When the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness came out with a definition of Canadian homelessness in 2012, it didn’t sit right with executive board member Jesse Thistle. Which is odd, considering he spent his 20s cycling in and out of homelessness.

“[They] framed it around being unhoused, and there’s a range of unhoused conditions. And I was like, this is not articulating my experience as an Indigenous person with prior [homelessness] experience,” Thistle said in a phone interview with The Tyee last week.

“I said, we need … to articulate what the problem is. [But] we don’t even know what the problem is because no one’s properly defined it.”

His fellow board members listened and asked Thistle if he, now housed and an academic, wanted to take the lead on defining homelessness from the Indigenous perspective.

Jesse Thistle is the Resident Scholar on Indigenous Homelessness at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. This makes him one of Canada’s foremost experts on the subject, and for good reason: he’s been homeless himself. On October 26 he published a new definition of Indigenous homelessness that he hopes will spur decision-makers to shift how they deal with Indigenous people who end up on the street.

Jesse was on and off the street for over 10 years. “I got into some serious trouble with the law, and I was court ordered to go to rehab and sort myself out,” he told me. Eventually Jesse was able to get through rehab, and has now been sober since June 2008. “Part of me trying to figure myself out and my 12 steps was to go back and evaluate my past,” Jesse said.

What he found there was a deep sense of loss. “When I talk to residential school survivors, or people who have been taken by adoption like me and my brothers, our homelessness started in childhood when we were taken from our families,” he said. “From there, the loss of culture, the loss of identity, not knowing what’s your place in society, that leads to homelessness.”

The latest Census data simply confirms the reality that racialized people, people who are recent immigrants, and Indigenous people continue to face discrimination and that income inequality doesn’t just magically reverse itself. That takes political leadership.

It’s time for the federal and provincial governments to make concrete commitments to implement policies that will reduce income inequality in ways that will show measureable progress in the 2021 Census. This will require policy development, implementation, and hard dollars.