Nuanced. - 35. Scott Sheffield: Canadian Military History & Indigenous Involvement

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Scott Sheffield is a researcher of Indigenous Military History, Father, Husband, author and associate professor of history at the University of the Fraser Valley.VIDEO INTERVIEW: https://youtu.be/FZAytR_pxCwScott has been married to his wife Kirsten for 27 years, and they have two sons. Scott Sheffield is involved with two different research projects at the University of the Fraser Valley. The first is the culmination of almost two decades of research and publication on the subject of Indigenous people and the Second World War. The second is focussed on the experience of the Second World War in British Columbia. Mr. Sheffield has published 2 books as sole or lead author, and a third in which he was a major co-author. More information is available below:Purchase: Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War by Scott SheffieldPurchase: The Red Man's on the WarPath by Scott SheffieldA Commemorative History of Aboriginal People in the Canadian Military by P. Whitney Lackenbaurwith, John Moses, R. Scott Sheffield, Maxime GohierSend us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Scott Sheffield. It is an absolute pleasure to sit down with you. I have been thinking a lot about the importance of remembrance day and trying to make the information more accessible. I don't know about other people, but for me, growing up, it was very hard to connect the wars, our involvement, the whys, to what I was doing at these ceremonies. And if I'm being honest, I didn't take the ceremonies as,

seriously as I think I should have. And I'm hoping that we can kind of get into the background as to how this came about, what made you interested in this research and the impact that it's had on you, but also put this into a context of how it impacted indigenous people. Because I think that that's a really interesting aspect to add in when we're having these conversations about reconciliation, what that looks like. I think our involvement in World War II is something I haven't heard as much about, and I think that that's such an accessible way for people to get interested in the topic. So I'm hoping you could start with a brief introduction of your background, and then we can get into the other topics. Sure, happy to, Aaron, and thank you for having me. In terms of

my background, I'm an associate professor of history at the University of the Fraser Valley. I originally grew up in Cranbrook and then came to Victoria and then on to Ontario to complete my education. And then as a young itinerant academic, we traveled around quite a bit. In 2000, we left Ontario to go to Calgary for a year. And then after that, to Victoria, and then to New Zealand for five months, and then back to Victoria. And then I actually left my family in Victoria for a 10-month contract in Kamloops. And then finally was hired on at the University of Victoria on a permanent basis, or the University of Fraser Valley, in 2000. 2005. So we moved to Chilliwack in 2005, and I've been here ever since.

Can you tell us about how that came about? Because I did read an article, I think, in the Chilawak progress, that talked a little bit about how funny it all kind of started for you. So could you tell us a little bit about that story? Yeah. After my wife and I finished our bachelor's degrees, we weren't married at that stage, but we were engaged, and we decided we'd take the year off, work for a while, then go to Europe. And so we were backpacking around Europe. And I'd sent applications. out to grad schools for a master's programs in Calgary, Wilfred Laurier, New Brunswick, and Victoria. So four different programs. But the replies didn't start coming in until we were overseas. And so I had my mail all coming to my wife's parents' house. And all he was collecting. Gerson's dad was collecting all the replies. And we were on a pay phone, I think, in southern France or northern Italy. I think it was southern France. And didn't have very long. talked to them and he said, okay, here's the deal. I've got these three replies. This is, you know, there's this much scholarship support for here. There's this much here. There's none there. And Calgary rejected you. It's like, what do you want to do? And I sort of had 30 seconds and think, okay, because I proposed a different topic for every place I was going to go because you always propose a topic that suits the people, the specialist there, that you would like to

work with. And it just made sense for a variety of reasons to choose to stay at you, Vic. And that was the one place that the topic I'd proposed was to explore the issues around indigenous people in the Second World War. And if I'd chosen to go to Wilford Laurier that year, instead, I would have been doing something entirely different. And I would never have found this topic, you know, that has in many ways come to define my, at least my academic career. And what was that process like? Did that excite you? What made you choose that topic area? I mean, it's an interesting question. This would have been the late 80s, early 9. when I was an undergraduate at UVIC. And I was always interested in military history in particular, and that's what I took

as much of as I could during my undergraduate years. And as I started to get interested in the idea of going on into academia and doing a master's in a PhD, I was told at the time, look, nobody will ever hire you in Canada to teach military history. Military history was a bit of a marginalized subject by the 1980s and 90s. There was a real sort of revolution in the discipline of history in the 60s and 70s, a social history revolution, and old history that looked at dead white, powerful men, who were usually either politicians, business leaders, or generals, was largely rejected. And historians became much more interested in looking at the vast majority of other people that made up society. So, you know, women's history became increasingly, and then gender history.

