To turn his life story into a book, Clayton Thomas-Müller had to come back home to Winnipeg

Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Life in the City of Dirty Water author Clayton Thomas-Müller.

Around seven years ago, I was having a hard time in my role as an Indigenous Cree climate campaigner. A really hard time.

I was having a hard time as a father and as a husband. I was going on autopilot in my interactions with my sons, who were four and six at the time. And I was missing home, living in Ottawa away from family and so far from where I grew up in Winnipeg.

I started talking to my therapist about what I should do. He told me to keep doing all the things I'd been doing to deal with childhood trauma: go to sweat lodge ceremonies, continuing with therapy, get regular exercise, try to lose weight, make art. He told me to start writing.

So I did. I wrote a book that was too screwed up to publish. It was a book that would have traumatized the people I love, whom I am still on a healing journey with. As the first person in my family to not go to Indian residential school, part of my healing means healing from the colonization my family has experienced — that we continue to experience — so that I am not held down by it. I knew that there was another book inside of me that I needed to write so I could be present as the father I know I can be.

At the time, we were living in Ottawa. After a whirlwind marriage in Oakland, California, followed by a brief stint in Vancouver, my sons' mother and I settled in the capital city, where both of our sons were born.

I wanted to reconnect with the art of storytelling that is traditional to my people, Cree peoples. I wanted to tell stories about what it's like to be Indigenous in these lands called "Canada," what it was like to grow up in the inner city of Winnipeg. I wanted to tell stories of my life — stories that would resonate with the many Indigenous Peoples who find themselves in Canada's inner cities with unanswered questions.

I decided to ask my friend Spencer Mann, a filmmaker who I work with on climate justice and Indigenous rights campaigns, if we could record an audio history. He filmed me in Winnipeg outside different homes where I grew up — telling the stories of life as a Cree kid, the stories of managing a drug house at the Furby St. house for the Manitoba Warriors. We filmed me going with old friends on an Elk and Moose hunt in Thunderchild Cree Nation (Treaty 6 territory) and going to the Tar Sands. We filmed me harvesting sweetgrass with my kids and celebrating my 40th with friends and family.

Our small team transcribed these recordings and we fed the audio into Google Docs' speech-to-text feature, which in turn spit out a manuscript. From this came my memoir — Life in the City of Dirty Water. 

It's a big deal writing a book. When I started, I thought it was going to just be BOOM! and one year later a book on a shelf in the bookstore. But the actual process of editing the manuscript was a long journey. I spent many late nights in back and forths with my editors Anna, Amanda and (later on) Nicolas. The editing process spread out over a five-year period until I finally got to see Life in the City of Dirty Water on a bookshelf at the airport.

As far as what it looked like when I was editing my book, I was often sitting late at night in my kitchen or on Zoom calls, working through organizing the chapters with my editor. As a father and a full-time campaigner fighting multinational corporations for a living, time in the day was very precious, so I had to make time when my sons and their mother were in bed to really get into it. I did not like working on my book when my family was around anyway because of the very private matters I was writing about. So the late nights writing in the dark felt more supportive to the creative process.

It was difficult managing the balance between getting this book out and my day work organizing for climate justice and Indigenous rights. The book is about me calling back 20 or so variations of Clayton that I had created over the duration of my life to make people around me comfortable, namely settler folks. It was about letting go of some of the trauma I have been carrying — things that are not my responsibility to carry any longer.

The 60-thousand-foot question that Life in the City of Dirty Water asks us all is, "What is it going to take for everyone living in these lands they call Canada to heal from the violence of colonization?" Moving forward, I plan to keep participating in the conversation. I am hopeful that the future is rich with justice, reparations, forgiveness and eventually peace — and I hope my book can play a small part in helping us get there. 

Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts.