Jesse Thistle spent more than a decade on the streets and in jail. But despite this he has managed to become an expert on the culture of his Indigenous Canadian ancestors - with the help of his mother, from whom he was separated as a young child.
Sometimes, at night, feeling humiliated after a day of begging, Jesse Thistle would walk up to the fountain on Ottawa's Parliament Hill.
Sitting on the edge of the monument, he would plunge his hands into the cold water, to fish out the coins visitors had thrown in for luck. The policemen on duty always saw Jesse coming. They'd watch as he shovelled handfuls of wet change into his pockets, then chase him away.
Jesse was 32 and had recently relapsed from rehab, but he'd been living on the streets, on and off, ever since his grandparents kicked him out when he was 19.
"My grandfather was a disciplinarian - old school - he believed in work, really hard work, and he would hit us if we did bad stuff," Jesse says.
"He would say, 'If I ever catch you doing drugs, I will disown you, it's that simple,' and he meant what he said."
So the day that Jesse's grandmother saw a bag of cocaine fall out of Jesse's pocket, he was told to pack his things and leave.
"It was like my world had ended," he says. "I could see on their faces that I'd broken their hearts."
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Jesse's life had been chaotic from the start. His father, Sonny, had got into trouble with the law in Toronto and had run away to northern Saskatchewan, where he met a teenager from the M?tis-Cree Indigenous group.
Her name was Blanche and she gave birth to three sons one after the other, Josh first, Jerry, and then Jesse.
Sonny drank and used heroin, and was often violent, so eventually Blanche ran away, taking the boys with her.
For a while they lived in Moose Jaw, sleeping on proper beds rather than piles of laundry and eating three meals a day. Then Sonny turned up again and told Blanche he had an apartment and a job in Toronto. Blanche was studying as well as working, and he persuaded her to let him take the boys for a few months, to give her a break.
But there was no new job, and Sonny hadn't overcome his addictions. He'd disappear for days at a time, leaving the boys - all aged under six - alone in the apartment. There was little food when Sonny was there and none when he wasn't. He taught the boys how to beg, how to shoplift, and how to roll him cigarettes by harvesting tobacco from butts picked up off the streets.
It was a few months before a neighbour alerted Child Services, and police came and took the boys away. Jesse was by now aged four, and he and his brothers would never see their father again.
After a period in an orphanage and a foster home, they were sent to live with Sonny's parents.
"I assume Child Services never called my mom because back then Indigenous women were thought of as unclean, unfit and derelict of their positions as mothers," Jesse says.
"When Indigenous kids came across Child Services' desks, their natural inclination was to put them in white homes because white people were seen as prosperous and responsible. It was called the Sixties Scoop - thousands and thousands of Indigenous kids were taken that way - it was endemic."
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The Sixties Scoop
Despite its name, the Sixties Scoop started in the late 1950s and persisted for more than 20 years
About 20,000 Indigenous Canadian children were removed from their homes by child welfare agencies and placed with non-Indigenous families
These children lost their names, their languages, and their cultural identity
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Jesse's grandparents barred Blanche from coming to see her children for a few years, and Jesse grew up with little knowledge of his M?tis-Cree heritage.
"We knew we were 'Indian' and my brother remembers living in a tipi one summer in Saskatchewan," Jesse says, "but he went around and told all the kids that, and I gotta tell you, there's no faster way to get beat up in grade school in Canada than looking native and telling white kids that you lived in a tipi."
Jerry, Jesse and Josh in Cape Breton, 1980
image captionJerry, Jesse and Josh in Cape Breton, 1980
Other families in the neighbourhood were reluctant to let their children play with the brothers, and at some stage Jesse decided that it would make his life easier if he pretended to be Italian.
"I was denying who I was," he says. "I started to hate my heritage, hate myself and hate her [my mom] because she wasn't around. I felt like she had ditched us."
At school Jesse was always fighting, was held back because of his poor grades, and never learned how to read or do maths properly. Then he joined a gang in high school and really started getting into trouble.
