Originally published 2021-01-26.
Jesse Thistle is a Métis-Cree historian and author who spent much of his late teens and twenties homeless and struggling with addiction, served short jail terms, and later rebuilt his life through education. He earned a history degree at York University in Toronto, a master's at the University of Waterloo, and became an assistant professor at York, where he researches Métis history and Indigenous homelessness. His 2019 memoir, From the Ashes, became a Canadian bestseller.
His life is often told as a simple comeback story. It is also a story about the Sixties Scoop, family separation and how reconnecting with history helped one man find his footing.
Childhood and the Sixties Scoop
Thistle was born in 1976 in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. His mother, Blanche Morrissette, is Métis-Cree and a status member of Mistawasis First Nation. His father, Cyril "Sonny" Thistle, struggled with heavy drinking and drug use and was often in trouble with the law; he has been missing since 1982.
When Jesse and his two brothers were very young, child welfare authorities removed them from their parents' care. Rather than staying with their mother, the boys were placed with their paternal grandparents, and grew up cut off from their Métis and Cree heritage.
Thistle has linked his experience to the Sixties Scoop, the name for a period from the late 1950s into the 1980s when an estimated 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families by child welfare agencies. Most were placed in foster care or adopted by non-Indigenous, often white middle-class, families. Speaking to the BBC, he described how Indigenous kids who came across child services' desks tended to be placed in white homes, and said: "It was called the Sixties Scoop - thousands and thousands of Indigenous kids were taken that way."
In 2017, the Canadian government announced an $800 million settlement for status First Nations and Inuit survivors, though Métis and non-status people were excluded from it.
Homelessness, addiction and prison
Growing up, Thistle was bullied for his background and did poorly at school. He sometimes told people he was Italian to avoid racist taunts. As a teenager he drifted into petty crime and drug use, and when that use spiralled at around 19, his grandparents told him to leave.
For roughly a decade he lived on and off the streets in Toronto and elsewhere, using crack cocaine and other drugs, cycling through shelters and serving several short jail stints for theft. His life became dangerous and chaotic; he has said he was once wrongly suspected in a serious crime.
In 2006, after a failed robbery attempt, he turned himself in. That decision became the turning point. Behind bars he went through withdrawal, and afterwards he entered a drug rehabilitation programme.
Teaching himself to learn again
Thistle had left school with very weak skills. In custody and recovery, he worked through the basics of reading, writing and mathematics, using whatever books he could find. After his release he kept going with real determination, reading encyclopaedias late into the night and watching his grades climb. He also took courses to relearn everyday social skills he had lost while living on the street.
In his mid-thirties he enrolled at York University in Toronto to study history. The real spark came when a lecturer encouraged him to look into his family history. Tracing his ancestry, he found a line of Métis and Cree leaders and resistance fighters. Telling the BBC how that discovery affected him, he said it "filled me with such pride that it fired me up to want to know more and more."
Academic career and research
His progress after that was rapid. Thistle completed an honours degree in history at York in 2015 and won the Governor General's Silver Medal in 2016. He then earned a master's degree in history from the University of Waterloo in 2016 and returned to York as a PhD candidate that autumn. He was named both a Trudeau Scholar and a Vanier Scholar, two of Canada's most competitive doctoral awards.
He later became an assistant professor in York's Department of Humanities. His research focuses on Michif road-allowance communities in mid-20th-century Saskatchewan, where many Métis families lived on narrow strips of Crown land beside roads after being displaced. He has also written about Indigenous homelessness, arguing that it should be understood through the loss of land, family and community, not only as a lack of housing.
Today he is reconciled with his mother, married, and speaks widely about addiction, recovery and Indigenous history.
From the Ashes
Thistle told his story in From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way, published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. The book covers his childhood, foster care, years on the street, addiction and the path into higher education.
It reached a wide audience. The book was a contender on CBC's Canada Reads in 2020, won the Indigenous Voices Award, received the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for non-fiction and stayed on Canadian bestseller lists for several years.
What his story does and does not show
It is tempting to read Thistle's life as proof that anyone can climb out of homelessness through willpower alone. He did work extraordinarily hard. But his own account also points to things that helped at different stages: treatment, people who believed in him, teachers who opened doors and the grounding he found in his culture and family history.
His story also shows the long reach of policies like the Sixties Scoop, which separated children from their communities and left lasting harm. Seeing that wider picture makes his achievement more impressive, not less, and it is why his scholarship on Indigenous history and homelessness matters. If you or someone close to you is struggling with addiction, talking to a doctor or a local support service is a good first step.
Sources: BBC News (original interview), Wikipedia: Jesse Thistle, Wikipedia: Sixties Scoop, Wikipedia: From the Ashes (memoir), University of Prince Edward Island, January 2021
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