Lobert Sel

Lobert Sel, the eldest son of Édouard-Outger Sel, is a Mi’kmaw father whose story links dangerous wage labor, family loss, and the costs of colonial schooling. He survives a brother’s death in the 1917 Halifax Explosion, relocates his family to Shubenacadie, and makes a decision about his son’s education that he comes to understand as a failure to protect him. His later letter asking Egga to come home turns that painful history toward the possibility of reunion.

Family and Work

Born in 1877, Lobert was the oldest of six children in Édouard-Outger’s family. His father had taken a young wife, Maddil, after joining the Sel family band in Mi’kma’ki. The novel places Lobert’s generation amid shrinking options: nine younger men went to lumber camps across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine, where they could be valued for their work. Lobert is identified as the one who returned from the West Coast unscarred and unbroken, glad to be reunited with his brother Jim and ready to establish a family life.

The account gives his survival a stark context. Molti, another of Édouard-Outger’s sons, died in a logging accident after a cable snapped at a camp. Lobert’s return contrasts with the peril faced by men who sought wages in distant forests, and his reunion with Jim briefly makes family continuity seem possible. He married and became a father; later, the safety of home itself would prove fragile.

Displacement and the Halifax Explosion

In December 1917, two ships collided in the Halifax Narrows; one carried munitions and explosives bound for Europe. The resulting explosion and tsunami destroyed the Mi’kmaw village at Tufts Cove. Among the dead were Lobert’s brother Jim and four of Jim’s children. The loss was not simply a private bereavement: it erased lives and damaged a community already living under pressure.

Grieving and frightened, Lobert told his pregnant wife, Nanty, that they would go to Shubenacadie. They moved inland to the reserve, although he did not consider it a safe haven. There they found some measure of balance while remaining poor. Lobert worked for a timber company and was paid in logs, which he used to build a three-room house. The house gave his family a home, but it was built through the same forestry economy that narrowed the choices available to them.

Egga and the Residential School

When his son Edgar-Jim, called Egga, was born, Lobert began to worry about the future as his own father had worried about him. He did not want his sons to work in the forests or his daughters to clean house for white women. He did not see the residential school as a danger, though he distrusted the man who arrived with papers and warned that the children might be taken by welfare authorities if Lobert refused to sign the consent forms. He signed, believing education could offer Egga better work than cutting trees.

Lobert and Nanty visited Egga every month, bringing smoked eel, Nanty’s bread, sardines, and yellow cake. They were proud that their son was receiving an education. Egga, however, could not tell them what was happening at school: he was made to work rather than attend classes and was subjected to mistreatment. When he finally escaped, school representatives arrived at the family’s log house, searched it, and returned at intervals over many months. Lobert and Nanty were miserable; as they heard accounts of the school, they understood that they had failed to protect their son from harm. The distance between what they hoped the school would provide and what Egga endured defines Lobert’s most consequential parental decision.

Nanty fell into prolonged sadness amid uncertainty about Egga’s fate and died. Lobert was left with what the novel calls the blackest thoughts. His judgment of the school extended beyond the people who ran it: its abuses and the absence of government oversight permanently stained any English-Canadian claim to decency. The promise of education, in his experience, had been made credible by visits, food, and outwardly pleasant manners, while the reality remained hidden from parents and children alike.

Later Family and the Appeal Home

After Nanty’s death, Lobert married Kate Googoo, a young widow who was already pregnant with their first child. Paul was born, followed the next year by Alice, and later by Mary May. Egga, living far away on Martha’s Vineyard, knew nothing of these younger siblings. The family had thus continued and changed while he remained separated from it.

Years later, Lobert wrote to Egga after hearing that his granddaughter Sapatisia had visited and asked about their people and family stories. His ink-blotched letter said that he was growing old and wanted to see Egga or another granddaughter. It also told him that the school that had hurt him was closed and burned. Lobert asked him to come home. The appeal made the closed school a marker of change, but it did not undo the separation or the harm that had shaped it.

The letters moved Egga to tears. He planned to travel to Shubenacadie with Bren on the next St. Anne’s Day and wrote to his father that he would come. Although little further news passed between them at first, Lobert’s request had reopened a route toward family contact. Elsewhere, when Mr. Stick sought help locating Sapatisia, Lobert’s failing mind still seemed to retain the place of her little house at Pussle Cove; he identified the inlet and pointed out that the lighthouse was a couple of kilometers east, though there was no road sign. The small, practical direction is one last instance of Lobert helping kin find their way to one another.

Character and Significance

Lobert’s life is marked by repeated attempts to secure family survival within systems that expose his relatives to loss. Logging offers wages and building material, yet carries lethal risks; the reserve provides a measure of balance, not security; and the school appears to promise advancement while separating Egga from his language, family, and protection. Lobert is neither indifferent nor careless: he visits his son faithfully and acts under the pressure of a threat that his children could be taken. The tragic outcome reveals how little control he has over the institution he trusted.

His later condemnation of the school and his invitation to Egga register distinct responses to that history. The first refuses the claim that official language and respectability amount to justice; the second reaches across years of silence toward a son who had escaped. Through Lobert, the novel shows family continuity as something repeatedly endangered but still pursued—not as an unbroken inheritance, but as work of remembering, asking, and finding one another again.