History of indigenous peoples began to really, you know, gain a lot of traction in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, working class peoples, immigrant communities. And so history became much more diverse. But in the process, military history was kind of ejected from the accepted mainstream of history, if you will. So the odds of me getting hired in a, you know, university to teach this was pretty slim, as it was, as I was told. And the joke in the military history fraternity was you had to use the Klingon cloaking device. You would do something that was either social or cultural history until you got tenure, and then you could decloak and say, actually, I've had an epiphany. I want to study military history. Wow.

But I didn't want to do that. I wanted to still stay connected to the thing that I was passionate about. And so I began to look around the edges of military history and the ways in which it connected to some of these other fields within the discipline of history, in this case, Indigenous history, and I sort of looked briefly around, and there was almost nothing published on Indigenous participation in Second World War, and so that seemed to me maybe a really interesting place where I can stay connected to military history, but build bridges between it and other branches of social history at the same time. Right. So that sounds really interesting to me that you're saying that we've moved away

from that, because I do feel like my understanding of what the sacrifices were. how they impacted our society, that that was the part I felt like I missed from a lot of my education. Would you be able to perhaps steal man the position of why we should have more understanding of military history? Because it does seem vastly important when you think about how that we were involved in World War I, World War II, how we were involved in these events, but not understanding kind of that background. Could you tell us why we might want to encourage that type of education more in academia? Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. You're right. I mean, for a lot of Canada's history, we've not paid a lot of attention to our military past.

We think of ourselves as an unmilitary people. And particularly in the 1980s and 90s, we thought of ourselves as a peacekeeping nation, not a warrior nation, if you will. And, you know, and I went to remembrance day ceremonies when I was a kid in the 70s when I was in scouts or whatever in the early 80s. the only people who went were the veterans, and usually, you know, the local RC&P, the firefighters, the cadets, the scouts, and cubs. But the general population didn't really attend. We rememberance day ceremonies in those years. It was only the veterans, and they were the bulk of people who were in attendance. And most Canadians didn't think too much about that military past.

You know, when I went into a bookstore in the 1980s, if I was interested in Canada's military past, there was nothing on the shelves. Wow. if I you know and so I would pick up British books or American books and it's still to this to the first to this day it's sort of a scarring experience I guess but I would look to the index first look up Canada and see the three or four times it was mentioned you know the reality was our stories were not being told about those those events and and that was part of what drove me I think and interested me in this I think the war is actually not I mean the all of the wars have been incredibly important to the development and shape of modern-day Canada. Over the course of the 20th century, we've lost well over 100,000 killed, and well over 2 million Canadians have served in Canada's armed forces during the 20th century alone. I mean, that's an enormous number. So this was something that affected huge numbers of Canadians, everyday Canadians.

It wasn't just a small group of professional soldiers or something. something like that that we're talking about. These were nationally traumatizing experiences. And Canada was important in these. These were important stages in the development of the country. People talk about the First World War kind of coming of age for Canada. It helped to raise our profile and make us an international entity for the first time. We got to sign the peace treaty independently. We got a seat at the League of Nations during the interwar years. That would never have happened in the early 20th century. Second World War in a similar way was, you know, it was another sort of expansive moment for the country. It really became a more major player, a middle power on the world stage, not just a small bit player.

And we as Canadians became more engaged in the world, you know, more willing to actually play a part to take on the responsibilities of being an international, a member of the international community, not just the status of being at the big kids table kind of thing or the adults table. And it didn't just stop with the Second World War either. You know, the Korean conflict was really important in terms of Canada being part of the United Nations, the idea of collective security as a means of trying to prevent aggressors from launching wars in the future. Canada was active in peacekeeping from, you know, in the 1950s through to the 1990s, and then that kind of peacekeeping kind of died out, and we became involved in peace enforcement in the 1990s. early 2000s. And that became really transformative and part of Canada's actual identity.

We thought of ourselves as a peacekeeping nation. And what's interesting is that started to die out now too, because Canada hasn't been an active peacekeeper or peace enforcer, if you will, a peace builder since then. Our mission, Afghanistan was somewhat about that, but primarily was about trying to develop security to allow development to happen. So it was much more combat-focused mission. Canadians were uncomfortable with that by the early 2000s. I didn't like seeing images of Canadian soldiers engaged in firefights and, you know, seeing coffins coming back. Well, over 100 Canadians who were killed in Afghanistan was traumatic for Canadians. And in some ways, we'd lost touch with that warrior past. And so, you know,

when I teach Canadian military history, it's often getting young people to see the country in a different way that this has been part of Canada's past. It's been a really important part of Canada's past. And we're not so far removed from it as maybe we would like to think. That makes me kind of think about what I've been taught through my undergrad and attending law school is all these rights we have. And I find it so interesting that this aspect of the sacrifice is made to kind of bring about these rights are something that we're starting to kind of let go of and not have that same, I don't know. When I think of the United States, I think of them as very proud of their military. And because

they keep that strong connection with how they got these rights and freedoms, how they went and fought for them, and that became a big part of their identity, where in Canada, we're very focused on our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and how that interacts with our lives. But we don't hear as much about how we got these rights and what it took to protect and defend these rights against other countries who would have removed them. Can you tell us what that experience was like for you and how perhaps some people might miss out on that? Well, I mean, that's one of the things that I think, you know, for younger generations today, many are disengaged from the political process. They don't think about democracy and their rights or necessarily exercising their right to vote and don't see it as important. And that's something for me, I've never been able to feel that way because I think about, you know, particularly in the Second World War, when the survival of democracy, you know, even of Canada, was very much a threat, especially after the fall of France in 1940, Canada was, you know, Britain's second ranking ally. And if Britain fell and it looked like it might in 1940, if the German army had invaded,

then, you know, Churchill was talking about bringing the British Navy back to Canada and trying to fight on from Canada. Things looked bleak. And, you know, in that moment, everyday Canadians, you know, left their life, their farm, their job, their education, set aside all the the things they normally would have been doing, you know, wooing and having families and that sort of thing. And, and they went away to war. Some of them for five or six years. It's a long, long time. And, um, and a lot of them sacrificed a great deal. Even the ones who survived the war, you know, still left a part of themselves, uh, spiritually, psychologically, in the battlefields

in Europe and elsewhere and so because of that I can't take lightly my right to vote I have in one year I actually spoiled my ballot but I damn well was going to exercise my right to tell the political parties that I was not happy

with any of them that time around but I still exercised my democratic duty and right because it's a sacred thing And it's not a certain thing. And sometimes I think people do take it for granted. But the reality is people fought and died to ensure that we can do this. Democracy today is still under threat.

You know, it's really been attacked in the United States through the Trump era. It's weakened or, you know, withered in places like Turkey, eastern Europe, the Philippines, and many other countries around the world. And if we're not careful, we don't look after it. If we don't take care of it here in Canada, then, you know, we risk losing it ourselves. And it's one of those things that maybe you don't miss it till it's gone. But once it's gone, it's very hard to get back. Hard to get back.

Exactly. The metaphor that I'm kind of thinking of is like a plant. And perhaps the roots of our democracy perhaps are going to World War II, entering these fights. Do you see any parallel to the fact that if we don't understand what our role was in the past, that we can't have that same respect because I don't disagree that so many of my peers roll their eyes at voting and nothing's going to change. And to me, it's like maybe your vote doesn't sway your local election. Maybe it doesn't sway the federal election. Maybe it has no impact on those levels. But you have to understand that you are the cornerstone of the state and that you are

the thing that allows the state to move forward in a better direction. You help inform it. You are, you hold the government accountable for their actions and you keep it in check. It doesn't, like right now it feels like we have much more of this look as the government is the people who are to save us and to kind of guide us through. And I think that there are certain aspects. Of course, public health needs to take the lead on this. But we still have to hold our government accountable to a certain extent and make sure that when there are scandals, that people are held responsible.

And it feels like right now we have a lot of leaders that perhaps don't have that sense of, it's time to step. I need to step down because I'm no longer leading the state in the way that it needs to be led. I'm distracting from the leadership of our country. And so, therefore, I resign based on the inability for me to move forward with the confidence of the country. Like, that type of energy doesn't, I don't feel that same type of leadership. So could you talk about that metaphor that I mentioned first, perhaps? Yeah. I mean, I think that the governments often do over, stay, they're welcome. There's a, there's a lifespan to any government before they start to get too comfortable, perhaps a sense of entitlement grows, and they start to run out of fresh

ideas. You know, every government comes in, pumped, brimed out of being in opposition and ready to try and make change in the way that they think is important for the country. But they all lose momentum over a certain period of time, and they start to gather baggage. And this is why democracy is a beautiful thing because as a society collectively we can say right time for a change right and time to sweep that out and yes i do think the metaphor of the plant is is really important and the roots are certainly there in the second world board they extend further back of course uh you know through back to the long traditions of british parliamentary democracy that that Canada was built on and and then nurtured in its own right but yeah when those things are under

threat, then I think it can build and strengthen, you know, certainly for the veterans who came home after the war, they felt there was a reality to what they lived. And they sought to make Canada a safer, kinder, gentler, more secure society, you know, for their own families and for their greater good, the collective. And that was very real for them. And in some ways, I think as we've become distanced in time from those events, as the very veterans themselves have started to pass on. You know, we don't have many Second World War veterans left. And the last First World War veteran died a decade or so ago.

