“the One Who Remains”

“The One Who Remains” is the name Auguste gives himself when Elise and Amboise urge him to leave with them. His refusal separates him from their escape and return to Penobscot Bay, making the phrase both a personal declaration and an image of endurance amid the family’s displacement.

The Choice to Stay

Elise is fleeing Luçon Brassua, who is away drinking with his friends. She gathers her few possessions in a turnip sack and runs for the boat landing. Amboise calls her away, but the escape is not complete: Auguste still needs to be brought along, and Kuntaw wants him to live in the Penobscot house.

When told they have come for him, Auguste trembles, looks around at the idlers near the post doorway, and sits down again with a sly smile. He refuses plainly: “No. Too late. You go. I stay.” No persuasion changes his mind. He insists that someone must remain and names himself “the One Who Remains.”

Naming and Separation

The narration notes that Auguste had always been good at naming. The title therefore belongs to a larger habit of giving things a name, but here its simplicity carries the weight of a choice. Auguste does not merely fail to escape or get left behind: he states that he will stay, making remaining his chosen role in the moment.

The phrase also marks a break within the family’s movement. Elise and Amboise use money Kuntaw gave them to arrange passage from Halifax to Boston, then persuade a fishing-boat owner bound for Georges Bank to detour and drop them at Penobscot Bay. Elise says little on the return voyage; on reaching her home port, she draws a deep breath and exhales. Auguste’s name holds the other side of that journey: one person remains where the others depart.

Wider Resonance

Elsewhere, the book presents Mi’kmaq life under mounting colonial pressure through repeated losses of land, food, and freedom of movement. Père Crème tells a French official that the Mi’kmaq suffer as their country is taken and their children are subjected to colonial goods and forceful ways. Sosep warns that settlers and their animals are taking more and more, and urges his people to keep their world alive in thought and practice even as they are forced to live in two worlds. Against that history, Auguste’s self-naming resonates with the wider question of who stays, who is displaced, and what can be carried forward.

The book’s later account of the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove, destroyed in the 1917 Halifax Explosion, gives that question a further, devastating context: Lobert Sel and his family move inland to Shubenacadie, where his children face the violence of residential schooling. The phrase itself belongs to Auguste’s earlier decision, not to those later events; its resonance comes from the novel’s broader pattern of forced departure and survival. Here, remaining is not presented as an easy victory. It is a starkly named position in a family crisis, set against the others’ hard-won return home.