Amazon Prime Free Trial
FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button and confirm your Prime free trial.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited FREE Prime delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-29% $16.36$16.36
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: BOOK_DEPOT
$6.94$6.94
FREE delivery January 29 - February 3
Ships from: ThriftBooks-Atlanta Sold by: ThriftBooks-Atlanta
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample
Follow the author
OK
Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing Hardcover – August 24, 2021
Purchase options and add-ons
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 J.W. DAFOE BOOK PRIZE*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 MANITOBA BOOK AWARDS’ MCNALLY ROBINSON BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD*
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A gritty and inspiring memoir from renowned Cree environmental activist Clayton Thomas-Muller, who escaped the world of drugs and gang life to take up the warrior’s fight against the assault on Indigenous peoples’ lands—and eventually the warrior’s spirituality.
There have been many Clayton Thomas-Mullers: The child who played with toy planes as an escape from domestic and sexual abuse, enduring the intergenerational trauma of Canada's residential school system; the angry youngster who defended himself with fists and sharp wit against racism and violence, at school and on the streets of Winnipeg and small-town British Columbia; the tough teenager who, at 17, managed a drug house run by members of his family, and slipped in and out of juvie, operating in a world of violence and pain.
But behind them all, there was another Clayton: the one who remained immersed in Cree spirituality, and who embraced the rituals and ways of thinking vital to his heritage; the one who reconnected with the land during summer visits to his great-grandparents' trapline in his home territory of Pukatawagan in northern Manitoba.
And it's this version of Clayton that ultimately triumphed, finding healing by directly facing the trauma that he shares with Indigenous peoples around the world. Now a leading organizer and activist on the frontlines of environmental resistance, Clayton brings his warrior spirit to the fight against the ongoing assault on Indigenous peoples' lands by Big Oil.
Tying together personal stories of survival that bring the realities of the First Nations of this land into sharp focus, and lessons learned from a career as a frontline activist committed to addressing environmental injustice at a global scale, Thomas-Muller offers a narrative and vision of healing and responsibility.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAllen Lane
- Publication dateAugust 24, 2021
- Dimensions6.23 x 0.83 x 9.28 inches
- ISBN-10073524006X
- ISBN-13978-0735240063
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
Editorial Reviews
Review
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 J.W. DAFOE BOOK PRIZE*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 MANITOBA BOOK AWARDS’ MCNALLY ROBINSON BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD*
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
One of CBC’s:
“Best Canadian Non-Fiction of 2021”
“12 books for the outdoor enthusiast on your holiday shopping list”
“18 Canadian books for the memoir lover on your holiday shopping list”
“[A] brave story. . . . Thomas-Muller not only writes about his upbringing in Winnipeg, which translated from Cree means ‘dirty water,’ he unravels how he began healing by using prayer and participating in his culture. . . . [Life in the City of Dirty Water] is a deep account of survivance against systems of oppression, intergenerational trauma and addiction, and about finding healing and highlighting his Cree experience.”
—The Tyee
“In [Thomas-Muller’s] latest memoir, Life in the City of Dirty Water, he painfully and bravely reveals his journey through catastrophic pain, unbelievable odds and a reconnection to land, language and culture through his work defending Mother Earth. . . . His memoir is an artefact of transformation—a transformation of a hardened youth who endured more tragedy and danger than most of us can imagine into a defender of people, land and the notion that all species and systems are connected.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“From selling drugs in a gang to organizing environmental campaigns against oil and gas extraction, the stories of Thomas-Muller’s life defy any one category to paint a complex picture of what it is to be a Cree man in Canada.”
—The Globe and Mail
“An incredible story. . . [and] a beautiful book.”
—CBC, “The Current”
“[In Life in the City of Dirty Water,] Thomas-Muller finds hope in the growing movement of climate change activism, especially by children.”
—Vancouver Sun
“This book is an adventure story in every way. A life of drug dealers and crackhouses and guns; leaving that behind for a remarkable time of spiritual and personal growth; and there’s the ongoing adventure of working desperately to protect the planet and its sacred places. Clayton Thomas-Müller relates these adventures in ways that will help everyone through unfamiliar terrain—he’s a trustworthy guide and an authentic storyteller. In a moment when Indigenous people around the world are coming to the very fore of the most crucial fights, this volume will broaden your understanding in powerful ways. And you won’t forget its scenes any time soon.”
—Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and author of Earth and Oil and Honey
“Clayton Thomas-Müller—Cree poet and environmental warrior dedicated to decolonization—has crafted an awesome, lyrical memoir that captures the experiences of urban Indigenous youth facing poverty, drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, and juvenile detention. Most, like Clayton, inherited the intergenerational trauma of residential schools. Clayton found a way to escape trauma and poverty in order to fight for his people. This beautifully written book is required reading for everyone who cares about justice for the survivors of genocide who continue to survive in colonized conditions. It offers a path to liberation that may also be the way to saving the earth and humanity itself.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“[An] inspiring memoir.”
—CBC
“The one thing that Clayton is able to do is he connects the past with the future. I think that’s what sets it apart from all the other books. We have an uncertain future ahead of us and he really takes what he’s learned from his past, his culture, his spirituality, his ancestors—and all those stories of creation and spirituality that make us a whole community. It makes the First Nations and all the people of Canada whole. It’s that wholeness that’s going to bring us forward. So I feel like Life in the City of Dirty Water really was able to do that better than any other book. It shows us a pathway forward as we try to deal with upcoming trauma that is undoubtedly going to happen as the climate changes.”
—Suzanne Simard, bestselling author of Finding the Mother Tree (Canada Reads)
“A gritty and inspiring memoir.”
—Daily Herald Tribune
“[A]n artefact of transformation—a transformation of a hardened youth who endured more tragedy and danger than most of us can imagine into a defender of people, land and the notion that all species and systems are connected . . . . [Thomas-Müller] painfully and bravely reveals his journey through catastrophic pain, unbelievable odds and a reconnection to land, language, and culture through his work defending Mother Earth.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“[An] inspiring and accomplished memoir.”
—Daily Hive
“[Life in a City of Dirty Water has] more ups, downs, chaos, pain, and beauty than many of us will ever experience.”
—St. Albert Gazette
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ᑕᐸᓰᐃᐧᐣ
flight
The first time my father saw an airplane, he thought it must be an angel. He was five years old, standing outside his family’s cabin deep in the bush, on Pukatawagan First Nation in northern Manitoba. It was before he attended residential school, but Catholicism was already very present in the community and he had heard about angels from the priest who lived on the rez. That day, he heard a strange noise and looked up. He saw a white cross flying through the sky, and he thought: This must be an angel, because what else could it be?
He told me that story many years later. We were at the St. Regis Hotel in Winnipeg, and he was drunk out of his tree. It was one of the half-dozen times I ever spent with him. Even though I was only seven at the time, hearing the story triggered something inside me. I now know that the unsettled feeling I had was the sudden understanding that I’m only one generation away from living in the bush and being of the land. In only one lifetime, everything had changed.
My father, Peter Sinclair Sr., was a Cree bushman, and a miner, and he worked for the railroad. He was also an advisor to political leaders, and a writer, and a bureaucrat. He was from Pukatawagan First Nation, the easternmost First Nation in our territory, Treaty 6, which spans Saskatchewan and into Alberta. My family is spread out over a vast region, from Pelican Narrows to Sandy Bay, a Métis settlement in northern Saskatchewan, through South Indian Lake and Nelson House, Manitoba, where my mother’s father comes from, with Pukatawagan right in the middle of it all. These are all the territories of the Swampy Cree people, or the Rocky Cree as we call ourselves.
My father was actually half Cree. His father, Keno, born Adalbert du Bois de Vroylande, was a full-blooded Belgian immigrant who was a World War II fighter pilot and a war hero. My grandfather became disillusioned with his aristocratic life and jumped on a steamship after the war. He went to Hudson Bay, got on a dogsled, and went into the bush. He met a woman who became his wife, and they created my father. My grandfather was famous in our community of Pukatawagan. He and my grandmother owned and operated a general store. He had a Clydesdale horse way up in northern Manitoba, and he built a root cellar so he could have vegetables in the wintertime. That just blew all the Indians away.
My father drank himself to death at the age of fifty-eight. I don’t know why he drank, but the limited stories he told me about himself give a glimpse: watching his father die of a heart attack in their general store, being raped by a nun throughout his whole time in residential school.
The last time I saw my father was at the Seven Oaks General Hospital in Winnipeg. He still had jet-black hair and big, bushy black eyebrows, sort of a kind look, and a bit of a crooked smile. But he was all swollen and yellow with jaundice. The late stages of cirrhosis had kicked in. The last thing he said to me was “Ah, Clayton, always so serious. I’m sorry I haven’t been a good dad. Take care of your kids. Make some money so that when you’re dead, they’ll have something.”
