Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

They Signed On: The Long Service

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

They Signed On — The Long Service

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented Fact = the fact stands in a named source — government and museum records, the nations' own published histories, the standard scholarship. Tradition — the people's own account = what the nations and the men's and women's families teach. Debated / Claim = a disputed point, labelled where it stands. Numbers the sources give differently are carried as ranges, flagged, never averaged into a false precision. The verification of a named battle stands in §3 at full length, including the part of it that could not be pinned down.

The thesis of the entry, in the words that commissioned it: they signed on and fought bravely for countries that were still trying to erase them — and their service is part of why those countries stand. One honesty the entry adds at the start, because the nations' own histories insist on it: the nations were never anyone's mercenaries. When they fought beside France, beside Britain, or beside the United States, they fought as sovereign allies by their own councils' decisions, for their own homelands and their own sovereignty first. The betrayals recorded in this entry were done to allies, and the nations' historians name them as such.

1. Allies by their own councils: the French alliance era

Documented Fact. For a century and a half before Canada or the United States existed as countries, the Indigenous nations of the northeast were the military powers of their own country and the alliance partners every European empire had to court. The Great Peace of Montréal of 1701 — when some thirteen hundred delegates of dozens of nations made peace with New France and each other — stands as the era's monument: diplomacy between sovereigns. In the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the nations chose their sides by their own interests, most of the Great Lakes and Ohio nations standing with France. At the Monongahela on 9 July 1755, a French and Indigenous force destroyed General Braddock's British column — the defeat that taught the British Empire it could not move in that country without Indigenous allies. In the American Revolution the choosing cut the other way for some nations and both ways for others: the Oneida and Tuscarora stood with the Americans; the Mohawk under Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) stood with the Crown, and their homelands paid for both choices when the wars ended and the victors divided the land without them. The pattern the whole entry follows is set here: the nations fought, decisively and bravely — and the peace was repeatedly made over their heads.

2. The War of 1812: Tecumseh, and the cost of the alliance

Documented Fact. When the United States declared war on Britain in 1812, it invaded Canada repeatedly, expecting conquest. What stopped the invasions was, repeatedly, the alliance of British regulars, Canadian militia and Indigenous nations fighting as nations. In the west, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh built a confederacy of nations to defend a homeland the United States was taking treaty by treaty and fraud by fraud; his alliance with General Isaac Brock was decisive in the war's first year — the surrender of Detroit in August 1812 was won as much by Tecumseh's warriors' presence as by Brock's bluff. Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames (Moraviantown) on 5 October 1813, and his confederacy died with him. The cost stands in the peace: at Ghent in 1814, Britain — which had promised its allies an Indigenous buffer state in the west — dropped the demand at the negotiating table and signed a peace that simply restored the borders, leaving the nations that had saved Canada's west to face the United States alone. The nations' histories carry Ghent as the alliance's price: they had been indispensable in the war and disposable in the peace.

3. The verification: a battle near the Ottawa Valley, tested against the record

A claim stands behind this entry: Indigenous warriors held the Americans off at a place close to the Ottawa Valley, fighting with the French to keep Canada's sovereignty. Four candidates stand in the documented record of the Ottawa–St. Lawrence–Richelieu corridor. They are tested here in the open, because the strand's law is that an identification is never forced: what can be verified is presented, and what cannot be pinned to one battle is said plainly.

Candidate one — the Battle of Châteauguay, 26 October 1813. The strongest match on substance. Documented Fact. An American army under Major General Wade Hampton, some four thousand strong on the march, advanced from the south to take Montréal as part of a two-pronged invasion down the St. Lawrence corridor. Lieutenant-Colonel Charles-Michel d'Irumberry de Salaberry met it on the Châteauguay River with a force built of the Voltigeurs Canadiens (French-Canadian regulars), Canadian Fencibles, embodied and sedentary militia — and Mohawk warriors of Kahnawake and Kanesatake, whose war cries from the woods were part of de Salaberry's deliberate deception: bugle calls answered from stand to stand and cheering staged along the line made a few hundred men in the forward position sound like an army. Hampton's advance columns — about 2,600 to 3,000 men in the modern accounts — struck the forward line, failed to turn it, and Hampton withdrew his whole army. Montréal was saved; with Crysler's Farm a fortnight later, the St. Lawrence campaign of 1813 was over and the invasion of Canada had failed. The numbers are carried as the sources give them, flagged: the 1920 Parks Canada plaque states the old patriotic form — "a Canadian force of about 300 … halted 5,700 American troops" — while modern scholarship puts de Salaberry's whole sector force near 1,530, of whom about 300 held the forward lines Hampton actually struck. Both stand here; the plaque's arithmetic is the tradition of the monument, the modern figures the scholarship. The Kahnawake and Kanesatake warriors are not a tradition but a roll: the Military General Service Medal list of 1847 names them — Captain Dominique Ducharme, Lieutenant Jarvise Maccomber, and some twenty-eight named warriors for Châteauguay alone. An 1895 eyewitness account published in the Montreal Gazette, carried in the Kanehsatake educators' record, states what the official histories long left out: "The Okas and the Caughnawagas were really the heroes of the campaign, and their services ought to be commemorated." The geography is stated honestly: the battlefield stands in the Châteauguay valley, southwest of Montréal — in the same St. Lawrence lowland system, at the edge of the Ottawa country rather than inside the Ottawa Valley proper.

