“Don’t ever write anybody off.”

Those were the words Andy Nieman delivered Friday to a standing-room-only crowd inside the longhouse of the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre during the Vulnerable People at Risk Forum, hosted by the Kwanlin Dun First Nation and the city.

Nieman is a member of the White River First Nation whose titles include social worker, pastor and territorial children’s advocate, among many others.

He spoke to the crowd about his years spent living on the streets of Vancouver, following a troubled childhood, and how he turned his life around.

He urged the crowd to not give up on anyone or look down on anyone who might be vulnerable.

Nieman began by talking about where he came from.

“It was a place of a lot of hurt,” Nieman said.

Spending his first 10 years growing up in the Sleepy Hollow area of Whitehorse, Nieman said he grew up in a violent home with alcoholic parents.

His earliest memory is waking up in the freezing cold two-room house one night in the middle of winter. Looking through the house for someone, he realized he was alone.

“That’s where panic grips my soul,” he recalled, going on to say he then screamed at the top of his lungs, with no one there to answer his cries.

It was at the age of five when Nieman first started running away, trying to escape his violent home.

He would often lie to get to stay at friend’s houses, he said, also noting his thanks to a couple who would take him in when they knew there was a party happening at his house.

By the age of 10, Nieman was already breaking into houses and deemed too uncontrollable.

He was shipped out on a Greyhound bus to the Lower Post Residential School (as a non-status First Nation member, he wasn’t required to attend residential school but was sent there by his family).

There, he said he fell into the hands of a pedophile for the three years he attended the school.

“When I left, I felt like the most vulnerable person on the planet,” he said, describing shame that covered him “like a cloak.

“I could not look people in the eye for more than five seconds when I was sober.”

That shame ate at him every moment he wasn’t “piss-ass drunk” or stoned, he said as he went on to recall his love of LSD.

“I loved it because I hated myself,” Nieman said, advising the many government officials, service organization staffers and others at the forum not to judge.

“Everybody has a story,” he said.

For a time, Nieman didn’t want to live but he was too scared to die.

His misery, depression and loneliness eventually became so strong he began to overcome that fear of death.

“I lived in a place of total darkness,” he said.

Nieman then described one of the loneliest days of his life when he was crashing after a 10-day cocaine run.

He felt such heavy despair that day that he actually craved death.

“I hungered (for it),” he said.

Homeless with no money, he came to a point where he decided he would end his life.

The next sale he made as the middle man in a coke deal, he would spend on a cap of China white heroin, enough to kill him.

“I made up my mind I was going to end it,” he said.

Standing in a dark rain, he realized there were just three things he wanted that he could not get in that moment: a warm bowl of soup, a cigarette and someone he could talk to that he knew cared.

At that “point of no return”, he whispered a short prayer: “Help me, Jesus.”

He had no sooner said that when an old friend he knew from Dawson City came wandering along the same street and greeted him with a bottle of whiskey, asking if he wanted a drink.

And that was the moment things began to change – he had one of the three things he wanted: someone to talk to who cared.

“I believe Albert was sent by God,” Nieman said.

While that was a moment when things began to change for him, he said major changes didn’t happen until he learned to be truthful and not run from his past.

He went to a treatment program in Vancouver, but it was through Alcoholics Anonymous Nieman learned to talk about his feelings and accept his past.

“It was in AA I found my voice,” he said, again stressing his message of non-judgment and acceptance, pointing out that many may not realize how close they could be to that vulnerability.

As long as a person has breath, he said, there is hope.

His message appeared to be heard by the large audience, who gave Nieman a standing ovation following his presentation.