The healing power of public archives
Research brought student new level of understanding
KITCHENER — Jesse Thistle was a homeless drug addict robbing corner stores for money when his life was turned around by, of all things, a visit to the public archives.
Today, Thistle is a top PhD student in history at York University who says he was able clean his life up when he finally started learning who he was and understanding his family’s history.
That work forced him to stay sober, learn about his buried Metis-Cree bloodline and helped explain his parents’ own troubled lives.
Raised by his grandparents in Brampton, Thistle says his indigenous heritage was never discussed. Those missing pieces in his identity would eventually cause a lot of problems, he said.
“It was just something that was not talked about. But it’s damaging to not know who you are or where you come from,” he said.
“The first time I heard my language, I was in jail … What I’m showing is that when indigenous people know their history, they can heal from it.”
Thistle’s story about using historical records for personal healing will be the focus of his free, public talk at 7 p.m. Tuesday inside council chambers at Kitchener City Hall, as part of Archives Awareness Week.
He’ll speak about his awardwinning paper “Archives as Good Medicine,” which traces his family’s story all the way back to the Northwest resistance of 1885. His great-grandmother was a cook for Louis Riel who fled after the government’s land grab and violent crackdown on the uprising.
Thistle says trauma from experiences like that, and from families of residential school survivors, has been passed down through generations. He’ll also talk about his father’s disappearance in 1982, and show two of his short films.
Most of his family history was unknown to him before he began his research.
He wanted to understand why his own life had gone so off the rails, and found the deeper he dug into his genealogy, the more his life began to improve.
“Without this, I don’t think I ever would have healed properly. The work of archivists and historians is particularly important for indigenous people like me who have been taken out of their community, raised elsewhere and lost their identity,” he said.
“And my story is common. I’m just one of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who have similar stories.”
As he reconnected with his lost heritage, Thistle says he started forgiving his parents.
He understood why his mother lost custody of him and his brothers, and finally addressed his father’s disappearance.
In 2013, he reported his father as missing, and police are now treating it as a murder case.
Understanding the broader context of his parents’ lives, their struggles and their own family histories, Thistle was finally able to address his own demons, too.
“It was eye-opening. Everything made sense,” he said.
“It just made everything crystal clear. I could see why my father had gotten into drugs, and why he’d disappeared. It allowed me to forgive him for not coming home.”