From the Ashes

by Jesse Thistle

  I finally had enough to pay my fines.

  I drove to Brampton with Lucie, and we walked into the courthouse together. I licked my thumb, peeled off each fifty-dollar bill, and slapped them down one by one until I’d counted out the full $3,071 in fines.

  The teller was gobsmacked and grinned back at me—he knew what paying those fines represented: a break with the past.

  FINDING THE COURAGE TO STAND

  MY FIRST CLASS AT YORK University was at 8:30 a.m. on September 8, 2011. It was in Canadian History.

  “Just remember to breathe,” Lucie said to me as I threw my book bag over my shoulder and walked out the door. She waved to me with a tea towel, and I remembered Grandma doing the same when I got my first job at the grocery store. I smiled, but was trembling inside.

  I was the first one to arrive, and I found a seat in the front row. I placed my brand-new binders, pens, and paper on my desk in neat rows and readied myself for the lecture. I watched as people trickled in, filling the hall. They were half my age. Everyone—around four hundred people—had laptops, smart phones, or recording devices—only two others that I could see had pen and paper like me.

  No one sat beside me, and I fidgeted and tried smiling at some of the kids, but they were more interested in people their age.

  Maybe I’ve made a huge mistake coming here, I worried. Maybe it was foolish of me to try this. Me, an ex-con, mid-thirties, barely two years sober, amongst all these glowing young people who had years of education on me, and who still had that bright spot within them that hadn’t yet been crushed by the world. I got scared and gathered my things, ready to run away.

  Then a memory came to me of when I was in jail and saw the chaplain and started working with him, and then of Professor Lennox Terrion and how I’d relearned everything in rehab.

  I wasn’t sure why I thought of that when I looked at all the young people with their computers and innocence, but I did. Maybe it was because I was frightened, like when my cellmates tuned me up after I handed in my homework, or maybe it was because I was reaching really deep not to run away, trying to remind myself that I didn’t break then, and that I wouldn’t break now.

  Whatever the reason, I came to the realization that I’d earned my way here and that I had the right to chase my dreams. That even I deserved a second chance.

  I thought, I belong in university, just like everyone else.

  INDIAN TURNED MéTIS

  I STARTED TAKING INDIGENOUS HISTORY classes to figure out who I was and why I saw so many other Natives in all the homeless and justice institutions and out on the streets over the years. I thought I might be able to get some answers in my classes or readings and understand why I had made some poor life choices and keep from relapsing. It was a long shot—but I had to try.

  For one of my first assignments, one of my professors, Dr. Victoria Freeman, asked us to look at our family history within the context of Canadian colonization.

  Since my grandma in Brampton hardly ever talked about her Native background, I called my mom to ask her questions.

  “We’re Michif rebel fighters,” she said. “Canadians call us Métis.”

  I recognized that word “Michif” from when we’d all been talking in Aunt Cecile’s kitchen after Josh’s wedding.

  “Your great-grandmother Marianne Ledoux, Mushoom Jeremie’s mother, is related to Louis Riel,” Mom said. “But talk to your aunt Yvonne, she’s the family historian.”

  When I called Aunt Yvonne the next day and asked her about our involvement with Riel, she could hardly contain herself.

  “I’ve been waiting a very long time for you to get interested in who you are,” she said. “A lifetime actually.” She asked me to hold on while she turned on her computer to access her genealogy files. “I’m addicted to Ancestry.ca, so if I get a little strung out on the call, just send over the blue bus to take me away.” She cackled, and her laughter stirred up a memory of her in our place in Moose Jaw after we ran away from Dad in 1979. She was taking care of us when Mom went off to work and tucking us in. I’d never remembered that before.

  “Let’s see,” she said, and it sounded like she was slurping a drink of some kind. “Ah! Here. The Morrissette family tree. I’ll email the link, so you can explore it yourself. If I explain it, you may need to go back to rehab.” She cackled again, but I could tell she was serious. “The picture I sent is Chief Mistawasis—a Cree chief. He’s your three-times-great-grandfather.”