And that tangible connection to those events, I think puts more onus on us today to think about their example and to make sure that we do look after what is the heartbeat, you know, the way our society functions. And yes, it's easy to be cynical. And I know lots of people can become cynical. And sometimes politicians don't behave well and, you know, are corrupt. But the vast majority really aren't.

They're well-intentioned. They see what they do is public service and, you know, in the greater good. And they come to it with their own particular views about what will make the country a better place. And they don't agree. and that's fine. They shouldn't agree. It's good to have diversity of opinions. But if we're going to have a civil society, we have to be able to also share those opinions with each other, sometimes agree to disagree and not think of the others as hateful, you know, or evil or somehow flawed human beings. That in the grand scheme of things, we are still all

Canadians. We are still all one in the best for our country, even if we have different views of how best to get there. You know, it's not like people are enemies of the state. This is not like the Second World War in that sense. And so that healthy dialogue, healthy understanding of the place of all of us as citizens in keeping a healthy democracy. And if need be, to defend that democracy is, I think, something that as Canadians we need to retain. I really appreciate that because for me, I can't, I tried committing to one party early on in my kind of growing up phase. I think I was like 17 or 18 and I had committed to the NDP. But as I kind of grew and had more experiences with UFE and having opportunities to learn more through podcasts, I kind of realized

that it seems like a mistake to me to pick one side or the other because it's a time and place type of issue. At a certain point in time, in my opinion right now, we need a conservative government. And the reason I think that is because I think we've spent a lot economically. I think that that's going to impact our children and perhaps our grandchildren, depending on how you look at it. I worry about the rate of inflation on indigenous communities because inflation impacts people on fixed incomes the most. And so I think, in my opinion right now, a conservative government would be appropriate because I do think we're going to see another recession. I do think think that these things are going to shortly come to an end. And so perhaps a conservative

government would be more appropriate now. But I don't disagree that say we come out of this and five years later, maybe it's time to bring back a bunch of more social supports. And it's a more of a time and place issue than it is one side is always correct and the other side is always incorrect. I think that you have to be able to update your opinions and say, where are we right now? Do we have a flourishing economy? Are we doing really well? Or do we need to tighten the purse strings and be more careful right now and be more fiscally responsible. And I think that these types of things, I don't think it talked about enough recognizing the two sides that are both important on the coin.

Yeah, I agree. I think some people are very comfortable in a particular ideological stream. And so for them connecting with a particular political party and a particular ideology is very comfortable and suits them and their lifestyle. I've never been one of those people either. I've always been much more issue driven. So, I mean, at one time in my life or another, I have voted conservative, I voted liberal, I have voted NDP, and I have voted green. I've been all over the map.

And it is, for me, it is issue driven. Yeah, I agree. And then I agree similarly that I think there is a fiscal reckoning coming, you know, that Canada's had to, and should have spent heavily as it did to try and help the country as a whole to get through. you know, as close to unscathed as we can. Clearly, there's still going to be a lot of marks. And this, I think COVID is going to be one of those things like the Second World War where it's going to be an error marker, you know, that before COVID, things are like this. And then there will be post-COVID, you know, as an era yardstick.

Yeah. And things will be different. But there will be a time when we're going to have to address the fiscal legacy of having to, you know, deal with a massive crisis like this. And it's not the first time. You know, if you look at the Second World War, the First World War, Canada doubled and tripled its debt, you know, in these kinds of events. And that's why you have a government that can actually be, you know, intrusive to step in and to help the collective get through difficult times so that people are not left, you know, struggling at their own devices. That's why there's a need for government. but there also sometimes needs to be a balance.

And my hope is that we deal with the fiscal reckoning before it becomes a crisis like it became in the 1990s when deficit fighting and trying to wrestle the debt to ground produced a lot of hardship for Canadians across the board. Huge amounts of government services were cut. Education funding was cut, health funding was cut, everything was cut. And if we don't try and deal with those,

I think fiscal leftovers of COVID before it gets to that point, then we might go through another difficult era of restraint and fiscal cutbacks. Right. Well, let's get into kind of what you were talking about. We're losing access to the elderly. And I don't think even, I've talked about this before, but I don't think we value our seniors the same way I think we should. And I think that indigenous culture actually sets a good example on how to approach elders.

and how to look to them, look to them for wisdom, information, knowledge. So can we start, perhaps, with the First World War? And could you tell us about things you would want listeners to know? What would you want them to get out of it? Because we don't have access to anybody to be able to share stories. What do you think listeners should take away from the First World War? From the First World War? Boy, that's a big question.

And you're a little risky to just let a historian, like, say, First World War, go. Yes, we got all the time in the world. I'll try not to take all of it. First World War is a really important event for Canada, for Canadians. Canada's still relatively small. Population was about 7.5 million when the war broke out. And still very divided between French and English. In English, Canada, there's huge support to go to war.

