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 internationally best-selling memoir, From the Ashes. He is a PhD candidate in the history program at York University, where he is working on theories of intergenerational, historic trauma, and survivance of road allowance Métis people. 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.
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.
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. His father, Cyril "Sonny" Thistle, is of Scot-Algonquin ancestry and has been missing since 1982. Thistle's maternal great-grandmother, Marianne Ledoux Morissette, was present and supported the Métis Resistance in 1885 during the Battle of Batoche. 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.
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 Podruchny. 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. In the fall of 2016 Thistle began work on a PhD in the history department at York University.
Thistle is a Trudeau Scholar, a prestigious award administered by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, 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 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. 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." 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.