"We were drinking, partying, going to raves and using drugs, and that soon became my identity," Jesse says. "I would lose myself on MDMA, ketamine and crystal meth for three, four and five days in a row."
And then his grandparents kicked him out.
One evening after becoming locked out of his brother Jerry's apartment in Toronto, Jesse fell three-and-a-half storeys to the ground while trying to break in. He survived and landed on his feet, but his right heel was shattered, his right ankle joint destroyed and both his wrists broken. Doctors couldn't believe that Jesse hadn't been killed. But his real problems began after he was discharged from hospital, when infection set in.
Jesse was smoking crack to dull the pain in his leg, but when his toes started turning black and his toenails began falling off he realised he needed help.
"My leg had rotten flesh, it was starting to go necrotic and it was gangrenous," he says.
He vaguely remembers doctors telling him that his leg may have to be amputated, and that if the infection spread to his heart or brain it could kill him. In panic, Jesse fled.
"I wanted to hide from the world and from my addictions, from all the mistakes and all the people that I'd hurt along the way. I just wanted to rot away and die," he says.
"I thought, 'Why don't I do a crime and go to jail? I'll be safe in there, have a place to rest, access to food and medication.'"
So he held up a convenience store and helped himself to the takings - but instead of waiting to be arrested, as he'd planned, he jumped into a large rubbish bin at the back of the shop and hid.
"I was in the garbage bin, thinking, 'I can't even rob a store properly,'" Jesse says.
He later discovered he'd taken less than $40 (Canadian dollars), and after a few weeks of drug-aggravated paranoia - imagining that he was about to be arrested at any minute - he turned himself in.
"I did it," he told the police, "I'm the guy who robbed the store. Now lock me up and throw away the key."
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Prison was an unlikely turning point for Jesse.
He received the medical help he so urgently needed for his leg, which quickly began to improve.
But there was no support to come off the drugs and alcohol he'd been addicted to since he was a teenager, and he went through a "horrible, horrible" withdrawal, involving agonising seizures in solitary confinement.
Surprisingly, the experience spurred him to resume his education.
"To fight the cravings from crack I started re-teaching myself how to read and write properly," he says.
After his release from prison, Jesse went into rehab to continue this work, while also dealing with his addictions.
"I'd stay up late every night looking over encyclopaedias and my grades started topping the charts. I took etiquette courses to re-teach me how to eat at a table and take care of my hygiene - all the things that I'd forgotten because I'd been drifting around so long. I felt good about myself for the first time in many, many years."
It wasn't plain sailing. He relapsed at one point, returning to the streets to beg - and take money from the Parliament Hill fountain - only managing to get back on track after he was sentenced to a one-year stint back at the same rehabilitation centre.
While there he received a strange email - a woman was looking for him, it said, and there was a number to call. It turned out to be his mother, whom he'd seen on only a handful of occasions since she'd let Jesse and his brothers go with their father to Toronto as small children.
Shaking and through tears, Jesse called Blanche but was so overwhelmed that he had to hang up several times while they were talking.
"I was just terrified of being rejected and terrified of love," he says. "But it was a beautiful conversation - it was like a rain quenching the prairies after a long drought, that's what it felt like."
Then more unexpected family news came, a message from his grandmother - the first contact he'd had with her since being banished from his grandparents' home years previously.
She was dying, she said, and asked Jesse to visit her.
"She gave me a tongue-lashing," Jesse says. "She was like, 'I'm really disappointed in you. I want you to make me a promise - follow through with this education, go to university, and go as far as you can.'"
Jesse swore that he'd do as his grandmother asked. He urged her to get better and they hugged before Jesse returned to rehab. Two weeks later she died.
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The day after his grandmother's death, Jesse received a message of condolence from an old school friend of one of his brothers.
"I think I fell in love with Lucie at that moment just because she was kind," Jesse says. "I light up thinking about it even now."
Jesse and Lucie started talking often, sometimes for hours at a time on the phone, and they'd Skype one another regularly.
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Originally Posted by JohnLanders
good dog!
