Auguste Sel

Auguste Sel is an elderly relative of Kuntaw Sel whom Amboise and Jinot encounter during their journey to Mi’kma’ki. Once a companion of Kuntaw in a life of hunting, fishing, craft, and communal celebration, he now lives amid the effects of displacement and social hardship. When his grandsons invite him to join them at the Penobscot house, Auguste declines and names himself “the One Who Remains”: a decision that turns the journey home into a painful choice between family reunion and staying with the community he sees around him.

Identity and Family Background

Auguste is Kuntaw’s cousin and the son of Noë, Kuntaw’s deceased aunt. Kuntaw asks Amboise and Jinot to seek him out while they travel to see Elise, hoping that if Auguste is still alive he will come and live with the family at the Penobscot house. Kuntaw remembers him as someone often in trouble, but the request itself shows that Auguste remains part of the family’s network of care, even after years of separation.

The family’s history reaches back to René Sel. Jinot learns that René was his ancestor and that he had been murdered by a girl he adopted. Kuntaw distinguishes René’s life from the later lumber-camp labor of his descendants: René cut trees for himself, rather than working in logging camps. This account places Auguste within a lineage changed by both family violence and the transformation of work in the forest.

The Search in Mi’kma’ki

Kuntaw’s sister Aledonia receives Amboise and Jinot and points out people bearing the Sel name. She confirms that Auguste is alive, remarking that he is too troublesome to die. The cousins find him at a granddaughter’s wikuom, sitting outside in a subdued, alcohol-worn state. When they identify themselves as Kuntaw’s grandsons, Auguste rouses enough to greet them, recalls Kuntaw as fortunate in contrast to himself, and then falls quiet.

The setting gives that reunion its larger context. The village is hungry and sad, composed of wikuoms and settler cabins in lands that were once Mi’kma’ki. Eel weirs lie in disrepair, while agency bread and pork have displaced the effort of catching eels. The cousins also see Elise’s difficult circumstances: her husband, Luçon Brassua, is drunk near their damaged home, and Elise tells them that her baby daughter, named Bee after Beatrix, has died. Auguste’s condition is not presented as an isolated failing; it belongs to a community whose circumstances have narrowed alongside its loss of land and livelihood.

Memory and Community Loss

Watching Mi’kmaw men idle near the post, Auguste remembers what life had once demanded and offered. In his youth, he says, he and Kuntaw were ready to hunt, fish for eels, seals, and sturgeon, and make their own bows, arrows, crooked knives, canoes, and paddles. Their lives included war games, brave deeds, feasts, and dances. He contrasts that remembered activity with the men he sees now—and with himself—and reaches for a bottle beneath his thigh.

His recollection makes the distance between past and present concrete. The change is visible not only in the men’s inactivity but also in the broken eel weirs, the dependence on agency food, and Auguste’s own diminished circumstances. At the same time, his account preserves knowledge of practices that the younger generation may otherwise encounter only through stories. His sadness is therefore both personal and communal: he recognizes himself in the altered conditions around him and names the loss without pretending that memory can restore what has disappeared.

The One Who Remains

Amboise urges Elise to leave her husband, and she gathers her few possessions and runs with the cousins toward the boat landing. Once there, Amboise insists that they must also bring Auguste, since Kuntaw wants him to live at the Penobscot house. Auguste stands at the prospect of going, trembling, but looks around at the people and place he would leave. He sits down again and refuses, despite their attempts to persuade him.

His refusal is not a rejection of kinship: Kuntaw’s invitation and the cousins’ effort to take him with them show that he has a home available to him. Rather, the scene presents staying as a deliberate attachment to those left behind. Auguste says someone must remain and calls himself “the One Who Remains”; the narration observes that he was always good at naming. The name carries the force of his choice while leaving its future unresolved: he stays in Mi’kma’ki, where he has witnessed both the community’s hardship and the remnants of its older life.

Narrative Significance

Auguste’s brief appearance joins family history to the book’s longer account of forest work and social change. The Sel descendants’ movement into lumber camps contrasts with René’s independent tree cutting and with Auguste’s recollection of a life organized around hunting, fishing, making, and communal ceremony. The journey intended to reconnect relatives instead exposes how much has changed in the place they return to.

The phrase “the One Who Remains” also resonates with a wider concern for what survives when people leave, livelihoods change, and communities are diminished. Auguste’s decision gives that concern an intimate form: he could go with his family, but chooses to stay among the people whose altered lives have moved him to tears. He does not reverse the loss he describes; his naming of it, and his presence within it, become the substance of his role in the story.