I said, “OK, I’ll do that, Dad,” and I left. I was twenty-six years old.
A couple of weeks later, I flew back to Winnipeg to bury him. As I sat on the plane, I thought back to my father’s memory of the first plane he saw and here I was sitting in one of those white crosses in the sky on my way to bury him.
After the funeral, I drove with the procession to The Pas for the second funeral, with my dad’s body in a coffin in the back of a pickup leading the way. I slept beside his body at the funeral parlour in Opaskwayak Cree Nation, and then my siblings brought him to our trapline for his third and final funeral service, burying him beside our grandmother. His spirit sat with me for the drive back to Winnipeg, the whole way down Highway 6, and we laughed about all the things we did not get to work out while he was still alive.
I didn’t really know my dad, but I was always thankful to him for giving me life. I never hated him for being a drunk and for not achieving his potential. He had been a very handsome man, intelligent and articulate. People I’ve talked to from his generation have told me that they thought he was going to be the one to lead our people.
From my father, I have eleven brothers and six sisters, from Alaska to New York and all the way to Brazil. I know a few of them and we all have different moms. All of my dad’s children took his death differently—some got angry, some didn’t come to the funerals, some were so drunk they were barely there. Some fought over my dad’s earthly possessions, and he didn’t have much. The only thing I inherited from my father was the sportscoat he had on when he was admitted into the hospital before he died. It still had his blood all over the front of it from him puking it up. What I really wanted was photos—I only have one or two of my dad, and he was pretty hammered in them. I don’t have any pictures of him looking dignified.
My dad had an eye for my mom, though he was much older than her. He first met her in 1976, when my mom was about fifteen and going to high school in Thompson, way up in northern Manitoba. At the time, my father was working as an agent for the federal Ministry of Indian Affairs. He was one of the only Indian Indian agents.
On one of his trips to Thompson, he ran into my mom and he said to her, “Hey Gail, I really like you. I would like to spend some time with you.” That night he took her on a date to the Thompson Inn, a notorious Indian bar. He and my mom snagged on their first date. My mom became pregnant with me. She didn’t tell him.
The social worker at Student Services at the Indian Affairs office in Thompson told my mom that she had to get an abortion. But my mom, like all my aunties, had gone to a Catholic residential school, so she thought she’d go to hell if she had an abortion. The social worker said, “Well, you’re going to have a really hard time if you stay here in the north and have a baby.” She put my mom on an airplane to Winnipeg.
My mom was all alone, with no friends or family, and over eight hundred kilometres from home. The social workers in Winnipeg managed to get her a place at Villa Rosa, a home for unwed mothers, run by nuns. She stayed there until the morning of July 17, 1977, when she thought she had to go to the washroom and one of her girlfriends said, “Maybe you should go to the hospital.” The hospital was one block over, so she walked there. I was born at 8:42 that morning in a hospital called Misericordia, in the West Broadway neighbourhood of Winnipeg.
My mother is also Cree. Her mom came from Pukatawagan, and her dad is from Southend, Saskatchewan. My mother was born in The Pas, in northern Manitoba. She lived a trapping lifestyle in the bush until the RCMP took her from her family and forced her to attend the Guy Hill Indian Residential School. She was only six.
She stayed there until grade 10. My mother moved to Thompson to finish her high school at the Indian day school they had there. It was at that day school that she met my dad. So she pretty much went from residential school to the maternity ward.
But my mother left our reserve at sixteen. She knew that Winnipeg could offer her more than just decent healthcare. She wanted to get an education. She wanted to give her child more choices than she had. If she was going to raise a kid alone, Winnipeg was the place to do it. There were more services available and more education and work options in Winnipeg than back home on the rez. And people weren’t trying to rape you or shoot you, which was a common thing in Puk back in the 1970s, which is why they called it Dodge City. It had the highest murder rate per capita in North America for a decade. She was vulnerable there. To my mom, going to the city was the safest thing for a pregnant teenager to do.
She lived a paradox I have spent years trying to understand. She had to leave her people to be safe. Leaving the land is the source of so many of our problems, so how could it also be the solution? She survived residential school only to seek refuge at a hospital founded by nuns. These facts have not been easy for me to reconcile.
