Francis Pegahmagabow is perhaps the best known Indigenous (Anishnaabe) soldier of the First World War. He is the most decorated Indigenous soldier in Canadian military history and holds the record of Canada’s top marksmen with 378 kills. Much is known of his military and post-war life, many having written of […]
Indigenous Veterans
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During question period in June 1919, Member of Parliament (MP) Newton Wesley Rowell, the chairman of the special house committee on veterans’ pension, was asked about returning soldiers’ eligibility for pensions. MP Richard Clive Cooper said, Under this pension scheme the man who went to Siberia, which is a pretty […]
When Canadian veterans returned home from the Great War in 1918, two government programmes were available to them. The first was the vocational training programme, which was created to help ex-servicemen re-enter the job market on an equal footing with their non-veteran counterparts. The philosophy behind this system was to […]
Alexander George Edwin Smith was among the most famous Canadian veterans of the First World War. Born August 14th, 1880 on the Six Nations reserve just outside of Brantford, he was the oldest son of Alexander George Smith, Chief of the Cayuga on the reserve. Before the War, Smith worked […]
The pains endured from fighting a war do not end with the fighting. For many veterans of the First World War, their battle scars never healed and continued to affect them for decades after the war ended. One of these veterans was Private Thaddeus “Thaddie” Knockwood. His pension files and […]