Great War, Great Warriors?

The study of Indigenous wartime service in Canadian military forces has expanded significantly since the mid 1990s, when only Fred Gaffen’s venerable, if anecdotal, Forgotten Soldiers complemented a small and eclectic batch of government reports and masters theses. The growing politicization around indigenous soldiers’ access to veterans’ benefits and recognition following the world wars and Korea, including a full chapter in the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, provoked interest in the present and historical issues involved. A good portion of the coverage that has followed since then was drawn to the compelling orthodoxy that Whitney Lackenbauer and I dubbed the “forgotten warrior” interpretation. This approach highlighted indigenous martial prowess, phenomenally high enlistment rates and an intense loyalty to Crown and treaty that went unrequited by a perfidious government that accepted, even compelled, indigenous service and then turned a blind eye to their unequal access to veterans’ benefits post war. There was merit and some accuracy in all these components, which fostered political awareness, commemoration and support for redress, but few extended past these familiar touchstones into uncharted territory or even paused to test their validity. Fortunately, we seem to be moving beyond the forgotten warrior over the last decade, something confirmed by the recent publication of Timothy Winegard’s excellent For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War.

Winegard’s book sets out to provide a comprehensive narrative examination of the First World War experience of Canadian First Nations, whom he refers to as Indians (he justifies his terminology effectively in the preface). Winegard notes that the wartime experience of Métis and Inuit were unique but “generally excluded from this study … The Indian experience … is the focus of this book.” To date, Canada has lacked such survey treatments of indigenous participation in both world wars, unlike the United States, for instance, which boasts Thomas Britten’s superb American Indians in World War I: At War and At Home, as well as a trio of decent surveys on the Second World War by Alison Bernstein, Jeré Franco and Kenneth Townsend. The best work previously published in Canada on the First World War was James Dempsey’s Warriors of the King: Prairie Indians in World War I. Winegard’s For King and Kanata brings both a wider national scope and a more thorough research foundation to this important subject.

Winegard takes a long view, devoting the first three chapters to exploring the history of indigenous warfare and military service in support of European allies in the centuries prior to the Great War, as well as the ideological and colonial context of Canada’s developing relationships with the “Indian.” Although wide-ranging and relatively brief, these chapters help situate the Great War experience of indigenous peoples and orient the reader in the military and cultural context that shaped their service. Chapters 4 through 6 track chronologically the convolutions in Canada’s policy framework around “Indian” recruitment and conscription: from a fairly restrictive phase in the early stages of the First World War, through an increasingly permissive phase to eventual conscription and a limited exemption for Status Indians in 1918. The final three chapters shift to a more thematic approach, exploring the experience of being a soldier, the home front and finally, the return to civilian life after the war. Overall, Winegard concludes that following the war:

This is a bleak, but accurate, assessment of the impact of aboriginal service in the Great War.

For King and Kanata is first and foremost the product of a prodigious and creative researcher, not only in the usual Canadian archival collections, but also in imperial collections in Britain. Winegard observes that Canadian historians “all too often depict Canadian contributions as if detached from the governing political and military structures of the imperial government.” His diligent work provides a most nuanced exploration of evolving policies around Status Indian enlistment during the Great War yet published, including the Canadian policy shift in late 1915 from unofficially restrictive policies to acceptance of indigenous volunteers. Previously, the assumption was that the shift derived from growing domestic military urgency for recruits to meet Canada’s burgeoning manpower needs, a pattern replicated in the Second World War. Winegard instead locates the root of this change in a pair of confidential missives from Britain’s colonial secretary, Andrew Bonar Law, to governors general throughout the Empire in October conveying the British Cabinet’s interest in surveying the “possibilities of raising native troops in large numbers in our Colonies + Protectorates for Imperial service.” The British reversal was part of a search for more military human resources that included the imposition of conscription in the United Kingdom in late 1915. Their prior lack of interest in non-white Dominion troops thus changed to active solicitation, which helps explain the transition in Canada to what Winegard identifies as the second phase of active “Indian” recruitment from late 1915 to 1917.

Winegard’s thorough research blends with his pre-war contextualizing to contribute other important additions to the literature. First, he unearthed some important information about indigenous support and enlistment in the Boer War, something that historians have only speculated about previously. Once again it is the imperial records that yield the richest material, including indigenous proclamations of loyalty and offers of warriors to aid the Crown, as well as British racial views of the appropriate make-up of Empire forces for South Africa, which made it very difficult for non-Europeans to successfully enlist in the Canadian contingents. This is followed by a fascinating glimpse of Canadian militia development in the years from 1904 to 1914, and the place, or lack of place, for Status Indian soldiers in Canada’s brief flirtation with militarism. What Winegard provides on these issues is brief but promising. It whets the appetite for additional exploration of these important and virtually unknown subjects that have fallen outside the traditional tropes of the forgotten warrior.