We didn't get to declare war. we were still a dominion and didn't have control over our own foreign policy. So as soon as Britain declared war, the entire empire was at war. But here in Canada, Canadians were enthusiastic, actually. It might sound bizarre to us today, but when news of the declaration of war went through, there were spontaneous parades in the streets, bands played. People were excited. You know, there hadn't been a major war in a century since the defeat of Napoleon in Europe.

And so in this era where social Darwinist ideas were quite common currency, people looked on the idea of war as a chance for societies to test themselves against each other. This was about survival of the fittest. And people, of course, believed that, you know, in English Canada, that the Anglo-Saxon race was the fittest, and this was going to be proven. And so there was a degree of enthusiasm about going to war. And, of course, people expected the war to be short and sharp and ended by a few decisive. of battles. They all said, oh, it's going to be over by Christmas. The big concern for the Canadian boys was, are they going to be able to get there in time to take part in the adventure before the war comes to an end? And so tens of thousands of Canadian men enlisted by October

of 1914, more than 30,000 went overseas. Was there the draft? No, not initially. There was no need. Canada's armed forces in most of our major conflicts have been largely raised through volunteerism. And that was the case for most of the First World War as well. Up until 1917, in fact, voluntary enlistments enabled Canada to build up an army of four divisions on the Western Front, a little over 100,000 men, and to sustain that even through all the heavy casualties of 1915 and 1916 and into 1917 as well, to Vimy Ridge. And it's only after that, to the Prime Minister of the time, Robert Borden, happened to be in Britain for conferences with the Empire leadership

and came to visit the troops after the Battle of Amy Ridge and he came back to Canada determined to make sure because Canada was starting to run out of voluntary enlistments at that stage that he was going to find the replacements to make sure the Canadian Corps could stay strong through to the end of the war regardless of how they were raised and that's what brought conscription on in 1917 which was a bitterly divisive issue

it really in many ways it fractured what was already a very fraught relationship between English and French Canada. I think you could argue that out of that, we ended up with two Canadian identities that lived in parallel with each other throughout the 20th century. You had a French-Canadian nationalism very much isolated in Quebec, and you had an English-Canadian nationalism more broadly throughout the rest of the country. And in some ways, I think you can draw fairly direct lines from that break in 1917 to the rise of the, to the quiet revolution. in Quebec in the 1960s, the rise of the Party Quebecois, the Sovereignty Referendum in 1980, and then eventually the second referendum in 1995 that, of course, came within a percentage point of actually breaking Canada apart, potentially.

So the legacies of that war really lasted a long time, and that's only one part of the legacy. Women get the vote for the first time during the war in that election for conscription federally, but provincially it started earlier in 1916, in Manitoba and Alberta, BC was 1917. So, you know, that was another important legacy of that war.

I think it's important for us to know as Canada as Canadians today. What else? What else? Maybe the idea that Canadians could be accomplished soldiers. We don't think of Canada

today, as I said earlier, as a warlike people or a warrior nation. And yet, Canada's military contribution in the First World War, they all arrived almost entirely as amateur soldiers, right? A lot of them were served in the militia, but they were just part-time soldiers. And Canada's units in the Western Front were pretty amateurish still through 1915, but by 1916, they were starting to really learn how to fight, learn how to deal with a modern industrial battlefield that had lots of artillery and, you know, barbed wire entanglements and machine guns and poison gas and was a pretty awful experience. And yet the Canadians became very

adept actually at, in particularly attacking, learned how to break through the German defenses almost at will from Vimy Ridge in April of 1917, right through to the end of 1918 of the, you know, the armistice in November of 1918, Canada's core on the Western Front became an elite attacking formation within the British Expeditionary Force and was famous. I mean, Vimy Ridge, we all remember today. It's symbolically important, even if it wasn't necessarily strategically a big deal. It didn't really shorten the war any day or anything like that, but it's come down to us as the kind of symbolic shorthand of what were, was in some a remarkable accomplishment for Canada at the time, that, you know, Canadian soldiers were

seen by both their enemies and their allies as some of the best and most effective soldiers of the First World War. Could you tell us about Vimy Ridge? Sure. Yeah, Vimy Ridge is a high point of ground in northeastern France. And it had been in German hands since the early part of the war, late 1914, 15. The French army had tried twice to take the... in 1915, lost over 100,000 men trying to do this. And the Germans had spent all the years since more heavily fortifying it and really considered it impregnable. And so the Canadians came into that sector, the front in the winter of 1916-17, spent

