From the Ashes Study Guide

Jesse Thistle was born in 1976 in Prince Albert, in the Canadian state of Saskatchewan, near the original lands of his Métis Cree ancestors. After his parents split when he was young, he and his brothers lived with their father Sonny for a period, but Sonny’s substance addictions and small-time criminal engagements meant that the boys were often left unattended and without food. Retrieved by child services at age three, Thistle and his older brothers were sent to live with Sonny’s parents in the Toronto suburbs. This provided him a relatively stable environment for his childhood and adolescence, but the pain of his uprooting and his unease surrounding his indigenous identity steered him into a life of juvenile delinquency and, eventually, serious addictions and petty crime. Thistle spent much of his adult life homeless and alienated from his loved ones, until a year-long stint in high-security rehab helped him to work through his addictions and make amends with family members. He married his wife, Lucie, and began studying Indigenous history at York University in Toronto. He quickly became a rising star in this field, and his memoir From the Ashes catapulted him to nationwide renown. Now a respected voice in Indigenous studies, Thistle continues his academic pursuits, which have involved research into his own ancestors and the forced displacements they have endured over the years.

A defining historical event that Jesse Thistle references in his dedication of From the Ashes was the "Sixties Scoop," a network of Canadian social policies that began in the late 1950s and continued into the 1980s. The Scoop refers to protracted efforts by child welfare services to forcibly remove Indigenous children from their families and broader communities and resettle them with White families through foster homes and adoption. The Sixties Scoop was intended to address disfunction in Indigenous communities that was itself traceable to the institution of Canada’s residential school system, which since 1894 had made enrollment in remote government-funded boarding schools compulsory for Indigenous children. The residential school system was intended to assimilate Indigenous youths into the European-derived culture of Canada’s colonial settlers by alienating them from their own communities and cultures. Both the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop have come to be seen as disasters for Canada’s Indigenous population, the effects of which are still felt today. Thistle’s own adoption by his grandparents, although not without its problems, was actually an uncommonly lucky outcome for a child of his time period and ethnic background, where total dislocation would have been much more common. His academic work continues to investigate the origins and lingering effects of these disastrous Canadian social programs.

From the Ashes was Jesse Thistle’s first book. Since then, he has published a book mainly of poetry, Scars and Stars—though, like From the Ashes, it intermingles prose and verse to create a revealing portrait of Thistle’s experiences. In the vein of Thistle’s memoir, Alicia Elliott’s 2020 memoir A Mind Spread Out on the Ground similarly engages the author’s Indigenous roots and the struggle of navigating the contradictions of Indigenous identity in contemporary Canada. Darrel J. Mcleod’s 2019 memoir Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age likewise explores the hardships and domestic uprooting the author experienced while growing up as Cree in Canada. The issues touched on in From the Ashes have been treated in recent fiction as well, including katherena vermette’s The Break, which interlaces a crime narrative with depictions of homelessness and police harassment among the Métis Cree people. Another novel of Indigenous North American life in the modern era that deals with themes of alienation and despair is James Welch’s 1974 classic Winter in the Blood. The addiction that makes up a large part of Jesse’s life story is likewise treated in James Frey’s controversial 2003 book A Million Little Pieces, which was initially marketed as a memoir but later reclassified as a novel after doubts about his claims came to light.