Jesse Thistle

Jesse Thistle (born 1976) is a Métis-Cree author and assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto. He is the author of the best-selling memoir, From the Ashes.[1] Thistle is an advocate for the homeless. He is a PhD candidate in the History program at York University where he is working on theories of intergenerational and historic trauma of the Métis people.[2] This work, which involves reflections on his own previous struggles with addiction and homelessness, has been recognized as having wide impact on both the scholarly community and the greater public.[3]

Jesse Thistle
BornPrince Albert 
Alma mater
OccupationHistorian, teacher, writer 
Employer
Websitehttps://jessethistle.com/ 

Family and personal life

Thistle was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. In 1979 he and his two brothers were removed from his family home and moved to Brampton, Ontario to be brought up by his paternal grandparents. During his late teens and twenties Thistle struggled with addiction, homelessness and served several brief stints in jail for petty theft. After an unsuccessful robbery attempt in 2006, Thistle turned himself in to police and entered a drug rehabilitation program.[2] In 2012 he entered the undergraduate history program at York University.

Thistle is married to Lucie Pekarek-Thistle and lives in Toronto.

Much of Thistle's historical research is based on the stories and experience of his family and ancestors. His mother, Blanche Morissette, is Métis-Cree and was a member of the Park Valley road allowance community in Big River, Saskatchewan.[4][5][6] His father, Cyril "Sonny" Thistle, is of Scot-Algonquin ancestry and has been missing since 1982.[5] Thistle's maternal great grandmother, Marianne Ledoux Morissette, was present and supported the Métis Resistance in 1885 during the Battle of Batoche.[7][8] The documentary Family Camera directed by Marc de Guerre for TVOntario includes images of the Morissette family and interviews with Thistle, his mother and aunts where they recount the history and experience of living in the road allowance community and the legacy of the Canadian government's treatment of the Métis people.[5]

Education

Thistle obtained a Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies with a Specialized Honours in History from York University in 2015. His undergraduate thesis is entitled: James Bay and Mattawa as an Interconnected Fur Trade Region: Illuminating Lake Timiskaming’s Historic Metis Community and was supervised by York historian Carolyn Prodruchy. He completed a Masters of History at the University of Waterloo in 2016 where his thesis was entitled: The Puzzle of the Morrissette-Arcand Clan: A History of Metis Historic and Intergenerational Trauma and where he worked with Susan Roy.[9] In the fall of 2016 Thistle began work on a PhD in the History Department at York University.[9]

Thistle is a Trudeau Scholar, a prestigious award administered by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation,[10] a Vanier scholar and was awarded a Governor General's Silver Medal in 2016. He has won numerous other awards, including the Odessa Award in 2014 and the Dr. James Wu prize in 2015[11] for his paper "We are children of the river: Toronto’s Lost Metis History."

Professional work

Thistle's use of academic research as a means of healing and understanding of his personal story as an Indigenous person growing up disconnected from his community and its history and his past experiences with homelessness, addiction and incarceration has formed the basis for his original and innovative research contributions.[2][12][9][13] Thistle's historical research has used his own past and identity as a way to examine the position of Metis people and culture within Canadian society, particularly around the idea of inter-generational trauma. The idea is that trauma suffered by previous generations can echo through the generations.

Early historical research Thistle conducted to argue in favour of the possibility of habitation of Métis people in the historic area of Toronto was revisited by Thistle in 2016 in the article "Listening to History: Correcting the Toronto Metis Land Acknowledgement."[14] Thistle's research now suggests there were no permanent Métis settlements in Toronto and he suggests the standard land acknowledgement text used in the Toronto area, in particular by the Toronto District School Board, that includes the Metis is incorrect. A position he reiterates in an article in the New Yorker magazine.[15]

