On a feeding night, Gale and her volunteers load vehicles with food and supplies and drive into the cold. Bear Claw sets up and word moves fast. People come. Some are coherent, some are not. Some are in the grinding misery of withdrawal, bodies shaking, eyes gone somewhere else.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gale moves among them. She knows who needs what. She knows who to hold and who to give space to and who has not eaten since she was last here. She is fierce and tender in the same motion, which can be difficult to sustain.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been in this life,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s how come my brothers and sisters \u2014 I understand them really well.\u201d<\/p>\n
She has a description of herself that she seems to have arrived at with some peace.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a crackhead on the streets. I was sex trafficked here in Edmonton.\u201d<\/p>\n
She says it not with shame and not exactly with pride either, but with the particular authority of someone who knows that her history is the credential, the reason she is trusted, the reason people come to her in the cold and the dark rather than away from her.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a labour of love,\u201d she says. \u201cI go from moment to moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Merrick lives moment to moment too.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a sergeant tell me, \u2018Judy, just let us play out our plan.\u2019 To me it\u2019s a genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is back at the Maskokamik Lodge now, until he finds out if he can go back to the transitional housing apartment he was living at. A week ago, he yelled at a staff member during an altercation after he had been drinking alcohol \u2014 a vice he vows not to continue allowing to hold a grip on him. The apartment offers cheaper rent, three meals a day, and a roof over his head-it\u2019s paid for by a social assistance cheque until he finds a job, but he wants to finish school first. It is more stability than he has had in years.<\/p>\n
He has a lot of time to think here. Long nights in a room that is his, technically, but feels like a way station between one uncertain thing and the next. He fills the time reading, drawing, writing lyrics and playing guitar when he can get his hands on one.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Creating art is his outlet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people describe it as morbid,\u201d he says of his art. \u201cI describe it as honest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Merrick was born into a family already fracturing under the weight of things that had happened long before him. His parents separated when he was young. Both struggled with addiction. His father, a man who spent his childhood in foster care, carried wounds that had never been treated.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had no mom or father to teach him,\u201d Merrick says. \u201cHe was in foster care all his life. So he got abused and abandoned. His attachment issues, he\u2019s emotionally scarred. Mentally scarred.\u201d<\/p>\n
His mother was a different kind of absence. He does not call her his mom. \u201cShe never loved me. She never treated me like a son. I was more of a slave.\u201d She would look at him and see his father\u2019s face and punish him for it, he says. \u201cYou look like your dad. You sound like your dad. You\u2019re gonna be just like your dad.\u201d He heard it enough times that for a while he believed it. They convinced him his dad didn\u2019t want him. They convinced him no one else did either.<\/p>\n
What he learned instead was how to sit in a room and read it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have no friends, you got nobody to talk to, you just sit there and watch people growing up. You recognize patterns. You see how they act, how they react to certain things.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IMG_0204-1-scaled.jpeg\")
Merrick, 19, from Saddle Lake Cree Nation has experienced homelessness since he was 16 when he lived in a tent with his father in Edmonton. Merrick is currently working to finish high school and hopes to one day have secure housing. Photo by Brandi Morin<\/p>\n
The losses in his family came in clusters. His paternal grandmother was found dead in her apartment. She had been sick \u2014 cancer \u2014 and the landlord had refused to let anyone in. By the time they reached her, she had been alone for three or four days.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had no food or water,\u201d Merrick says. \u201cShe was starving, dying of thirst. Dying in her own filth.\u201d He pauses. \u201cThe landlord went in. Found her body.\u201d<\/p>\n
His father\u2019s sister took her own life. And then his maternal grandmother \u2014 drunk, in the middle of a fight with his mother, also took her life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018I\u2019m gonna go home and hang myself now.\u2019 And that\u2019s what she did. Went to the garage, grabbed an extension cord.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was ten years old when someone else in the family died, his cousin. He remembers standing there when they told him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI stopped crying.\u201d He looks at the table. \u201cI don\u2019t feel much emotion sometimes. When I feel it, I feel it hard. But sometimes I just\u2026 don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is what intergenerational trauma looks like from the inside.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s never just one thing,\u201d he says. \u201cIt always piles up and adds onto each other. They\u2019re all interconnected somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Merrick smiles brightly and gushes that he loved school when he went. He wants to finish Grade 12. He wants, eventually, to study botany.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to get to the point where I\u2019m able to play with the genetics and breed herbal plants, medicinal herbs we can grow at home. So, we don\u2019t have to go to pharmaceuticals and get all those chemicals they feed us.\u201d<\/p>\n
He has already mapped out the family he wants to have someday, his dream is simply to become a good father.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But right now, he is nineteen and alone and the two people he is closest to in the world are somewhere in this city and he can\u2019t find them. Finding his dad and sister is what keeps him up at night.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Merrick says he talks to God sometimes. Gets into arguments. And has good discussions, he says.<\/p>\n
Outside the Maskokamik Lodge, Edmonton is doing what Edmonton does in February \u2014 pressing down cold and dark and indifferent on the thousands of people trying to survive it. The homeless people are getting younger, Merrick has noticed. He saw a girl recently who looked about fifteen, out on the street.<\/p>\n
He shifts in his seat. Outside, the cold waits.<\/p>\n
\u201cHope for the best,\u201d he says. \u201cPrepared for the worst. That\u2019s all I got.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a feeding night, Gale and her volunteers load vehicles with food and supplies and drive into the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[901,49,48,39906,204423,23752,32924,57764,32918,204424,39910,204425,23578,65445],"class_list":["post-516507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-alberta","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-capitalism","tag-colonialism","tag-edmonton","tag-first-nations","tag-housing-crisis","tag-indigenous","tag-landback","tag-neoliberalism","tag-police-accountability","tag-poverty","tag-unhoused"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}