A note from the author on the sources

The review on this page asks for a note on the sources and on the interpretation behind the novel. It is a fair request, and here is the answer.

The raid that opens «Blood and Soil» is the attack on Lachine, in the night of 5 August 1689: colonists were killed and many others were carried away as captives. What happens to the captives in the pages that follow follows what the documents of the period record: the forced marches, the killing of those who could not keep up, the children distributed among the villages and absorbed into them, the women given to men of the community that had taken them. I worked from those documents, above all the Relations of the Jesuits and other seventeenth century accounts held in the Canadian digital collections.

One point matters to me. Nowhere does the book offer the treatment of the captives as the general practice of a people: what you read happened to those people, in that place, on those nights, and it is told as fact, not as ethnography. The documents record all of this, and a good deal worse besides. Some of it I chose to leave out.

Armand Du Silence