From Toronto's Streets to a University Lectern

Jesse Thistle is a Metis-Cree writer and scholar from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. As a child he and his brothers were separated from their parents and their Indigenous community and spent time in foster care before living with their grandparents in Brampton, Ontario. Family gatherings in the 1980s stand out in his memory. He has said he had no idea who he was or where he fit in, and that in high school he sometimes told people he was Italian to blend in.

In his twenties he spent several difficult years on the streets of Toronto, going in and out of jail and struggling with addiction. Neither source gives exact dates or ages for this period, but both link it to the dislocation and trauma he carried from childhood.

Recovery came through years of rehabilitation and support. He began writing about his life in fragments as part of his Alcoholics Anonymous programme, a process he has called very healing and cathartic. Later the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness hired him to help write a definition of Indigenous homelessness in Canada. Talking with Indigenous people who had experienced homelessness, he has said, helped him learn about his own past and heal by serving others.

He turned to education and became an assistant professor of Metis Studies at York University in Toronto, where he teaches courses on homelessness and Prairie and Michif history. His memoir, From the Ashes: My Story of Being Metis, Homeless, and Finding My Way, mixes poetry and memoir. It became a national bestseller and a contender on Canada Reads in 2020. The book also describes making amends, about 24 years later, with a woman he had hurt in high school.