indigenous veterans day: the people who went to war, and the families who waited

 indigenous veterans day: the people who went to war, and the families who waited

November 8 – National Indigenous Veterans Day

Tomorrow is Indigenous Veterans Day in Canada. I want to take a little time to remember something that I don't think we talk about nearly enough.

I have been researching my family tree and recently discovered more about my great-uncle, James Charles Enos, known in our family as Uncle Jimmy.

He was Indigenous (Songhees, Kalapuya, Iroquois, Tsouke) Portuguese, French ancestry. My mother remembered him, and one of the things she told me was that she had the rosary he carried with him into the trenches.

His military records have opened a little window into a time I can hardly imagine. He enlisted in Victoria on November 6, 1915, and his records connect him with the 88th Battalion and No. 10 Pioneer Battalion. 

Medical records

His service file contains multiple hospital admissions, including entries relating to his feet and a gun shot wound to hip,   admissions to the 11th Canadian General Hospital.

I am still piecing together his story. I don't know everything he experienced, what he saw, or what he carried home with him.

But I keep thinking about him.

And I keep thinking about all the other young men and women who went away to war.

the families who waited

Imagine being a parent in 1917.

Your son is perhaps 19 or 20 years old. He has gone overseas to fight in a war that most of us today can barely comprehend.

There is no internet, no texting, no video calls, no way to check whether he is safe.

There are letters, postcards and telegrams.

Letters could take weeks. Telegrams were often the fastest way to communicate news of a death or injury. Families sometimes waited anxiously for information, not knowing whether silence meant their loved one was safe or something terrible had happened.

Imagine seeing the telegram delivery person approaching your home.

Imagine being a mother receiving news that her son had been wounded and was in hospital. Then imagine receiving another notification weeks or months later.

What did those parents do with that worry?

Who comforted them? How did they sleep? How did they carry on with ordinary life while waiting for news?

And what if a parent died while their child was overseas? Did the soldier ever get to say goodbye? How did they find out? What must it have been like to return home and discover that someone they loved was no longer there?

We remember the soldiers who died, but we should also remember the families who suffered losses, sometimes more than one, and the people who waited years for someone who never came home.

the injustice Indigenous veterans came home to

There is another part of this history that deserves to be remembered.

First Nations, Inuit and Métis people served in Canada's military during the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War.

More than 4,000 Indigenous people served in the First World War alone.

They fought alongside other Canadians. They faced the same dangers, the same mud, the same bullets, the same fear and the same possibility of never seeing home again.

But when many returned, they were not treated as equals.

Indigenous veterans faced racism and discrimination. Many were denied access to the same pensions, benefits, land grants and support offered to non-Indigenous veterans.

Some First Nations veterans faced an especially cruel choice: give up their Indian Status through enfranchisement to access certain benefits, or retain their legal identity and community connections while being denied support available to other veterans.

Indigenous land was also taken and transferred to non-Indigenous veterans through postwar settlement policies.

Think about that.

They had gone overseas to serve a country that still denied them equal treatment at home.

and they weren't even allowed to lay a wreath

This is one of the things that really gets to me.

In 1991, Indigenous veterans in Winnipeg went to a Remembrance Day ceremony to lay a wreath for their fallen comrades. They were refused. They were told they could lay it after everyone else had left.

Imagine that.

You have served your country. Your friends have died. You have lived through things most people will never understand. And when you come home to honour those who never made it back, you are told to wait until everyone else is finished.

National Indigenous Veterans Day was established in Winnipeg in 1994, partly because of this injustice.

Indigenous veterans were finally able to lay a wreath at the National War Memorial in Ottawa in 1994, and Indigenous veterans were permitted to march and lay a wreath at Vancouver's Cenotaph as a group in 1995.

It took until 2003 for the federal government to provide compensation to First Nations veterans who had been denied certain benefits after the wars.

These dates are not ancient history. They happened within our own lifetimes.

the suffering that came home

I also think about the people who returned injured, physically and emotionally.

Some came home with missing limbs, scars, chronic pain and disabilities. Others came home carrying memories they couldn't explain to their families.

How many never spoke about what happened?

How many drank to quiet their memories? How many struggled with anger, sleep, relationships or raising children? How many families lived with the effects without ever understanding where they came from?

One friend whose father served in the war once told me about being only five years old and trying to protect his mother from his father's violence. He described hitting him with a broom.

He said that his father  admitted it later in life, crediting his son for stopping it, he eventually took those memories to his grave.

I cannot imagine what that family lived through.

War trauma can travel through generations. It can affect partners, children and grandchildren who never went anywhere near a battlefield.

That doesn't excuse violence or erase the suffering of those who experienced it. But it reminds us that the consequences of war don't necessarily end when a soldier comes home.

There are also complicated family stories. People separated for years, frightened and lonely, trying to find comfort in one another. Relationships formed, marriages changed, children were born, sometimes outside marriage. Birth control was not what it is today, and families sometimes carried unanswered questions about their origins for generations.

There are stories of love, loss, separation, unexpected children, and grief. Some were never discussed. Some were deliberately buried.

And how many families still don't know the full story?

remembering what we don't know

I wonder how many of the people who served have now passed away without ever telling their stories.

How many were too traumatized to speak? How many were taught to keep quiet? How many thought their experiences were simply something they had to live with?

There are fewer and fewer people left who can tell us firsthand what happened.

Sometimes all we have are service records, hospital admissions, photographs, medals, old letters and a few sentences remembered by a child or grandchild.

My mother remembered Uncle Jimmy. She remembered that rosary.

I am grateful for that little piece of family history. It makes the records feel less like paperwork and more like a person. Someone's son, someone's brother, someone's uncle. Someone who was young once and had a whole life ahead of him.

I wish we knew more.

what are we remembering?

I sometimes see military recruitment advertisements offering education, training, financial support and opportunities, including programs for Indigenous young people.

I think we should always be honest about what is being offered and what the commitment and risks of military service really mean.

Education and opportunity are important. But we should never forget the human cost of war, or the history of governments that recruited people to serve while failing to treat them equally when they returned.

I don't want another generation of parents to sit waiting for news that their child has been wounded or killed.

I don't want more children growing up with the consequences of war. I don't want families torn apart, communities grieving, or young people returning home with injuries and memories they cannot escape.

Remembrance Day should be more than a ceremony, a poppy, a wreath or a moment of silence.

It should be about remembering, learning, questioning, imagining what other people endured, and making sure we do everything possible to live differently.

We should be asking our governments difficult questions. We should be challenging racism, discrimination, ignorance and the decisions that lead to war.

And we should be listening to Indigenous veterans and their families, not just once a year, but throughout the year.

Because freedom, equality and peace should not be things we ask young people to fight and die for overseas while denying them at home.

To Uncle Jimmy, and to all the Indigenous veterans who served, those who never came home, those who returned wounded, and those whose stories were never told: you deserve to be remembered.

Lest we forget.