Black and Indigenous Canadians are working to keep alive the legacies of soldiers who faced racial discrimination despite serving their country with honour.
Kathy Grant says she started The Legacy Voices Project in 2013 to fulfill a promise to her father, a solider from Barbados.
“A promise I made to my dad before he passed away was to make sure that Canada formally recognizes the contributions of its black soldiers, as well as its West Indian soldiers,” Grant told CTV News Channel on Remembrance Day.
Grant’s Facebook group digitizes and shares photos and documents that tell the history of black soldiers, who she points out often weren’t allowed to go into certain movie theatres or restaurants after returning home from battle.
The group has also worked with the Department of National Defence to record veterans’ oral histories.
“A lot of times they’re older and they’re passing away and we wanted to make sure that those stories got told in the soldiers’ words,” Grant said.
One story that the group has been sharing is that of Jeremiah Jones, a black soldier from Truro, N.S., who served in the First World War with the Nova Scotia Rifles.
Jones braved machine gun fire during the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 2017 in order to throw a grenade at the enemy. The grenade killed several of the Germans.
Jones forced those Germans who remained to carry their machine gun back to his commanding officer, according to Veterans Affairs.
He was injured in the battle and again at Passchendaele in 1917.
While it is believed that Jones was recommended for the Distinguished Conduct Medal – the military’s second highest honour after the Victoria Cross – it was only awarded posthumously, in 2010, 60 years after he died.
‘They became Indians again’
Indigenous people are also working to honour the estimated 12,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis who served in the First World War, Second World War and Korean War.
It’s a history that Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde said many Canadians still don’t know.
“They were fighting as equals over there … but when they came back … they became Indians again,” Bellegarde told CTV’s Omar Sachedina in Ottawa on Saturday.
“That means they had to go to the Department of Indian Affairs for their benefits, not the Department of Veterans Affairs,” Bellegarde said. “So they never got the same programs and services or benefits that other veterans had.”
Kathleen Eshkibok, a member of Wikwemikong First Nation in northern Ontario and a member of her local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, held an essay and art contest this year to honour Indigenous veterans.
Youth were invited to tell the best story about a veteran. There were cash prizes, including $300 of her own funding, plus $300 from the local band council and $200 from the local legion branch.
The student who won drew a picture of what Eshkibok described as “an elder with two youth sitting around the sacred fire … telling the story about what happened during the war.”
Eshkibok says her goal was to help the youth remember “what their great-grandparents, grandparents, aunties and uncles did for this country.”