  I remembered Derick’s brother Moses asking me what I was when I was growing up.

  So we are Cree . . .

  I checked my email. There, upon my screen, appeared a big black-and-white picture of an old man sitting with other old Indian men. The caption read, “Cree chiefs Ahtahkakoop and Mistawasis.” I examined the medals around their necks, and then minimized the image and clicked the link. A huge family tree appeared—hundreds of ancestors with pictures, names, dates, and places of birth beside each box that represented each ancestor. Many had feathered bonnets on, like plains Indians from the movies, others looked like old cowboys, others were just dressed in regular clothes.

  “You’re Cree and road-allowance Michif, Jesse. You come from a long line of chiefs, political leaders, and resistance fighters.” Auntie’s voice glowed like fire and lit my curiosity.

  I went through the photos faster and faster, trying to drink in the rushing river of information. Those of the Cree chiefs fascinated me most. They were strong and epic in appearance, in their beaded buckskins, feathered headdresses to the ground, and spears in hand, many on horseback and surrounded by warriors. But they looked staged.

  Then I saw pictures of my kokum Nancy and mushoom Jeremie and their little shack near the train tracks and felt a lump in my throat—I hadn’t seen an image of them in nearly four decades. Below those was a battlefield picture with the heading “Batoche,” and underneath it was that blue flag with the infinity symbol I’d seen when I’d had the fever after my operation.

  “What is this battle—Batoche? And what’s this flag, Auntie?” I asked. Visions of the western door and the horses and the fear I’d felt welled in my chest again, but I fought against it now with my auntie on the line.

  “That’s where our family fought for our land during the resistance—when Canada attacked us. And that’s our flag—the Métis flag.”

  The reports of Gatling guns thundered in my soul. The face of the Indian I’d been with in the rifle pit in my dream came to me. I searched the family tree and couldn’t find him, but I remembered that Iron Maiden song Leeroy and Derick sang near the dumpster.

  Could this be part of the same conflict . . . ?

  I searched the pictures and saw the same columns of redcoat soldiers near the large river, charging up the same slope of hill, toward that same white church. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was real.

  I stayed on the phone for a half-hour with Aunt Yvonne and she explained how our people had fought and been pushed off our lands around Batoche, Saskatchewan, after 1885 and were made to squat on public Crown lands on the sides of roads and railways, known as road allowances—land nobody owned or wanted. The Métis weren’t taken care of with a treaty like First Nations peoples with reserves, but cast off to wander, unprotected and dispossessed—we were the forgotten people.

  The waist-high grass along the old highway in northern Saskatchewan rustled as warm wind blew from the south. I took my camera out and snapped a photo of the now-deteriorating railway line running from Debden up to Big River. Its steel bed snaked up over the crest of the hill then disappeared into the shrubs and thistles; I couldn’t trace where Kokum took me berry picking, but knew it was somewhere here. Standing beside me were my mom, Aunt Yvonne, and Dr. Carolyn Podruchny, a York University professor and expert in Métis history.

  I’d met Carolyn after Dr. Freeman marked my family history paper.

  “This is one of the best papers I’ve read all year,” she said. “I think you need to meet a friend of mine.”
r />   Two weeks later, I was at Carolyn’s office in York University’s History Department, a binder of Aunt Yvonne’s and my own genealogy research in hand. Yvonne was right: genealogy was addictive, but in the best possible way.

  I learned quickly Carolyn hadn’t read my paper, but she wanted to know my family’s history. After some explaining, she said she knew exactly who my mother’s people were—Arcand, Morrissette, Montour—some of the major Métis resistance fighter clans, bison hunters, and road-allowance families in the northern parkland belt in Saskatchewan.

  She agreed to take me on as a student.

  “You’ll do an independent reading course,” she said, adding that she’d hire me as a research assistant on her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council project, “Tracing Métis History Through Archives,” which involved fieldwork at various Métis historical sites in Saskatchewan.