The main thrust of Thistle's research involves research into the road allowance Métis in Saskatchewan through the research into his own family history. The recovery of his family history and making connections to his Indigenous culture through archival documents forms the backbone of his practice[16] and documented in the article "Archives as Good Medicine"[17] as well as in the short film kiskisiwin | remembering, a documentary film directed by Martha Stiegman.[18] Along with Podruchny, Thistle conducted a series of site visits and interviews in northern Saskatchewan and his PhD thesis is entitled: Indigence, Invisibility, and Indifference: Metis Life in Road Allowances Communities on the Canadian Prairies. His work on the Road Allowance Métis community has been featured on programs such as the CBC Radio's "Unreserved" program.[19]

He was the National Representative for Indigenous Homelessness for the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness for their research priority areas and is a strong advocate for an Indigenous understanding of homelessness, arguing most current strategies for addressing homelessness do not account for the impacts of inter-generational trauma, the deep sense of loss of culture and connection to the idea of home for survivors of experiences such as residential schools and the Sixties Scoop, and that addressing Indigenous homelessness must take Indigenous worldviews into account. Thistle published a new definition of Indigenous homelessness in October, 2017.[20][21] He joined the board of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH) in 2019.[22]

In 2019 Thistle published a memoir entitled From the Ashes.[23] The memoir detailed his childhood, youth, and early adulthood, dealing with issues such as foster care, homelessness and addiction. The book was praised for its openness in expressing loss and pain, and for its eloquence, especially as it relates the multigenerational impacts of colonization.[24][25] "From the Ashes" has been on numerous bestseller lists.[26] In 2020 it was selected by George Canyon as his choice for the CBC Canada Reads competition but was voted off during the second round.[27]

Awards and honours
  • #1 Bestselling Canadian book of 2020 (any genre or format) - From the Ashes.
  • #1 Bestselling Canadian Non-Fiction book of 2020 - From the Ashes.
  • #2 Bestselling Canadian book of 2020 through independent bookstores - From the Ashes.
  • Winner Kobo's 2020 Canadian Non-Fiction Emerging Writer Prize.[28]
  • Winner of the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award in Canada for prose in English.[29]
  • Winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award, Indigenous category.[30]
  • Named one of 50 most influential Torontonians of 2019.[31]
  • Indigo named From the Ashes their #3 Best Book of 2019, best Non-Fiction of the year.[32]
  • Named a member of the Artist Ambassador program, Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund.[33]


Selected works
  • Jameson, Elizabeth; Podruchny, Carolyn; Thistle, Jesse A. (2018). "Women on the Margins of Imperial Plots: Farming on Borrowed Land". Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. 29: 158. doi:10.7202/1065722ar. Retrieved 2019-12-12.
  • Thistle, Jesse (2019). From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781982101213.
  • Thistle, Jesse. The Puzzle of the Morrissette-Arcand Clan: A History of Metis Historic and Intergenerational Trauma. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
  • Thistle, Jesse A. The Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada, Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, Toronto: York University, 2017. http://homelesshub.ca/IndigenousHomelessness
  • Thistle, Jesse A. "We are children of the river: Toronto’s Lost Metis History," YOUR Review, vol 3 (2016).
  • Thistle, Jesse A., "kiskisiwin – remembering: Challenging Indigenous Erasure in Canada’s Public History Displays," Active History (July 3, 2017).
  • Thistle, Jesse A. "Listening to History: Correcting the Toronto Metis Land Acknowledgement," Active History (December 2, 2016).
  • Thistle, Jesse A. "Dishinikawshon Jesse: A Life Transformed," Aboriginal Policy Studies 5, 1 (2015): 69-93.
  • Podruchny, Carolyn, and Jesse Thistle. "A Geography of Blood: Uncovering the Hidden Histories of Metis Peoples in Canada." In Spaces of Difference: Conflicts and Cohabitation, edited by Ursala Lehmkuhl, Hans-Jurgen Lusebrink, and Laurence McFalls, 61–82. New York: Waxmann, 2016.

