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

by Jesse Thistle

When Kokum and I came back from berry picking, Mushoom was standing at the front door of the cabin. The elk-horn buttons that fastened his beige leather vest strained to hold it together over his rounded stomach.

She said that I was the largest of all her babies, a little over ten pounds when I was born in 1976—as long as a carnival hot dog with a huge oblong head—and the doctors were shocked when I came out.

Kokum threw a cast-iron skillet at it with one flick of her wrist, like a ninja star. The skillet whistled thirty feet in the

I watched her as she wiped the dirt off her hands and put rolled-up bannock balls in the skillet. As they hissed and spit into the air, I could hear my parents’ car screeching to a stop outside. They were fighting, like always.

Empty boxes of crackers and cans piled one on top of another, covering the countertops and cascading out over the stovetop.

The cigarette drooped from his lips and begged for a flame. I huddled close to guard against the wind. The ember burned cherry red as he struck the match, lit the butt, and hauled in a breath.

I was glad to be hanging out with my favourite uncle, making him happy, the sun beaming down on my face.

The smell of fish and oil spilled onto the street as we left. The night air was cool for September. Street lights flickered in the park, surrounded by a blanket of blackness.

And the wall, a thousand miles high, that I kept between me and the rest of the world didn’t exist—not a brick anywhere in sight.

An old man walking with his cane, a mother holding her baby, a little girl playing in the park—all were transformed into shadows of daily life atomically scorched onto the concrete of sidewalks and roadways, and I was now one of those shadow people.

The girl next to me pulled down her bikini top and showed me her breasts—their fleshy presence complemented the celebratory cheers and horns that resounded throughout the house. I grabbed her and gave her a sloppy kiss to welcome in the new millennium.

His lunchbox hands squeezed my shoulders.

His voice sounded like an ice shelf sheering off into the ocean—kaboom.

I opened my arms like a thistle in bloom, wrapping every leaf around him, thorns outward, keeping us both safe.

“That’s just disgusting—dirty Canadian drinking dirty American beer.

The house smelled of crack and meth. The walls were caked with a clear layer of resin, enough to get high on if I scraped it off and smoked it.

I was dumped in the back of a paddy wagon, scratching the steel sides and growling, like an injured mountain lion in shackles,

I walked along the boulevard in Ottawa, and the colours of the storefronts drained down across the sidewalks, faded under the blackened snowbanks, and seeped into the storm grates.

The city hummed its droning hum, a cacophony of horns and car tires rotating across slick pavement, splashing through puddles.

song came on the loudspeaker of the bar. I turned my head to listen, wondering if I recognized it. I didn’t. I didn’t recognize much anymore—not music, or movies, or anything. Signs blurred into smears of jumbled incomprehension. Faces, too. I was a wild animal, a stray wolf with matted fur covered in filth, one not even a dogcatcher would want to mess with. The world screamed past me.

The rest of our conversation melted into a drizzle of emotions that fogged my heart in the nicest way. Like a silent summer rain that lightly quenches the prairie after a long drought, or the cloud of droplets that kicks up at the bottom of a waterfall, delicately misting your face. Refreshing and warm, like I’d rediscovered some fragment of home, some lost piece of myself. It filled me up.

Talk about this in therapy

Life on the streets had been horribly dirty. Many times I’d wished I could have had a shower but simply couldn’t—I often went for weeks without one. So when I got sober, I collected an abundance of soaps, shampoos, skin creams, face scrubs, toothpastes—I must have had, no exaggeration, about two hundred of each. So many that I filled an entire bookshelf with them and kept them on display in my room

the prairie roses all across the property appeared to be smiling at me, welcoming me home, waving their heads this way and that.

But even softened by years of luxury and stability, I can still read the street like an open book. I can still see plain as day where the zombies live, where the vampires shift in dark corners, where they sell bones and batwings to the undead, the broken-hearted, and the lost.

But because of my youth and, later, my addictions, I see what happened to me like fragments of light, flickers of a flame, shadows on a wall.