Warriors of the King: Prairie Indians in World War I

J.R. Miller is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan,
the author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada, and co-editor of the Canadian Historical Review.

James Dempsey of the University of Alberta’s School of Native Studies
has produced a useful overview of the Western Canadian portion of a
striking story: the voluntary enlistment of First Nations males in
Canada’s armed forces during the Great War. Although their communities
had been mistreated by the government of Canada since the creation of
reserves in the 1880s, these men flocked to the colors in large numbers.
How large? Dempsey cannot be precise, but he estimates that between 3500
and 4000 enlisted across the country; about 400 of these were from the
Prairie Provinces. The total of 400 constitutes, says the author,
one-third of the region’s eligible males.

The federal government treated these men as an exploitable resource.
Although they were not wanted as soldiers at first, later, when
non-Native voluntary enlistment proved insufficient, they were
enthusiastically recruited. In fact, they almost became the targets of
conscription in the final year of the war. After the peace, they were
once more mistreated. Only about one-tenth of them received loans under
the Soldier Settlement scheme, and any who showed interest in the League
of Indians of Canada, a fledgling Native political organization,
encountered the disapproval and discouragement of officials.

Why, despite of 30 years of mistreatment, did they enlist? According to
Dempsey, they were motivated by a strong warrior ethic, loyalty to the
Crown, and a desire to escape the dreary reserves. The first point is
more asserted than demonstrated, and the author does not seem to notice
that communities that sought to buy out their young men or Cree who fled
north to get away from recruiters contradicted the warrior ethic thesis.
The book provides considerable evidence of strong loyalty to the Crown,
but the decision to enlist to escape the reserves is, like the warrior
ethic, more asserted than proved. In short, then, Warriors of the King,
though useful, is flawed. Its argument is not convincingly developed in
all respects. Its bibliography is dated, with important work by Carter,
Kulchyski, and Walker omitted. Finally, almost all the illustrations in
the volume come from southern Alberta, the region that the appendix
indicates had the lowest enrolment on the prairies.