From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way

Jesse Thistle, the author of From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way, chronicles his life and struggles with addiction, crime, and living on the streets. Rehabilitation and education play a significant role in helping him find his way back to stability, particularly his studies in Indigenous history, which help him develop a strong sense of community and identity. The idea of identity, in particular, is especially important to the story.

Métis, which means “mixed” in French, is a term applied to people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry (“Métis.” Encyclopædia Britannica). The Métis-Cree, however, are the only speakers of Michif, a language that is a combination of Cree and French but is also influenced by English and other Indigenous languages (Brown, Jennifer. “Michif.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 3 Aug. 2018). Chapter 1 describes a scene in which a young Thistle spends time with his maternal grandparents, who live in a road-allowance home. Métis families lived in road-allowance communities for almost a century, using these spaces as homes after relocations and migrations from their homelands by colonial forces. They expressed violent resistance to these relocation in the late 1800s but were eventually allocated the road-allowance lands by the Canadian government, who labeled the Métis as “rebellious” or “troublesome” (Logan, Tricia. “Métis Road Allowance Communities.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 19 July 2021).

Thistle is unaware of this history while living with his maternal grandparents. He only learns about his ancestry, his family’s participation in the resistance, and their roles as political leaders and resistance fighters, when he later reconnects to his mother’s family. Despite this conscious lack of awareness, aspects of his maternal family’s history and identity are deeply embedded in Thistle’s psyche; he dreams of the historical Battle of Batoche while recovering from a foot injury and is surprised to learn that he spoke Michif as a child.

Thistle studies Indigenous history to understand some of the issues that plague his community, which he hopes will explain the life choices that he, too, made. By the time Thistle enters university, he recognizes that issues like substance use and addiction disproportionately impact his people. This is in line with data and research surrounding the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Issues such as substance use, addictions, familial dysfunctions, and homelessness can be traced to historical trauma resulting from colonization and the resulting racism and discrimination (“Indigenous Peoples.” Homeless Hub). These issues often exacerbate each other, such being Thistle’s case: After Thistle developed a drug addiction, his grandfather forced him to leave the house; without a support system in place, Thistle continued to turn to substances to cope with pain and trauma. His actions in pursuit of satisfying his addictions, in turn, continued to leave him without a stable home.

The concepts of home and homelessness take on different meanings from an Indigenous perspective. At the end of the book, Thistle presents a paper on the subject, a result of his work with the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH). The organization has worked with Indigenous peoples by listening to their lived experiences and stories. The COH proposed that the Indigenous worldview sees home as not just a physical structure, but the following:

[a] web of relationships that involves connections to human kinship networks; relations to animals, plants, spirits, and elements; relationship to the Earth, lands, waters, and territories; and connection to traditional stories, songs, teachings, names, and ancestors (“Indigenous Peoples”).

When Thistle finally finds peace toward the end of the book, he also reclaims the Indigenous sense of home: reconciliation with family members; a strong support system that includes his girlfriend-turned-wife Lucie, old friends, and a network of colleagues; and pride in his Métis-Cree heritage that allows him to feel connected to the natural world.