From The Ashes
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From the Ashes, by Métis-Cree-Scot author Jesse Thistle, is a brutal, well-crafted, poignant read. He grabs you by the collar with his first words, pulling you into the pages of his life, and you fall wide-eyed with him, unable to look away, hoping to find an end to his suffering and self-injury, but seemingly, there is none. Every time his life seems to have reached bottom, he has not. Torn from his mother and then his near homeless, drug-addicted father and then falling prey to addiction, homelessness, prison, self-abuse, and injury, to places no child or adult should go, your heart bleeds with him and for him. It is a story of pain, suffering, systemic racism, and finally, a form of redemption and success.
The author bared his soul for the reader and put into words experiences that would make most speechless. His courage makes this an essential read for those who know someone dealing with self-abuse, addiction, and systemic racism.
In the author's words in a CBC interview, he said, "If you look through the book, you'll see flashes of light every time I was traumatized. The way that my mind works, it's like looking through a shard of broken glass, with all the different light fragments. I can only capture them in one- and two-page memories because they either score my soul and I bleed too much or I can't remember because my mind blocks it out. It was painful, but it was also very beautiful. These were really hard, painful, sharp memories."
Recently, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation discovered the remains of over 215 unnamed indigenous children buried in hidden graves outside a former residential school in Canada. These terrible places operated between the 1840s to 1978. They systemically tore successive generations of indigenous children from their mothers and fathers and communities to attend boarding schools in distant lands. Teachers then stripped them of their language and culture and physically and psychologically abused them. While Jesse Thistle did not attend these schools, his suffering, in part, was a consequence of the systemic racism they represent.