received the Marilyn Trenholme-Counsell Literacy Award from the New Brunswick Literacy Coalition. Of her many books about Acadians, she says on her website that making their culture and history known is her passion.