Thirty years ago Canadians began hearing more about the “Forgotten Warriors,” indigenous men who volunteered in the fighting services during Canada’s wars.
Deserving of equal honour, they had received less recognition. One result was that a National Aboriginal Veterans Monument was unveiled in Ottawa in 2001. There was some controversy at the time, since many thought the magnificent National War Memorial, unveiled in 1939, stood for all veterans regardless of race. Others, however, insisted the aboriginal peoples deserved separate recognition, not least because the native tradition of warfare long predated the development of the country we know and love as Canada.
Mountain Horse, had he been alive, could have told them. Living in the 19th century in what is today southern Alberta before there was a Canada or an Alberta, Mountain Horse was a distinguished tribal leader of the Blackfoot Confederacy. In 1870, he fought in what the Blackfoot people call the “Last Great Battle” against their rivals, the Cree, over control of the Cypress Hills on the Belly River, now the Oldman River.
Victorious thanks to assistance from the Peigans, who also despised the Cree, the Blackfoot continued to be well armed. In 1872, the Blood or Kainai (one tribe in the Confederacy) were recorded as possessing “141 Rifles, 318 Revolvers, 202 Flint guns, 216 Bows, 45 Spears, and 32 War axes,” as Chief of the Defence Staff (then called Adjutant-General of Militia) Colonel Patrick Robertson-Ross wrote in his official report on the West. He found that “the Ka-Na-ans (or Blood Indians)” numbered “about 600 men, 800 women, 900 children, possessing 2,500 horses and ponies, 480 dogs” and lots of weapons. This was their way of life: fighting, hunting, trapping.
When the Blackfoot, Sarcee, and Stoney negotiated Treaty 7 with the Dominion of Canada in 1877, they were encouraged to give up their guns. From now on they would enjoy the protection of the “Great White Queen,” Victoria. The tribes trusted the Queen’s men in uniform, and Chief Crowfoot said, “The Mounted Police protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.”
The relationship between the Mounted Police, the missionaries, and the First Nations was was so positive that it was natural and progressive for young Albert Mountain Horse, the oldest son of the Mountain Horse who fought at the Belly River, to sign up for St. Paul’s Boarding School on the Blood Reserve, an Anglican residential school, at age 6.
Albert’s parents probably named him after Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, the Queen’s daughter and the wife of the Governor General of Canada from 1878 to 1883, who visited the Blackfoot at a great powwow in 1881. They also raised him to know the Blood traditions. At St. Paul’s he was recognized as “one of the brightest and most enlightened boys on the Reserve.” He flourished at school, joined the school cadet corps, and afterwards went to work with the Mounted Police. After summer training with the Militia (the part-time Army Reserve) in Calgary he passed the qualifying examination to be a lieutenant in the Militia. He was clearly a rising star of his people and of Canada.
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Albert was qualifying to teach musketry while serving with the 23rd Alberta Rangers, one of four cavalry units that became today’s South Alberta Light Horse, now based in Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, and Edmonton.
Albert immediately volunteered to fight and became the first indigenous member of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Just as his father went to war for Blackfoot lands, the son would go to war in a faraway land.
“I am going forth to fight for my King and country,” Albert wrote in a letter to his school principal, the Reverend S.H. Middleton. In another letter he wrote, “I am very anxious to get to the war.”
He was not alone. Between 1914 and 1918, about 4,000 status Indian men (not including Métis, Inuit, and non-status Indians living off reserve) donned the uniform of the King-Emperor, George V (Queen Victoria’s grandson). That was more than one-third (35 percent) of all Indigenous males living in Canada.
This was astounding because Ottawa’s Military Service Act actually exempted status Indians from serving, leaving them free to stay at home. But thousands came forward, eager to participate. From the Far North, John Campbell travelled almost 5,000 kilometres to join the army in Vancouver. There are many stories like that.
Some 50 Canadian indigenous soldiers were decorated for bravery during the First World War. Henry Norwest, a Métis sniper, was credited with 115 kills before he was himself killed by the Germans. The top shot in the history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was Corporal Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibway of Parry Sound, who got 378 unofficial kills.
“The fine record of the Indians in the Great War appears in a peculiarly favourable light when it is remembered that their services were absolutely voluntary, as they were specially exempted … and were prepared to give their lives for their country without being compelled,” said Father Edward Ahenakew, an Anglican priest and a Cree from the Ahtahkakoop Band in Saskatchewan.
The Canadian War Museum website says, “First Peoples troops encountered a double cultural barrier in the military: the racial prejudice that marked the contemporary non-Aboriginal world, and a military hierarchy that worked almost exclusively in English, a language many Aboriginal recruits did not speak.” But some of this is just 21st-century reflex rather than fact.
The 1914 Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs says Ontario had an Indigenous population of 26,419, of whom 17,744 spoke English (about 67 percent). In Alberta, with a population of 8,281 Indians, 1,219 spoke English (about 15 percent). It seems the level of English ability is correlated to where you lived and how many years, indeed how many generations, they had the opportunity to go to school.
Scott Sheffield, an expert on natives in the military, writes that “Most Indigenous veterans’ accounts speak of how their fellow soldiers accepted and respected them — racial prejudice had no place in the trenches.”
Albert Mountain Horse wrote: “I was in the thick of the fighting at Ypres” in April 1915. “I don’t mind rifle fire” (the result of plenty of live-fire training in peacetime) “and the shells bursting around us, but this gas is the limit.” The second battle of Ypres was where the Germans first unleashed the hell of poison gas as a weapon. Mountain Horse survived gassing three times and three weeks of battle, but developed tuberculosis of which he died in November in Montreal on the way home.
Instead of staying home, Albert’s two younger brothers, Joe and Mike, who had also attended St. Paul’s residential school, volunteered. They saw a lot of action: Joe was wounded at Arras in 1917 before Vimy and survived the war; Mike fought at Vimy and Hill 70 and was bayoneted at Cambrai in 1918. He too survived.
It is interesting that Mike Mountain Horse painted Blackfoot victory symbols on German guns captured at Amiens, to show that the Blackfoot Confederacy had done its part to defeat the Krauts and had overcome and avenged the killers of his beloved big brother, Albert.
The Truth and Reconciliation Report (The History, Part 1, Volume 1, p. 371) deals with the Mountain Horse story in this way: “Not only had residential schools, cadet training, and service in an imperial army failed to separate these young men from faith in their own customs and traditions, but the men were strengthened in their belief because they were able to call upon those traditions to survive and succeed.”
These are fair comments but they give no credit to the combination of their strong native background with the Canadian influences, education, and discipline they got at school and in the cadets. They were proud of their culture, but they were integrated into Canadian institutions. Those were essential, too.
After the war, Mike rejoined the Mounted Police and later worked for CP Rail and in the 1920s became a reporter with the Lethbridge Herald newspaper. In 1939, when the Second World War broke out, he joined again. He then continued to serve the Blood Tribe/Kainai Nation, speaking in public and in schools about the Blackfoot tradition, and was elected to the Blood Tribal Council in the 1950s. He died in 1964.
In their sacrifice, in the combination of their own cultural tradition and what Canada gave to them, the indigenous men of their generation were a true inspiration. Lest we forget.