months preparing. They knew they were going to be attacking it at some point in the spring. They dug miles of tunnels in the chalky soil underground. Literally, they're called subways. And if you go to Vimy Ridge today, some of those subways are still accessible. you can do a public tour and it's quite remarkable they're they're tight you know for you can imagine hundreds of men hiking through these tunnels with big packs and rifles uh there were huge underground caverns that were dug out where an entire battalion of 700 men could wait to go up you know

into the front lines safe from enemy fire and uh there's huge amounts of preparations all kinds of guns were brought in the Germans knew they were coming and yet on the day Canadian artillery fire was superb and the tactics were well developed and well designed and they managed to roll through the German defenses and capture the entire ridge, almost entire ridge, within a matter of hours. In fact, there are a few chunks that held out for a day or two afterwards. But it was a small part of a larger British offensive that mostly didn't go very well except for the capture Vimy Ridge. So it was the first time that the Canadians really got a lot of press. It was Easter Monday and the French press called it, you know, Canada's Easter

gift to France, and the press in London made a big deal of the Canadians, Canadians back home, were super proud of it, and the soldiers themselves knew that it had been a real accomplishment to take this. So it was, it sort of announced their

arrival, if you will, as an elite formation on the Western Front. But it's one of those things. It wasn't that big a deal in the broad realm of the First World War as a whole. And it wasn't a certainty after the war that Vimy Ridge would become the site for Canada to build a memorial and to remember its sacrifices in the Great War.

You know, at one point there were going to be a whole series of smaller memorials at eight or ten sites. And Vimmy was not necessarily the most important of those or seen necessarily in that way. And the decisions eventually evolved to the point where they were only going to build one memorial. and Vimey Ridge was determined to be the place to build it. And in part because of that, when that massive and stunning limestone memorial was unveiled in 1936, that became the focal point of Canada's memory. And so when students come into my class today, they know Vimy Ridge. They don't know any other battle of First World War that the Canadians necessarily fought in,

but they do know Vimy Ridge. So I sort of feel badly because on the one hand, I'm dismantling a little of the mythology of Vimy Ridge and telling them these sorts of things, but also broadening their understanding of how the Canadian Corps got to be successful at Vimy Ridge, through the long, hard classroom on the Western Front, and then what they did afterwards, which in many ways are much more important

to helping to end the war in 1918. The Canadian battles in the last hundred days are hugely important. The Canadian forces were like the spearhead of the Allied armies, fighting in some of the most difficult parts of the line, always achieving their objectives, capturing 10% of all the prisoners that all of the Allied armies captured

in the last 10 days, even though they made up probably 2% of the actual numbers. You know, they really punched above their weight class. And so that, for me, is the most important part of the First World War, is how adept, how proficient, how professional they had become, and because of that, how successful they were. Right. Could you tell us a little bit about how,

the First World War came about, what caused, you mentioned a little bit about social Darwinism as a motivation for Canadians to want to get involved, but what caused these issues? Because my childhood self, when I was sitting in these classes or learning about the war, was like, well, if I was there, we would just avoid war because that silliness. And why would you send soldiers out? And the politicians are sitting at home, making their decisions, and we're sending out vulnerable children, young people, to go out and fight. We should have just avoided all of that, and we could have just been so much smarter. But I think that that's probably naive to think. So could you tell us a little bit about how this came about?

Yeah, hindsight makes us feel like we're smarter than people in the past, but the reality is they were dealing with lots of unknowns. And when they, you know, one of the tricks in trying to understand past actors is you actually have to try and get out of your own shoes and put yourself in somebody else's shoes, trying to erase all knowledge of what does happen, and stand in the past and look forward. And then you when you do that, all of a sudden you see not just what does happen, but all the alternatives that didn't, you know, the dead ends,

the errors, the lost hope, lost causes kind of thing that never did take place. When you stand in the future or stand in the president and look back, it all looks like a much clearer, more straightforward line. And so putting yourself in that past, you can see that there are, you know,

lots of people were making decisions and making what we can see now were mistakes or fateful decisions that help lead to war. But the conditions in Europe before the war were such that, in a lot of ways, the continent was kind of primed for it. All the different nations in Europe were in a period of intense nationalism in all the different countries, but also intense militarism. You know, they felt all of them threatened by their neighbors, and so they built strong militaries, which of course made their neighbors feel more threatened, who then built strong militaries, so they felt better.