  I was thrilled. It meant I would see my mother and our people in our homelands, where I hadn’t been since I was three.

  Carolyn flew me home in June.

  It felt so good to hug my mom after so many years. I don’t think I mustered any words in the airport, I let my tears do the talking. We growled like wolves the same way Josh and she did years ago in my grandparents’ doorway. Carolyn clapped her hands in excitement.

  For two weeks, Carolyn and I, along with my mom and Aunt Yvonne, drove all over the province to interview about a dozen Cree and Métis Elders, visiting historical sites relevant to the 1885 resistance, including Batoche. Many of the Elders told us they’d never shared their history with outsiders before. Given their traumatic history and treatment by the Canadian government, it was understandable.

  The road allowance where my kokum and mushoom lived was the last stop on our research trip and my quest back to my identity. The land stretched about an acre back from the old road, right over to the train tracks. I recognized the ash and poplar trees off in the distance, bending and moaning as they arched over the now-derelict property. Mom wandered ahead of us to the old smoker, a small shack where my grandparents used to smoke moose, bear, and deer meat. There was nothing but a few rotten pieces of wood where it once stood.

  I took this photo of my mom (right) and Aunt Yvonne (left) in the Park Valley schoolhouse, about three kilometres from the Morrissette cabin, on the day we visited the road allowance. Mom said she was so happy I was home that she’d dance—and she kept her word.

  Aunt Yvonne hiked toward two depressions in the grass and pointed to the ruts. “You can still see where the cars and carts used to drive up, doctor.”

  Carolyn batted at the mosquitoes buzzing around her head as she struggled through the overgrown grass. I limped alongside her, like usual, but energy radiated up my legs—I was stepping on ground I hadn’t tread in thirty-seven years—and it was like the road allowance remembered me, the prairie roses all across the property appeared to be smiling at me, welcoming me home, waving their heads this way and that.

  Aunt Yvonne motioned her hand over another depression some thirty by sixty feet with small shrubs and trees growing within it—fauna not as tall as the surrounding forest.

  “This is where they lived, ma mère and mon père.” She looked at me and her black eyes seemed to hug right around my whole body. Carolyn turned to face me. She, too, had eyes as big as moose tracks in the snow.

  I stepped within the depression of the building and fell to my knees.

  The smell of lard and my kokum cooking bannock washed over me. I heard kokum singing to the hornets and mosquitoes, lulling them away, as we picked berries. The sweet sound of the Morrissette reels my mushoom played throbbed in my ears, the flicker of moonbeams on his vest danced across my eyes. The faint scent of smoke from my kokum’s hearth wafted across the air. I saw my mushoom whittling a toy sword.

  I remembered them.

  I remembered my mother’s people.

  I remembered who I was.

  IN THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY

  LUCIE AND I DIDN’T HAVE a big wedding. We didn’t have the money nor did we want the headache. We just went to Toronto City Hall with a handful of our closest family members and friends.

  Jerry was there. He was my best man, and he was wearing his finest black shirt, with his hair slicked back.

  We didn’t talk much, but when he adjusted my tie, he said, “It’s been a long road, Jess—time for a new pact, though, eh? She’s a wonderful woman,” and his voice cracked. Uncle Ron and his daughter were my witnesses. They shed some tears, but he kept a straighter face than she did, the way we Thistle men were trained to do by Grandpa.

  Lucie’s best friend came, too, along with her boyfriend, a professor at Humber College. He was in charge of the music and was supposed to play “Sweet Disposition” by the Temper Trap after the Justice of the Peace announced we could kiss, but he missed the cue and didn’t hit play until a few minutes after everything ended. There were cheers and laughter behind us as we embraced.

  Liba, my mother-in-law, sat weeping in the front row. Her smile was so big it filled the whole of Canada.

