Alice Sel

Alice Sel is a Sel family matriarch whose household in Dartmouth turns everyday care into a point of connection across generations. Her home provides child care and temporary lodging for young Mi’kmaw people, and it becomes the base from which Jeanne Sel and Felix Mius pursue education, family history, and the knowledge represented by Sapatisia Sel. Alice’s practical hospitality and familiarity with community networks help make those pursuits possible.

Family and household

After Nanty’s death, Lobert Sel remarried Kate Googoo. The family grew with the births of Paul, Alice, and Mary May; Edgar-Jim Sel, known as Egga, was living away on Martha’s Vineyard and did not know that he had these younger siblings. Alice’s later role in the family is consequently not just that of a relative with a home to spare: she becomes a point of contact for a wider family network whose members have been separated by work, migration, and the passage of time.

In Dartmouth, Alice’s house serves simultaneously as her home and a child-care center. It also receives young Mi’kmaw visitors trying out urban life. When Jeanne and Felix move in after high school, enroll at community college, and take part-time jobs, they enter a household that already has a public, communal character. The lower level is busy with toddlers and the upper floor with friends and relatives; Alice’s domestic space is a working environment sustained by care and traffic, not a private retreat detached from community needs.

The cousins’ education and closeness

Jeanne and Felix arrive with ambitions of reaching university, though they first need two years of community-college credits and face poor odds. They struggle with their courses and with the fact that neither speaks Mi’kmaw fluently. Some early mornings they sit at a computer together, learning words from Listuguj speakers’ pronunciations. Alice sometimes interrupts their efforts with criticism, a small but revealing part of their learning: reclaiming language takes place within ordinary family life, among encouragement, correction, and competing demands.

Alice notices that the cousins work hard and values the companionship they offer one another. At the crowded kitchen table, she tells Mary May that the two are trying seriously at their schoolwork and that it is good they have each other, like brother and sister. Mary May worries that their closeness might become romantic because they are cousins. Alice dismisses the fear: Felix takes girls to the movies when he can afford to, while Jeanne prefers to see a movie by herself. Her intervention is both affectionate and measured; she reads their intimacy as mutual care and academic partnership rather than romance.

The narrative briefly alters its view of the house through Jeanne’s experience. The usual congestion of children and visitors makes her think of the home as a madhouse, but one September Saturday she comes downstairs to find it empty and silent. The cleared kitchen—with its scrubbed table and mismatched chairs—is suddenly beautiful to her. The moment gives the house a second register: the bustle Alice manages is evidence of a life of service, while its rare quiet makes the room itself newly visible to the younger generation.

Community knowledge and family recognition

Alice helps Jeanne and Felix understand that Sapatisia Sel, the woman they have encountered in a magazine profile, is not an unknown figure but a relative: Egga’s daughter, from the United States, who once visited. The article describes Sapatisia as knowledgeable about traditional medicinal plants and as someone who plants trees. Alice’s recognition turns a clipping into a family lead and links the cousins’ interest in forestry and plant knowledge to a living relative rather than to an abstract subject of study.

The distinction matters because the cousins have seen white people come to study Mi’kmaw medicinal plants by questioning older women on the reservation. Their skepticism about outside attention sits alongside their wish to learn. Alice does not simply validate the magazine’s account; her own household becomes a place where the continuing use of medicines can be witnessed. When she falls ill with the flu, her friends from the reservation bring remedies, and Jeanne sees them administered in washes, gargles, teas, and other preparations. Alice recovers. The episode directly counters any assumption that this knowledge survives only as a record or a subject for outside observers: it remains part of reciprocal community care.

Making a meeting possible

Jeanne wants to ask Sapatisia why the magazine suggests that old Mi’kmaw medicines can no longer be used, and she and Felix consider going to find her on Cape George. Their plan stalls. Alice becomes ill, and Jeanne stays home from classes to run the child care and cook for her. The same family responsibility that delays the cousins’ search also gives Jeanne a close view of medicines in use, sharpening the question she wants to put to Sapatisia.

After recovering, Alice says she has decided to give up her Child Help Program meetings because she is too tired at the end of the day. The comment exposes the costs of her role: her household and community work are sustained by time and energy that cannot simply be extended without limit. Yet Alice continues to help the cousins find a route. She says Johnny Stick is travelling in their direction and describes him as good company, noting that he began attending truth-and-reconciliation meetings and that it helps to know one is not alone. Her suggestion draws on a community relationship and on knowledge of Johnny’s history at residential school without reducing him to that history.

When the cousins’ search is thwarted, Johnny goes to Lobert Sel, whose memory is failing but who can still indicate where Sapatisia’s small house stands: near Pussle Cove, a couple of kilometers east of the lighthouse, without a road sign. Johnny passes the marked-up paper to Alice, who places it beside Jeanne’s plate. The modest gesture completes a chain of assistance: Johnny obtains the location from Lobert, Alice brings it into the household, and Jeanne takes money from her East Coast Credit Union savings so Felix can rent a car, since she has no driver’s license. Alice’s significance lies in this connective work. She does not control the cousins’ choices or supply every answer; she helps family knowledge, community relationships, care, and practical means meet in the same place.