Jinot Sel—Albert Bone

Jinot Sel and Albert Bone’s relationship begins with an employment test and grows into an apprenticeship that joins genuine investment in Jinot’s skill to Bone’s paternalistic vision of Indigenous advancement. Bone gives Jinot a trade and access to the business behind it, but expects that education to pull him away from forest life and toward a commercial order that devalues the places and knowledge from which Jinot comes.

A Hire Founded on Practical Knowledge

Bone first assesses Jinot through his experience as a woodsman. Asked whether an axe is good or bad, Jinot refuses to judge it by appearance alone: he handles the tool, inspects it, and says he would need to try it on a tree. Bone takes him outside, where Jinot tests the axe against a young chestnut. He recognizes its quality, but the work also reminds him that his scarred leg has left him slower. The trial establishes both the basis and the cost of his expertise: his judgment comes from years of labor in the woods, though he can no longer imagine returning to that work as before.

Bone then offers Jinot a place in his factory. He says that he and the men he has trained aim to make the best axes and that quality is central to the enterprise. He proposes teaching Jinot forging and tempering, grinding and filing, and, eventually, every stage of manufacture. Bone acknowledges that he will lose money while Jinot learns the essentials. For Jinot, the offer is unexpectedly easy to accept; he had assumed Bone would hire only white men, and he trembles inwardly at being taken on.

Apprenticeship and the Making of an Axe

Jinot’s training lasts months and then years, until Bone is satisfied that the tools Jinot makes can endure thousands of heavy strikes. The river-drive skills Jinot already possesses prove unexpectedly useful in the forge. His responsiveness to moving water and rolling logs becomes an ability to read the changing shapes and colors of heated metal and to turn an axe under the hammer with speed and precision. The work is demanding, but it lets his old practical knowledge cross into a new craft rather than simply disappear.

The factory apprenticeship also changes how Jinot understands his own position. He feels that he is no longer simply Jinot Sel, but a hybrid figure occupying a contrived space. Bone takes a particular interest in him, even though many Indigenous men work in the factory. That attention brings opportunity and unease together: Jinot is being trained as a skilled worker, but also singled out as a representative of Bone’s larger project for Indigenous people.

Bone’s Ideas of Progress

Bone explains his project in terms that sound benevolent but carry a definite colonial hierarchy. He says that he hires Indigenous men because he believes they possess an instinct for mechanical improvement, and points to his foreman, Joseph Dogg, as an example. He also claims to want to repair historical injustice by encouraging Indigenous men to learn trades. Yet his account assumes that they should leave the forests and adopt what he calls useful occupations, so that the woodlands can become civilized and productive.

That assumption becomes especially clear when Bone takes Jinot to Boston. He wants Jinot to learn not only axe-making but its business side: how to speak with businessmen and associate with men of standing. Bone describes the practical pressures of running the company, including competitors who imitate his product, dissatisfied workers, agitators, and suspected spies. Jinot would rather remain among the forge workers, whose communication through gestures recalls the sawmills he knows. He does not welcome Bone’s solicitous effort to move him into a different social world.

The central contradiction is that Bone’s regard for Indigenous people does not extend to the forests and shorelines where they live. In his view, a place becomes real only after its trees are cut, its houses crowded together, and its land cultivated for European crops. His training gives Jinot a livelihood, but its underlying definition of advancement demands distance from the land and ways of life that shaped him.

Attachment, Opportunity, and Departure

Bone also gives Jinot a personal explanation for his commitment. On a journey, he recounts that he was orphaned after arriving in Philadelphia with his father, and later describes how the death of a prospective business partner left him without resources. He says he chose axe-making after recognizing the need for tools in a country of forests and settlements. When Jinot asks why Bone favors him, Bone says he privately vowed to encourage young Indigenous men to take up trades. He hopes Jinot will become the first Indigenous businessman and urges him to visit his people because he may find business opportunities there. Jinot’s inward response is discomfort: Bone’s invitation to reconnect is inseparable from the wish to turn that connection into commercial advantage.

Bone eventually asks Jinot to accompany him to New Zealand to inspect the kauri forests and assess the possibility of a new axe trade. Jinot hesitates because he has promised to keep his son Aaron close until he reaches manhood. The proposal makes plain how far Bone’s trust in Jinot’s abilities has grown, while also placing Bone’s business ambitions against Jinot’s family responsibility.

After Bone has been away for two days, Jinot begins to plan a way home. He no longer wants to continue making axes and wants to return to whatever remains of the places he knows. New Zealand’s forest has affected him, yet feels unfamiliar and alienating; he considers finding passage through Port Jackson or waiting for an American whaler. He concludes that Bone cannot keep him there. Their relationship therefore ends not in a simple rejection of the skills Bone taught, but in Jinot’s refusal to let employment and commercial ambition determine where he belongs.

The Relationship’s Larger Meaning

The apprenticeship is both materially real and ideologically constrained. Bone teaches Jinot a specialized manufacturing skill, recognizes his capacity, and spends years bringing his work to a standard he trusts. At the same time, he frames Indigenous identity as something to be redirected into the trades and treats forests chiefly as resources awaiting productive use. Jinot’s craft emerges from knowledge formed in the woods, but Bone’s conception of progress would make those woods valuable only once converted into commodities.

Their relationship thus holds two forms of knowledge in tension: Jinot’s embodied judgment of trees, tools, rivers, and work, and Bone’s commercial expertise in manufacture and markets. Bone’s offer opens a path into industrial life, but Jinot’s growing unease and eventual wish to leave show that instruction does not erase the difference between being trained for a business and accepting the worldview that business serves. The apprenticeship matters precisely because it gives Jinot new skills without resolving the question of whose future those skills are meant to build.