And, you know, there's a real arms race going on. Germany is a rising power in Central Europe, is building a Navy to challenge British naval dominance. France wants to get back Alsace and Lorraine, two provinces that lost in a war with Prussia in 1870. Russia is a giant behemoth on the east, but it's not very well organized. And so all of these countries have huge militaries, you know, Germany's standing armies, well over 800,000. and all the countries have also instituted conscription, peacetime draft. So every young man would go into the military and spend three years, the military, two or three years, and then they would return to peace life,

but they were liable to be recalled at a moment's notice. So France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Italy, Britain, all of them had the capability, Britain less so, of ramping that peacetime professional army of hundreds of thousands of men up into the millions in a matter of weeks. So they were kind of primed. And then the other thing that we often point to is that there's a, in part, because these countries felt insecure, they looked to build alliances to help make themselves

feel safer. And so you had two different armed camps, essentially in Europe. We had the triple alliance, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy. And then opposing them were Russia and France in a very close alliance. And somewhat loosely connected to this was the, the British Empire, and what was known as the Triple Entente. And so those two armed camps are kind of staring at each other. And what happens then is in the summer of 1914, in the Balkans, in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo,

the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire is killed by a Serb nationalist. And Serbia is independent nation next door, but Austria-Hungary decides it wants to swallow it up in retribution for this. And so we asked Germany if it's going to have its back, if it pushes this, because they fear Russia might want to get involved. Russia has interests in the Balkans. So the Germans say, yep, you go. No worries.

We got you back. Austria-Hungary starts to mobilize issues and ultimatum to Serbia, and it's like domino's falling. Russia then threatens Austria-Hungary and says, back down or we're going to start mobilizing. They start to mobilize. Germany then threatens Russia. We're going to mobilize. start to mobilize, then France mobilizes. And so all the dominoes fall. And there'd been crises like these before, but always, you know, and sometimes it came to brinkmanship, you know,

sort of international chicken and saber rattling and you back down or all go to war, no, you back town. Somebody had always blinked before. Well, in 1914, nobody blinked. And so the Germans wound up launching their forces through Belgium and into France, trying to defeat France quickly. And that brought Britain into the war because it had signed a treaty to protect neutrality of Belgium. And so on August the 4th, Britain declared war, and we found ourselves in it. Wow. That is just hard to imagine. And the way you laid out is just so clear. And it's just so easy to get lost in this. And like, it just surprises me that this information isn't more readily discussed because it is so engaging and so interesting to see how we operated as a society and how

allegiances were made. And these allegiances still largely exist today. Like, you think about our relationship with China, our relationship with Russia, our partnership with the United States, these close relationships still kind of exist today. Like, we can put this into modern terms and then kind of take away that, well, that was history and these people are somehow different than me. When you think about, we're on the outs with China right now. We have a very tough relationship right now, and it's hard to say where that's going to land. And it is, again, like this chicken. They have, I believe, still two of our Canadian citizens locked up. Those two have been freed. The Michaels were freed. But there are other Canadians, including

a young man from Abbotsford, who was arrested with for drug possession, but who has been given a death sentence for this. And you're right. I agree that our relationship with China is very fraught, and it's hard to see where this goes in the future. But these alliances do is this. Canada remains part of NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, we remain connected to Europe. We have Canadian soldiers who are in Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania, trying to help those countries feel less threatened by Russian aggression and actions because Putin is, you know, starting to rumble and try to rebuild kind of Russia's military and political clout back to where it was during the Cold War. And so it is uncertain times, and our alliances remain really

critical to us. And again, all the more reason why it's important we think of ourselves, not simply as peacekeepers, but in times of war, Canadians have always stepped forward and carried their weight. Right. Just a really quick question, and then we can get into the Second World War. So, from my understanding, Israel still has a conscription process for their young people. And when I learned that more recently, I kind of thought about my high school experience, and I don't know if you experienced this, but there were certain peers of mine that just had this desire to be a part of the military, to go learn, to educate themselves, to get that discipline. I don't think that they were looking to go murder people.

I don't think that that was the cause, but I had certain peers were like, I want to go join the military, the Canadian military. I want to go to the gym every day. I want to build my body up and I want to be a strong follower and like get that discipline built into me, be a strong leader, develop those skills and grow an individual as a consequence. I'm just interested to know what your thoughts are on how Israel approaches things. Do you think that from an outside perspective that that's a bad thing? Do you think that perhaps encouraging more, like I know the United States is much more encouraging of people to join their military at a younger age. It doesn't seem like Canada plays much of a role in that, but I do see some of my peers being like, I really want this.

And then they're kind of ostracized from, in my opinion, the larger collective of the school or their peers, because that's so out there for everybody else. And I'm just interested in your thoughts on that. Yeah, you're right. In Canada, a military career is not a commonly sought out one, I think, for a lot of young people, although it can be an excellent career. It's an opportunity to get all kinds of different education. Travel the world. Travel the world job experiences, because a lot of it is very, of course, technical as well. So it's not simply about soldiering and carrying a rifle. There's a lot of modern warfare that involves, and modern armies. In fact, the people who carry the rifle are the minority. A lot more of the army

and the military forces are needed for everything else that goes on around behind the scenes. and a lot of that is very technology heavy these days. And so there is lots of possibilities there. And it's not something Canada's ever been as, or in recent years, has been as forthright about. I think the Canadian military does try to recruit. Sometimes it struggles to get itself up to full strength, actually. And it's much easier in the United States. It's much more all-encompassing, you know, a military career is seen as more viable.

