Jinot Sel—Aaron Sel

Jinot Sel—Aaron Sel is a father-son relationship marked by love, bereavement, and a growing disagreement over where Aaron belongs. After cholera leaves them as the only survivors of their immediate household, Jinot vows to keep his son safe; Aaron, however, wants to find his Mi’kmaw relatives and know a life beyond the one his father can provide. Their parting over Jinot’s planned voyage to New Zealand makes that conflict unmistakable: Aaron leaves a letter on his father’s coat and walks north toward Nova Scotia, hopeful that the old ways endure.

Family Bonds and Early Loss

Aaron is one of Jinot and Minnie’s twin sons, born with Amboise, and the twins resemble Kuntaw more than Hugh Boss. Their arrival makes Jinot feel that he has become like other men and can almost understand truths that once seemed mysterious. That sense of settled family life is fragile. Minnie watches the boys anxiously for signs of scoliosis, taking them to Dr. Mallard as soon as they begin walking, while Jinot is often away on business with Mr. Bone. Her fears of Jinot disappearing and disease taking the family point to the insecurity surrounding the children’s early years.

When the twins are six, a winter accident kills Amboise. Their neighborhood sliding slope has been made treacherously icy after a freak rainstorm and a boy’s prank; Amboise is found pierced through the neck by a dry stick-spear left among the trees from summer play. Jinot is away with Mr. Bone and learns of the death only when the coach returns late that evening. Minnie and Aaron have already fallen into a stunned, fatalistic calm, while three-year-old Lewie and Lancey sleep, unaware. Jinot walks through the night, breaking into choking cries, and returns shortly before dawn. He and Minnie sit at the blue-painted kitchen table with their hands locked, sharing grief without words.

Amboise had been especially beloved by Jinot as a kind of resurrection of his burned brother, also named Amboise. Jinot recognizes, guiltily, that he had given Aaron less affection, and after the death he resolves to make amends, favoring Aaron with love and gifts. But grief also drives the parents apart. Minnie vows there will be no more children, while Jinot sleeps on the back porch on a worn bison robe he had used in the Gatineau. The children may visit him, but he is no longer the affectionate, playful father he had been. His withdrawal helps establish the emotional pressure surrounding his later insistence on keeping Aaron close.

Cholera and Jinot’s Promise

The cholera outbreak brings the family’s losses into sudden focus. Jinot finds Mrs. Joyful Woodlawn, hired to care for Minnie and the boys, violently ill after drinking well water. He rushes to Minnie, but the disease is already upon her. Lewie and Lancey die as Jinot watches; Aaron is absent from the house, found in the woodshed with a book of tales. He has eaten leftover ham fat and did not drink Mrs. Woodlawn’s water, and he appears well.

Jinot tells Hugh Boss that cholera has taken the others and that only he and Aaron remain. The disease also devastates Hugh’s household: Hugh survives, but his pregnant wife and three youngest children die on the same day. After weeks of grief, Jinot and Hugh meet in the cemetery to set up seven fresh-cut stones, each marked only with a name, dates, and the word cholera. They reconcile there. Jinot and Aaron then move into Hugh’s home, sleep in the haymow, and help care for the surviving children until Mrs. Boss’s sister can arrive from Danbury, Connecticut.

Jinot swears he will keep Aaron with him and safe until he becomes a man. The promise is an expression of care shaped by catastrophe: after watching his wife and children die, he cannot treat the surviving boy’s future as an ordinary matter. Yet the promise also becomes a source of friction. Aaron repeatedly says he wants to go to Nova Scotia and find his Mi’kmaw relatives. He wants to be an Indian, while Jinot’s immediate instinct is to protect him and keep him near.

Divergent Journeys

The disagreement comes to a head when Mr. Bone plans a voyage to New Zealand to inspect the kauri forests and asks Jinot to accompany him. Jinot hesitates because he has sworn to keep Aaron close; he tells Mr. Bone that Aaron is all he has left. Mr. Bone answers that Aaron can come too, useful as a strong young traveler. Jinot’s offer of a shared voyage does not resolve the conflict. Aaron retreats into long silences and does not answer his father’s pleading for days.

When Aaron finally explains himself, he says that he does not want to cross the ocean. He wants to go to Nova Scotia and find whatever Sel relatives may be there, because he wants to know that life. Jinot proposes another destination: Manitoulin Island, where Aaron’s uncle Josime has returned to the old ways. Jinot distinguishes those ways from Mi’kmaq life, explaining that Josime loved an Odaawa woman and that, in Jinot’s view, Mi’kmaw old ways no longer exist. He nevertheless sees Josime as the person who might show Aaron something of their people’s former forest life. He warns that Aaron is too young to make the journey alone and promises to go with him to Manitoulin Island after returning from New Zealand.

Aaron listens and considers the suggestion: Josime is a person with a name and a place, making the proposed search more tangible. But Aaron still will not go overseas. Rather than continue the argument face to face, he writes a short note and pins it to Jinot’s black coat: “Dear Father. I do not go to Newzeelum. I go Nova Scohsia then I go find uncle Josime. When I return you hear my good stories.” The letter sets out both his refusal and his intention to return with stories, preserving a bond even as he chooses a route his father did not choose for him.

Separation, Belonging, and Legacy

Aaron believes that the old Mi’kmaw ways, whatever they were, cannot be utterly lost, and he starts walking north with hope. His departure gives concrete form to a difference already present in the family: Jinot understands protection as staying together, while Aaron understands finding relatives and learning their life as necessary to becoming who he is. Jinot’s proposal to seek Josime acknowledges that need, but Aaron insists on beginning in Nova Scotia rather than waiting for his father’s return from New Zealand.

The episode leaves their relationship unresolved rather than severed. Aaron’s note promises that his father will hear his good stories when he returns; the promise of future communication stands beside the immediate reality of separation. For Jinot, who has already lost Minnie and several children, Aaron’s choice is another departure he cannot prevent. For Aaron, setting out is an act of attachment to family beyond his household and to a cultural inheritance he believes may still be found. Their conflict is therefore not simply over travel: it concerns whether care means holding the last surviving son close or allowing him to seek a wider kinship and a history his father considers nearly vanished.