References
  1. "Toronto Star bestsellers for the week ending Nov. 27, 2019". OurWindsor.ca. 2019-11-27. Retrieved 2019-11-29.
  2. Winter, Jesse (2016-08-17). "He was once a homeless drug addict. Now he's one of York's top students". The Toronto Star. ISSN 0319-0781. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  3. Muzyka, Kyle (Oct 17, 2019). "How Jesse Thistle's deeply personal memoir 'happened by accident'". Unreserved, CBC. Retrieved Nov 29, 2019.
  4. Barkwell, Lawrence J. "Park Valley". Virtual Museum of Metis History and Culture. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
  5. "Family Camera". familycamera.ca. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  6. "Poster #8: Batoche 1885: When Canada Opened Fire on My Kokum Marianne With a Gatling Gun - Graphic History Collective". Graphic History Collective. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  7. Barkwell, Lawrence. "Women of the 1885 Resistance". Metis Museum. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
  8. "Welcome to Back to Batoche / Bienvenue vers Retour à Batoche – VMC". www.virtualmuseum.ca. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  9. "How one man went from being homeless to winning Trudeau scholarship". Waterloo Stories. 2016-08-22. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  10. "Three York U graduate students become prestigious Trudeau Scholars | York Media Relations". York Media Relations. 2016-06-10. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  11. "Undergraduate Research Fair 2015 Awards | Undergraduate Research Fair". undergradresearchfair.blog.yorku.ca. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  12. "From street to scholar: Jesse Thistle creates new definition of Indigenous homelessness". CBC Radio. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  13. "Return of the Michif Boy: Confronting Métis trauma with PhD Student Jesse Thistle on CBC's Ideas | Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS)". laps.yorku.ca. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  14. Thistle, Jesse (2016-12-02). "Listening to History: Correcting the Toronto Metis Land Acknowledgement". ActiveHistory.ca. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  15. Marche, Stephen (2017-09-07). "Canada's Impossible Acknowledgment". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  16. Mercer, Greg (2017-04-10). "The healing power of public archives | TheRecord.com". TheRecord.com. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  17. Thistle, Jesse (2015). "Archives as Good Medicine: Rediscovering Our Ancestors and Understanding the Root Causes of Intergenerational Trauma". Revue YOUR Review (York Online Undergraduate Research). 2: 140.
  18. "kiskisiwin | remembering". National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI). 2017-04-21. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  19. CBC Radio (April 28, 2019). "From scrip to road allowances: Canada's complicated history with the Métis". CBC.
  20. "Indigenous Homelessness Won't Be Solved Through Housing Alone". HuffPost Canada. 2017-10-27. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  21. "From street to scholar: Jesse Thistle creates new definition of Indigenous homelessness". CBC Radio. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  22. "CAEH – 'Back into the circle': Q&A with Jesse Thistle". Retrieved 2019-08-03.
  23. "Books". Jesse Thistle. 2018-09-30. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  24. "From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way". Quill and Quire. 2019-07-29. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  25. "Métis-Cree academic Jesse Thistle's memoir is a powerful cap to a remarkable comeback | The Star". thestar.com. Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  26. "Jesse's Thistle's "From the Ashes" climbs up the bestseller list". Retrieved 2020-01-30.
  27. CBC Books (Jul 30, 2019). "From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle". CBC.
  28. June 25, Rakuten kobo |; 2020 (2020-06-25). "2020 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Winners Announced". Rakuten kobo. Retrieved 2020-08-09.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  29. "Blog". The Indigenous Voices Awards. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  30. "Blog". High Plains Book Awards. Retrieved 2020-09-29.
  31. November 21, Toronto Life |; 2019 (2019-11-21). "The 50 Most Influential Torontonians of 2019". Toronto Life. Retrieved 2019-11-29.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  32. "Blog". Our Best Books of 2019. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  33. "Blog". The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund. Retrieved 2019-11-29.
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