Candidate two — the First Battle of Lacolle Mills, 19–20 November 1812. Documented Fact. A year earlier, on the Richelieu corridor south of Montréal, the same commander held a smaller door against a larger army. De Salaberry, with about a hundred Voltigeurs and some 230 Kahnawake Mohawk warriors (the HistoryNet account; another account of the action gives about 200 Mohawk among some 370 defenders — the counts are carried flagged), repelled the roughly 650-man advance party of General Dearborn's army of some five thousand, which then withdrew without invading. If the remembered claim carries French-Canadians and Mohawk warriors together holding off the Americans, Lacolle Mills fits it as closely as Châteauguay, and a year earlier.

Candidate three — the Battle of Crysler's Farm, 11 November 1813. Documented Fact. The corridor's other decisive stand, and geographically the nearest of the three to Ottawa: on the St. Lawrence near present-day Morrisburg, Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Wanton Morrison's force of some 800–900 — British regulars, Canadian militia, Voltigeurs, and Indigenous warriors, about two dozen of them skirmishing in the woods on the flank in the standard detailed account — defeated the roughly 2,500 Americans actually engaged of Wilkinson's descending army. The Parks Canada plaque's form is again the patriotic one: 800 against 4,000. The Indigenous contingent here was small beside Châteauguay's, and the command was British-regular; the match to "fought there with the French" is the weakest of the three on substance, and the strongest of the three on nearness to the Ottawa country.

Tested and set apart — the Long Sault, May 1660. Tradition / Debated. The one famous fight that stands on the Ottawa River itself — at the Long Sault rapids near present-day Carillon — joins French fighters (Adam Dollard des Ormeaux and his companions) with Huron and Algonquin allies, and tradition holds that it saved Montréal. It does not fit the claim under test: the enemy in 1660 was the Haudenosaunee, a century before the United States existed, and modern historians debate how decisive the action was. It is named here so the record shows it was tested, and set apart for exactly the reasons stated.

The verdict, stated as the record leaves it. The exact battle cannot be pinned to one action with certainty from the description alone — and the entry does not force it. On substance — Indigenous warriors and French-Canadian soldiers together holding off a much larger American force advancing to take Montréal, in defence of Canada — the verified match is Châteauguay (26 October 1813), with Lacolle Mills (November 1812) its twin; on geography, Crysler's Farm stands nearest the Ottawa country. What is not in doubt is the thing the claim was spoken to honour: in the corridor of rivers that guards Montréal and Ottawa, the battles that turned the American invasions back were fought, and won, with Indigenous warriors in the line — named men, on the medal rolls, whose services a witness of the campaign said "ought to be commemorated." This entry is part of that commemoration, two centuries late.

4. The First World War: they signed on without the vote

Documented Fact — the scale. When the First World War came, the Government of Canada at first discouraged and restricted Indigenous enlistment; by 1916 the need for men opened the recruiting, and the nations answered at a rate no one compelled. The federal ministers' own Indigenous Veterans Day accounting gives the documented scale: more than 4,000 Indigenous service members in the First World War from Canada, earning at least fifty decorations — and in many communities, the record of the recruiting shows, a third or more of the eligible men went. In the United States, an estimated more than 12,000 Native men served — in 1917–18, most of them not citizens of the country they served; the Indian Citizenship Act came only in 1924, and its own legislative history names their service among its reasons.

Documented Fact — the franchise they did not have. In Canada, a status Indian could not vote in a federal election unless he first surrendered his status through enfranchisement — giving up, in law, being an Indian. Serving soldiers were enfranchised by the fact of service in some cases, whether they wished it or not. The unconditional federal vote came only in 1960. The men of 1914–18 therefore defended a country whose ballot was closed to them; and the grievance record that followed them home is documented too: returned Indigenous veterans were passed over for benefits other veterans received, and some 85,000 acres of "surplus" reserve land were taken for settlement by non-Indigenous veterans under the Soldier Settlement programme — the grievance carried in the Department of National Defence's own later reviews, as the Manitoba historical record cites them.

