In DerRic Starlight’s memoir, the Gemini Award–winning puppeteer and comedian is our guide to a world few would choose to enter by choice: life on the streets of Calgary, Edmonton, and Lethbridge.

See-Me Street: My Homeless Indigenous Journey is a first-person witness account of Starlight’s three-year spiral into alcoholism and living unhoused.

A member of the Tsuut’ina Nation, with family ties to the Blackfoot Confederacy, Starlight was a successful performer and wrestling promoter. “I was a Native kid who somehow grew into a kind of celebrity,” he writes. He had a home, kids, and “an Elvis Presley lifestyle.” He also felt a longing for Indigenous community and connection.

“The lights were bright, the applause felt warm, and the high from it all only lasted until the night got quiet. Because after every show, no matter the town or province, I always ended up in the same place: in bars, nightclubs, and fancy casinos filled with Indigenous people trying to find some kind of warmth.”

Despite Starlight’s success, there was always a painful awareness of, and a sense of responsibility to men and women like him, who lived very different lives. “Outside every bar, outside every club, outside every neon sign, there were always shadows waiting. Men sitting on cold sidewalks like they were forgotten by the world.”

When his own carefully calibrated world is torn apart by loss and grief, alcoholism tips the balance. Starlight takes us along as he searches for solace and belonging among old friends and drinking companions.

Although Starlight at first pictures himself as a documentarian, inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s immersive film Super Size Me, the lines between observer and participant begin to blur as his own struggle with identity, depression, and addiction comes into focus. Starlight understands what it means to be one step or one drink away from one world or another.

Through Starlight’s account, we experience life in homeless shelters, drop-ins, detoxes, outreach vans, emergency rooms, and recovery programs; we spend nights sharing blankets under bridges and in alleys where a sandwich split three ways feels like a feast.

His unforgettable companions include Bleak, Lefty, Chains, and Bobby, the world’s best powwow Chicken dancer, and dozens of others he meets along the way. These are not characters, however, but real people it’s impossible not to fall in love with as they are captured through Starlight’s recollections, diary entries, and interviews.

On “See-Me Street,” a slang term meaning “you’ll see me on the street,” a name has to be earned, and Starlight will eventually earn his: “Hulkster.” Even as he loses parts of himself, Starlight never forgets he is still a visitor to this world, someone with strong family ties, a talent for storytelling, and options for rescue he can grab onto to survive.

Starlight is eventually confronted about this dual identity, nearly losing his life, but one never doubts the integrity of his mission: To remind us that change is possible, that every life has value, and that every person deserves to be seen.

The journey through the streets of these cities is harrowing and heartbreaking; Starlight’s unadorned, straight-talking approach powerfully reveals the complexity and truth of lives that are rarely documented or understood. While the book will be a valuable educational tool and resource for front-line workers, it is ultimately, and as importantly, a tribute to the people who deserve to be seen and remembered: the souls on See-Me Street.

“One person gets to start over. Another doesn’t,” he writes. “I promised myself I would remember both.”