Jesse Thistle, the author of From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way, chronicles his life and struggles with addiction, crime, and living on the streets. Rehabilitation and education play a significant role in helping him find his way back to stability, particularly his studies in Indigenous history, which help him develop a strong sense of community and identity. The idea of identity, in particular, is especially important to the story.

Métis, which means “mixed” in French, is a term applied to people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry (“Métis.” Encyclopædia Britannica). The Métis-Cree, however, are the only speakers of Michif, a language that is a combination of Cree and French but is also influenced by English and other Indigenous languages (Brown, Jennifer. “Michif.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 3 Aug. 2018). Chapter 1 describes a scene in which a young Thistle spends time with his maternal grandparents, who live in a road-allowance home. Métis families lived in road-allowance communities for almost a century, using these spaces as homes after relocations and migrations from their homelands by colonial forces. They expressed violent resistance to these relocation in the late 1800s but were eventually allocated the road-allowance lands by the Canadian government, who labeled the Métis as “rebellious” or “troublesome” (Logan, Tricia.