Jinot Sel—Josime Sel

Jinot Sel’s relationship with Josime Sel is sustained less by regular contact than by memory, longing, and a recurring intention to find him. As the brothers’ lives diverge under pressure from the lumber economy and the erosion of Mi’kmaw ways, Jinot imagines Josime on Manitoulin Island as both a brother and a possible guide to a world that may no longer exist. The planned reunion remains a promise rather than a completed journey, giving their relationship the shape of an unfinished search.

Brothers Divided by Work and Place

Jinot and Amboise Sel work in Maine as the forest economy expands beyond the dwindling pine stands. After a season on the heavily cut Penobscot, among crews of farmer-loggers, they move north to New Brunswick, where the older camps offer a quieter working life and they find other Mi’kmaq living as woodsmen. Josime is not with them: he remains far away on Manitoulin Island. The separation is geographical, but it also marks different responses to a changing world. Jinot and Amboise settle back into lumber work, while Josime is associated in Jinot’s mind with a return to older ways. The work itself underscores what has changed. Jinot can fell a small, six-inch pine in less than a minute, and the brothers make their living cutting trees even as their people have come to depend on white settlers’ goods and food. Their employment is necessary, but it places them inside the transformation of the forest and their community. Josime’s distance gives him special significance in this context: he becomes the relative Jinot connects with a form of life no longer readily available where the brothers work.

A Search Imagined, Then Deferred

When Jinot considers leaving the woods, he thinks first of family. He wants to go to Boston to find Elise and meet his nieces and nephews, then to Manitoulin Island to find Josime and count more nieces and nephews. After his year of trial by fire, the wish to have children has become important to him, and searching for his siblings and their families offers one way to picture a wider kinship network. But he knows the Boston journey would be difficult: he has little money and no clear idea how to search for Elise in a crowded city. He also doubts that he can count on Goochey to get him to Manitoulin. For the time being, he chooses to remain in the Miramichi woods rather than go to Boston or return to Mi’kma’ki. The prospect of travel takes a new form when Mr. Bone decides to inspect the forests of New Zealand before establishing an axe factory there. Looking at Bone’s atlas, Jinot suggests that they consider the western forests of their own country, said to extend beyond Ohio. Bone disregards the suggestion and settles on New Zealand, asking Jinot to accompany him. The overseas expedition makes Jinot face a conflict between adventure and obligation: he has sworn to keep his son Aaron close until the boy reaches manhood, and Aaron is all he has left. Bone answers that Aaron can come too, but the possibility of a journey across the ocean also sharpens Jinot’s wish to locate Josime.

Josime as a Link to Older Ways

Aaron refuses to go to New Zealand. He wants to travel to Nova Scotia and find Sel relatives, saying he wants to know that life. Jinot redirects him toward Manitoulin Island and Josime, whom he describes as having returned to the old ways. He says that anyone seeking to know the old forest life of their people must find his brother. In this exchange, Jinot’s own search becomes an inheritance he tries to pass on: Josime is not merely a relative to visit, but the person Jinot believes may connect Aaron to a Mi’kmaw past. Yet Jinot does not present that past as secure. He tells Aaron that Mi’kmaw old ways no longer exist, and he privately fears that the shadow of white settlers’ ways may already have reached Manitoulin Island and its Odaawa people. His hope in Josime is therefore qualified. The island offers a destination and a person with a name, but not a guarantee that the old forest life can still be found there. The contrast between Jinot’s invitation and his private doubt makes the proposed search both hopeful and elegiac.

An Unfinished Reunion

Aaron decides he will not cross the ocean with his father. He leaves a short note explaining that he is going to Nova Scotia and then intends to find Josime, hopeful that the old Mi’kmaw ways cannot have been entirely lost. Jinot, meanwhile, writes to Elise that he is going overseas with Mr. Bone and that Aaron has refused to accompany him. He promises to write again. These decisions leave father and son on different routes: Jinot heads toward New Zealand, while Aaron sets out to search for family and the knowledge Jinot associates with Josime. The relationship’s significance lies in this forward-looking but incomplete movement. Jinot’s plans to see Josime recur—from his wish to count more nieces and nephews, to his advice that Aaron seek his uncle, to his promise to travel with Aaron to Manitoulin after returning from New Zealand. The available account does not show Jinot and Josime reunited. Instead, the brother remains a remembered destination around which Jinot organizes his hopes for family, cultural knowledge, and continuity, even as his own circumstances repeatedly carry him elsewhere.