Evicted From Nowhere: A Story of Survival in Ottawa
In May, a small encampment in the ByWard Market was dismantled. The official reason given was health and safety, but for a volunteer quoted in the Ottawa Citizen, the act was simple: it was “inhumane.”
This single word gets to the heart of a difficult truth. When we see a collection of tents in a public park, it is easy to see it as a problem to be managed. But to truly understand what is happening, we must look past the tents and see the people, and ask a more fundamental question: why are they there?
It is what happens when every other system has failed. The answer is that an encampment is never a first choice; it is a last resort. And in that last resort, something remarkable happens: a community is formed.
This is a reality captured with raw honesty in Jesse Thistle’s powerful memoir, “From the Ashes”. His memoir is a raw and honest account of a life shaped by the legacy of intergenerational trauma. Thistle bravely shares his experience of being Indigenous, homeless, and finding his way through the streets of the ByWard Market. He writes with heartbreaking clarity about being abandoned in childhood and falling through the cracks into a decade-long cycle of addiction, incarceration, and shelters.
“I wasn’t just homeless; I was ‘nothing.’ I had lost my connection to my family, my past, my Michif self. When you’re on the street, the world does everything it can to erase you.”
From the Ashes, Jesse Thistle
His journey shows that the path to a tent in a park is paved with systemic failure and deep, personal pain. When we listen to those with lived experience, it’s hard to view encampments just as a collection of tents. They are a symptom of a broken housing system. It is a refuge for those healing from immense trauma. It is a community of survivors.
“We were all just a bunch of broken people, but we were broken together. We looked out for each other. On the street, your friends are your family. They’re all you have.”
From the Ashes, Jesse Thistle
This is why the act of dismantling an encampment is so much more than just a “clean-up.” It is the tearing apart of a fragile support network. It is re-traumatizing people who are already struggling. It does nothing to solve the underlying problem that Thistle’s story makes so clear: a profound lack of safe, affordable, and culturally appropriate housing.
The real solution is not to find more efficient ways to displace people. The real solution is to make encampments unnecessary in the first place. This requires a commitment to the only things we know truly work: permanent supportive housing, robust mental health and addiction services, and a compassionate, human rights-based approach that sees the person, not just the tent.