Documented Fact — Francis Pegahmagabow. The name the Canadian record puts first is an Ojibwa name. Francis Pegahmagabow of Wasauksing (Parry Island) signed on in August 1914, among the very first, and served with the 1st Battalion through the whole war as a scout and sniper. He was awarded the Military Medal with two bars — one of only thirty-nine Canadians in the entire war so decorated — and he is accounted the most effective sniper of the Canadian Corps: the tally credited to him in the literature is 378 kills and more than 300 prisoners taken, carried here as what it is in the sources — a credited tally, unofficial, of the kind sniper records always are (Winegard, 2012). He came home to become a chief of his nation and a national Indigenous leader, fighting the second half of his life in the councils for the rights the battlefield had not bought.

5. The Second World War, beyond the code talkers

The companion class carries the talkers whole. The service around them was of the same scale as the sacrifice: from Canada, more than 3,000 First Nations members, plus many Inuit and Métis, served in the Second World War (the ministers' accounting); from the United States, more than 44,000 Native servicemen and women, out of a Native population of less than 350,000 — the highest rate of service per capita of any group in that country, in the military's own repeated accounting.

Documented Fact — Sergeant Tommy Prince. The emblem of the whole entry is a Brokenhead Ojibwe man. Tommy Prince, great-great-grandson of Chief Peguis, educated at Elkhorn Residential School, volunteered in 1940 and rose into the First Special Service Force — the joint Canadian-American unit the Germans named the Devil's Brigade. At Anzio in February 1944 he ran a telephone line fifteen hundred metres from an abandoned farmhouse some 130 metres from the German guns, and reported their fire for three days; when a shell cut the line, he went out in daylight dressed as a farm labourer, hoe in hand, and mended it under their eyes — the Military Medal. In southern France that September he walked some seventy kilometres in three days, without food or sleep, behind the German lines, and brought back the reconnaissance that destroyed an enemy bivouac and took over a thousand prisoners — the United States Silver Star. He was one of only three Canadians in the war to hold both medals, and he received them from King George VI at Buckingham Palace on 12 February 1945. Then the record turns, and the entry does not turn it back: Prince came home to a country where, as a status Indian, he still could not vote; he was passed over for benefits other veterans drew; he went to Ottawa with the Manitoba Indian Association and told the parliamentary committee reviewing the Indian Act to abolish it, honour the treaties, and give his people schools and the vote. In 1950 he signed on again, for Korea, with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry — Kapyong among his battles — and by his discharge in 1954 he held eleven medals, the most of any Canadian Indian of his wars (the National Defence accounting). He died in Winnipeg on 25 November 1977, in poverty, in a Salvation Army hostel. His medals, sold in his lifetime, were bought back at auction in 2001 for $75,000 by his nephew Jim Bear, with First Nations, Legion and federal help, and stand on public display in Manitoba. His own words carry the entry's thesis better than any summary: "All my life I had wanted to do something to help my people recover their good name. I wanted to show they were as good as any white man."

6. Korea and after

Documented Fact. The signing on did not stop in 1945. The National Defence history records that several hundred First Nations and Métis served in Korea, many of them Second World War veterans who went back — Tommy Prince at their head in this entry's telling, because he is at their head in the record. The American accountings give the scale for the later wars: 15,000 Native servicemen and women in Korea on the Navy's count (other accountings differ and are flagged in the sources file), and more than 42,000 in Vietnam, more than ninety percent of them volunteers (the Army's accounting). The line runs to the present: in 2003, Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier, was killed in Iraq — the first Native American woman to die in combat in the service of the United States, carried in the Congressional Record's own honouring of her. Her name stands here because the entry's subject is not finished history; Indigenous Veterans Day in Canada is marked every 8 November, and the muster this entry records is still being taken.

7. The thesis, closed

The countries these men saved had, in the same centuries, taken their land by the treaty chewed away (the companion class in this band, Chewing Away at the Treaties, carries that record), punished their languages in the schools (the Genocide Record carries it), closed their ballot boxes, and shorted their veterans' benefits. They signed on anyway — in 1812 for a sovereignty that included their own, in 1914 and 1939 and 1950 at rates no other part of the population matched — and their service is part of the reason the countries stand: Montréal stands because Châteauguay was held; the Pacific battles turned on voices from the Navajo Nation; the Anzio line held because a Brokenhead Ojibwe sergeant mended a wire in daylight in a farmyard. The record does not ask gratitude as a favour. It states a debt as a fact.

Sources for every claim in this reading stand in the research file behind this class. Its flagged points are carried openly: the verification in §3 does not settle on one battle; the Châteauguay and Lacolle Mills numbers stand in two traditions (plaque and scholarship); Pegahmagabow's tallies are credited, not audited; the Korea figures differ between official accountings and no merged total is constructed. Companion classes in this band: The Code Talkers · The Nations in the War Over Slavery · Chewing Away at the Treaties · The Fight Goes On.

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