In a similar vein, Winegard’s analysis eschews much of the mythologizing and commemoration that usually shrouds the classical shibboleths of the forgotten warrior such as high enlistment rates, proclamations of loyalty and snipers. Few historians have held these popular images up to close scrutiny or avoided the hype they provoke. For King and Kanata provides a refreshingly unvarnished interpretation of some of these key aspects of the story. For instance, on enlistment figures, Winegard notes the incomplete official figures of roughly 4,000 Status Indian enlistments from a 1914 Status population of 103,774, and draws on Duncan Campbell Scott’s problematic propaganda figure of 35 percent of the male population of military age. While it would have been nice to see Scott’s figures critically re-examined, Winegard does not trumpet the 35 percent figure; he merely notes it was “roughly equal to the percentage of Euro-Canadians who enlisted,” and moves on to state that the exact numbers of Status Indian men who served cannot be precisely known.

Similarly, Winegard pushes past the enthusiastic claims of loyalty to the Crown to explore more complex collective and personal rationales behind aboriginal enlistment. He draws an interesting parallel between indigenous leaders’ attempts to gain increased autonomy within the Canadian state as a result of their military participation and Prime Minister Robert Borden’s efforts to translate the high-profile exploits and sacrifices of the Canadian Corps into heightened autonomy within the British Empire and status on the international stage. At the individual level, during the war’s early years,

This interpretation of indigenous responses provides a more complex and human face than the blindly loyal allies of the Crown so often visible in the forgotten warrior image of First Nations’ participation in the national war effort.

A final example of the author’s measured analysis in For King and Kanata is his treatment of the much mythologized Indian snipers and, by extension, of traditional assumptions of inherent indigenous military prowess. From Duncan Campbell Scott onward, the scholarship of First Nations military service has drawn on anecdotal claims by officers and soldiers who served with indigenous men, on medal citations and on the exploits of extraordinary soldiers to craft an uncritical and undifferentiated picture of the Indian as a natural soldier. Symbolic of this approach has been a focus on the glamorous role of some aboriginal soldiers as snipers. Most famous among them are Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibwa from Parry Sound and the inspiration for Joseph Boyden’s 2005 novel, Three Day Road, and Henry Norwest, a Métis from northern Alberta, both among the most decorated and highest scoring snipers of the entire Great War. Winegard recognizes that their roles as snipers, where indigenous soldiers were likely overrepresented,

To support this position, Winegard examines more than just the well-known cases of Pegahmagabow and Norwest. He also looks at a host of other examples that give him a broad foundation for concluding that there is a strong kernel of reality in the mythology around Indian snipers. The “realities of life during this time period” meant that many young indigenous men had ample experience handling firearms and hunting, skills that were transferable to the Western Front. As a result, Winegard claims that

I might disagree with Winegard on the relevance of race in this process, but I accept the hard-edged military pragmatism of his conclusion, as well as the critical and thoughtful manner in which he has investigated this classic myth.

There are two issues that might have made this fine work even stronger. First, there is only a single chapter on the war’s impact on the home front for Status Indian communities, and a relatively brief one at that. Winegard touches on all the important subjects that we see in other literature about indigenous peoples and the war experience in Canada, such as wartime employment, agriculture, Victory Bond purchases, and patriotic acts and donations. But a dozen pages is sufficient only for a survey and does not enable the author to delve as deeply here as he did into military recruiting policy and indigenous experiences overseas. Second, the book is based on a superb archival base and interweaves consistently with the literature on indigenous war service and military history, but it does so less consistently with the historiography on indigenous peoples and their relations with the Canadian state. Much of the writing on this subject tends to come from practitioners of either indigenous or military history, and it is difficult and rare to fully bridge the wide gulf separating these two fields of study. Winegard does a better job than most in this respect, but it would have benefited the overall interpretation to situate this more fully in the trajectory of aboriginal-state relations.

These relatively minor concerns aside, For King and Kanata is an important addition to the burgeoning field of indigenous military history in Canada. Winegard has produced a book that will be the first stop for any person interested in learning about First Nations peoples’ roles and experiences in the Great War. He is to be commended for this, and for helping finally move the field beyond the familiar landscape of the forgotten warrior.