Dennis Hanagan –
On Remembrance Day, November 11, Canadians honour the soldiers who fought in two world wars and the Korean War. Often overlooked is the service of Canada’s Indigenous men and women.
More than 4,000 Indigenous men fought in the First World War (1914–18) and more than 3,000 enlisted for the Second (1939–45), says the Canadian Encyclopedia. In Korea (1950–53) Indigenous soldiers numbered in the hundreds.
Profiles of some of Canada’s Indigenous men and women who fought are taken from online sources including the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the Bomber Command Museum of Canada, the Canadian Encyclopedia, Veterans Affairs Canada and the book For King & Kanata by Timothy C. Winegard.
Thomas George Prince (Ojibwe Brokenhead Band in Manitoba) was a member of the deadly Devil’s Brigade. In World War II he donned civilian clothing and boldly strolled onto a battlefield in Italy after enemy bombing severed an Allied communications wire. Pretending to be a farmer weeding his crops, Prince bent down and successfully reconnected the wire to restore Allied communications, then sauntered back to his unit. That act allowed the Allies to track and blow up four German tanks. Prince is one of Canada’s most decorated Indigenous war veterans.
Francis Pegahmagabow (Ojibwe from the Parry Island reserve on Georgian Bay) was known to his World War I comrades as Peggy. He was an effective sniper, crawling into ‘no man’s land’ at night and quietly waiting for enemy troops to arrive. Over the course of the war Pegahmagabow captured about 300 Germans and is credited with 378 kills. He spent time in an English hospital after succumbing to pneumonia and gas attacks, but soon returned to fighting. Pegahmagabow is also one of the most highly decorated Indigenous soldiers in Canada’s military history.
John Shiwak, an Inuit trapper and hunter, served in the First War as a scout and marksman in the British Expeditionary Force. An officer there called him “the best sniper in the British Army.” In 1917 Shiwak was part of a task force assigned to liberate the French village of Masnieres, but he and six others died when a lone German artillery shell struck their unit. In his letters from the front Shiwak confessed he could not understand the constant killing.
Willard John Bolduc (Ojibwe of Chapleau, Ont.) was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by King George VI for his role as a Royal Air Force gunner in the Second War. On a night raid over Germany, Buldoc spotted an enemy fighter headed straight for his bomber. “I must have let him have about 500 rounds,” Buldoc said later. The enemy aircraft was destroyed. Only 24 per cent of Allied bomber crews in that war escaped death, serious injury or capture.
Frank Narcisse Jérome (Mi’kmaq of the Gesgapegiag First Nations on the Gaspé Peninsula) was a lumberjack in civilian life. In the First War he was wounded in the Battle of the Canal du Nord, which cost the Canadian Corps 10,000 casualties. A year earlier he organized a patrol to enter no man’s land to gather information while the Germans were launching repeated attacks on Allied trenches. He was one of only 39 Canadians to receive the Military Medal three times.
Charles Tompkins (Métis from Grouard, Alberta) served with the Canadian army in the Second War and as a ‘code talker’ for the U.S. Air Force. Germany and Japan broke Allied English codes but were confused by Indigenous languages. Tompkins and others like him used their ancient languages to relay vital Allied information. Sometimes they had to improvise. The Cree word for Mustang aircraft was “pakwatastim” – wild horse.
Mary Greyeyes-Reid (Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan) was the first Indigenous woman to enlist in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in World War II. She served overseas as a cook at London war headquarters, where she met Princess Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and King Gorge VI.
Edith Monture (Mohawk from the Six Nations of the Grand River) served in France as a registered nurse at Base Hospital 23 in the First War, caring for soldiers injured in trench warfare and gas attacks. She died in 1996 one week before her 106th birthday.