Still, my mother did not turn her back on the land. My childhood was like that of many other Indigenous youth in this country called Canada—it was very urban. But when I was a young child, I would spend my summers in the north on our family’s trapline in Jetait, which is at Mile 121 of the train line between Pukatawagan Cree Nation and Lynn Lake. A trapline is the land Indians are entitled to occupy under the Indian Act. Each trapper is allowed to hunt, fish, and trap on a parcel of land, and the head of the family receives a land occupancy permit, which is passed down through inheritance. So a trapline is a complicated thing too. It is part of an Indian’s relationship with the federal government. But it is also a crucial part of their relationship with their family. And it is a life-giving relationship with the land.
Often, Mooshum Edward would take all the kids to walk his trapline. We would accompany him as he checked his rabbit snares. Ours is a land of wetlands and swamps that open up onto beautiful rivers and the rocky shorelines of lakes. It is a world of secrets, and of shadows pierced by shafts of sunlight and blue sky, of the earthy smell of sphagnum and the lemony aroma of spruce. We loved making our way along the paths and among the thickets.
Grandpa’s snares would frequently catch animals he hadn’t intended—a lot of squirrels and chipmunks, that sort of thing. We kids loved it. We’d get these stiff squirrels on a piece of copper wire and we’d walk behind my grandpa making the squirrels talk: “Hi, Larry, how you doing?” “Oh not too bad, Bob.” “Going to the store today?” We’d make the squirrels fight. Make them fly. Kids are like that.
On our trapline, I got to witness the abundance of our land and the incredible love that my great-grandmother and great-grandfather had, not just for me but for so many children whom they would take from the reserve every summer to come live out in the bush and fish and pick berries. A lot of kids who had problems or came from dysfunctional homes would stay with my great-grandparents, who would take care of them, and feed them, and give them the love they needed.
Product details
- Publisher : Allen Lane (August 24, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 073524006X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0735240063
- Item Weight : 12.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.23 x 0.83 x 9.28 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,489,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #93 in Native Canadian Biographies
- #559 in Canadian Politics
- #1,163 in Native American Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2023The author candidly describes the effects of colonization on the indigenous population in Canada, many of which are shared among indigenous populations worldwide, in this autobiography. He shares his ongoing struggles to overcome these challenges through cooperative action with other indigenous populations and allied groups (particularly environmental and justice groups).
The author, first and foremost, is an excellent storyteller and this is a page-turner! Beyond that, he is brilliantly able to honestly express complicated issues from multiple perspectives. This is one of the best books I've ever read.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2023I very much appreciate reading a story about someone who started out with so many negatives in his life and through luck and determination got rid of so many of those negatives. It was also impressive to read about someone who has dedicated so much of his life to the betterment of himself and others.
I am not rating this any higher than three stars though because there are some grammatical errors (surprising that these were not caught in the editing process), some irritating repetitions, and the story jumped around too much for me. Chapter two was almost confusing/boring with the long, long, long list of organizations the author started and/or worked with.
Top reviews from other countries
- ShelleyReviewed in Canada on August 20, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Good read
It good to read about your own communities and what happens beyond your front door
Well written
- ACASReviewed in Canada on August 18, 2022
4.0 out of 5 stars Informative
I found this to be an interesting book, written by the author who doesn't mince words, and writes as though he is with you and telling his story.
- Client d'AmazonReviewed in Germany on September 29, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written
Being from the same area and having a similar background as the writer, I was amazed with every page and so many of my experiences were validated after reading it. It's inspiring and beautifully written, and is an incredible depiction of real life for many Indigenous people. I highly recommend everyone to read this to better understand Indigenous people and our struggles - this should be read in schools!
- DianaReviewed in Canada on January 9, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Transformation
This is an amazing memoir. Clayton suffers so much trauma being an indigenous kid living in inner city poverty. His transformation from a life of violence, crime, alcohol and drug addiction is fascinating reading. He becomes an activist for indigenous rights and the environment. His ideas for restoring the earth and the economy are definitely what’s needed, a must read for all.
- Lesley K MallettReviewed in Canada on November 12, 2021
3.0 out of 5 stars Hard to keep up
I found this book hard to process as it kept jumping around time frame wise. I also feel the writing is a little stilted and the story did not flow for me. I read it all though and he sure had an interesting life. An insight into a complex indigenous man for sure.