  After the ceremony, we gathered in front of the Jack Layton memorial in Nathan Phillips Square, and everyone drank and clinked together glasses of semi-expensive champagne—I had my bottle of 7Up, ever the teetotaller. My clinks made more of a blopping sound.

  We went camping in Killarney Provincial Park for our honeymoon. We brought Luna, a golden Labrador retriever Lucie was dog-sitting for a friend, and got a campsite way at the back of the park. When we arrived near dusk, we saw we had neighbours: a little girl and her father. They were roasting marshmallows and singing. We waved to them, unpacked, got a campfire going, and settled by it, smiling and happy and hopeful of what the future held.

  TARA NOELLE BATES

  Lucie and I were married on August 25, 2012, at Toronto City Hall.

  The next morning, we awoke early, walked down to the lakeside, grasped hands, and promised one another that we’d love and support each other and be friends until our last breaths.

  The city hall ceremony had been just a legal formality; the real wedding happened while the two of us were alone in the woods, by the lakeshore, in the misty sunrise. We submerged our hands in the water and the bond was sealed.

  In that moment of love, continents joined and the gaping maw within me closed, silent and forever.

  Creator and Luna were our only witnesses.

  The water ceremony was the way I imagine my ancestors would have married. It was the best wedding we could have asked for.

  AMENDS

  Today I walked back to where we used to live

  Same old fence surrounds,

  Same old paint on the windowpanes

  This, the place where it all happened.

  Guilt pushes me here; I can’t live these excuses anymore.

  You’ve long since passed, I know this.

  But here I am regardless,

  Reaching through time,

  Staring at our door

  Apologizing for breaking your hearts.

  A silent amend you’ll never hear.

  SIXTEEN LETTERS

  WHEN MY AUNT SHERRY DIVIDED my grandparents’ estate she discovered an old shoebox, tucked away in the closet, up top, in the hardest to reach spot, with the rest of my grandmother’s most precious belongings. Inside it was a stack of old letters from the Ontario Correctional Institute (OCI) in Brampton, where Dad served his last sentence before being released on day parole in December 1982. After that, he vanished forever after getting into a car outside Aunt Sherry’s place.

  “He just got in and we never saw him again, Jesse,” Aunt Sherry said. “I really miss my big brother, too.” She cried like she always did.

  I was shocked when Aunt Sherry gave the letters to me along with a tiny black prison Bible that OCI sent my grandmother. I didn’t know they existed.

  “These should go to you,” she said. “You’re the most like him, lived a life closest to his.”

  My father’s name was scrawled i
nside the front of the Bible, once in printing, which was scratched out, and then in flourishing cursive script underneath.

  I knew what that meant the instant I saw it. The curve of the letters, the gentle pressure on the rounded S and roll of the Ns and T: he was trying to perfect what he’d learned in school and discarded years earlier, he was trying to better himself in his cage.

  I’d done the exact same thing in a letter I’d sent to my grandmother when I was practicing my writing in jail years earlier.

  I pored over his letters, memorizing every one word for word, and I saw the same effort. He wanted to be a better man, to change and love, and be home for his family, but couldn’t for some reason.

  My favourite letter was the one addressed directly to me where he talks about Yorkie, my absolute best friend growing up.

  “Don’t be afraid of the dog—he’s a good boy,” he assured me.

  I was just four years old when he wrote it, and apparently afraid of Yorkie then. In another letter he wrote, “Grandma tells me you have all the women.”

  One of the letters Dad wrote to me from a corrections facility in 1981. I would have been four years old when he sent it. I didn’t see it until I was in my late thirties.

  I guessed she must have told him about the time I ripped up the catalogue and had the pictures of models strewn beside me under the covers, and how Yorkie busted me by romping about on the bed. I had a hard time keeping it together reading that one.

  Those sixteen letters and the black prison Bible are all I have of my dad—that, and the world of resentments I had to sort through on the streets, then in rehab. But it’s more than I ever had, and I was grateful for the journey back to him, even if the old shoebox, some thirty-four years later, was as close as we’d ever get to being father and son.