There are countries like Israel that maintain conscription, in Israel's case, because it feels still surrounded and threatened by enemies. But they're not the only ones. You know, Switzerland does. We think of Switzerland, of course, as, you know, the paragon of neutrality. But what sustains their neutrality, and they're surrounded by large and powerful neighbors, is and has traditionally been conscription and a very powerful military for the size of the country. And in countries that have conscription, in a way it kind of is a common level.

It becomes part of the national experience that, you know, in the same way that you go to school in Canada and then lots of people go on to university and you go through these stages in your life, well, for everybody, the military becomes part of that stage. They all go through the same training. And so it does create a sense of connection to the nation to a broader common cause, I think. And so it can be a positive social influence in that regard. And, you know, you're right. I think people do develop a sense of discipline. learn how to work within an organization, how to follow orders, how to give orders, and lead. So there are a lot of transferable skill sets that come out of a military career, or at least experience in the military. And so I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing. And then think in Canada, you know, our military does quite a lot of different things. It's much more likely in recent years to be involved in helping out with natural disasters like the fires here in B.C. this past summer, you know, floods and a variety of other things with COVID, you know, providing medical service expertise to Ontario, to Alberta, helping out in care homes in Quebec. So the kinds of things that the jobs that you'll be doing are really diverse and not always about fighting. Not always about conflict. Those skill sets are important in a lot of different kind of crazy situations.

I don't disagree. And when I think of, like, part of the reason I thought you would be such a great guest is because, to me, you are the steward for the history of all of these role models, all of these people who were willing to put their country, to put their children, their grandchildren above themselves. And to me, that is a role model. And it wasn't always clear that you were going to return home. and that's the ultimate sacrifice. And I've had the pleasure of having Bill Turnbullon, who's the owner of the town butcher,

and he wanted to serve in the military. And the kind of common theme I've seen among people who are open to joining the military or who have served is this intense amount of honor and responsibility to their community, this sense of it is the collective before myself. And not everybody has that. Not everybody needs, like we can't all be identical in certain ways, but the qualities that I think that you get out of this is, so valuable. And once I started looking at role models, I started to realize that there are

role models throughout history that I don't know, that people like yourself can shine light on, and that is, to me, your service to our community. Because if we don't have access to that, if you're not here, if we don't have access to the people who did serve, then there's no connection other than a book, and that's not going to be the type of storytelling that I think you're sharing today. Story storytelling is at the heart of being a historian. In some ways, it's one of the great pleasures of being a history teacher is actually being allowed and able to share stories. So for me, I enjoy lecturing. I enjoy the performative elements of it. I like sharing, engaging, funny, and sometimes emotional stories from the past. And I think that helps students

you're right to connect in a way that reading about a thing, an event or a person, may not always have the same kind of level of connection, perhaps. I don't know if I want to take on all the responsibility of being a steward for the memory and sacrifice of veterans, but I certainly do try and do my bit for the greater good in that way as best I can. I've never served in the military, so I don't have firsthand experience. My knowledge is book knowledge. And unless you have served, particularly served in combat, you can't fully appreciate that experience. It's a bit of a kind of a Rubicon. You can't cross without having been through it.

And so it's hard to get students even close to that line sometimes. We live thankfully in a peaceful, a peaceful country with relatively, boring politics, which I always tell people is a great gift, because if your politics are more interesting, it may not be as peaceful. And so, you know, people are a long ways removed from these stories. Not many people hunt anymore as well. Like, I grew up in Cranbrook, everybody hunted. I grew up being used to using firearms. But when I went away to Ontario to teach in, you know, university in southern Ontario in an urban center, nobody did. Nobody had even touched a gun.

And so they're even that one bit further removed from the ideas and the reality. And so I remember having, trying to, I had a student who was in a reenactment group. They collected period uniforms, decommissioned weapons and that sort of thing from the Second World War. And I was hoping to get him to come into class in uniform with a Second World War Canadian uniform. and weapons that have been decommissioned, so they're no longer functional. And there was no possible way to bring those weapons on campus, even though they were no longer functional in the 1990s. It was seen as too soon after the massacre at the occult palatechique in Montreal.

And it was, people thought I was crazy to even suggest it. And I can remember thinking, well, that's all the more reason why, I mean, I can explain what a brand light machine gun looks like. But when you see it, it has a certain gravitas. It looks, you can, it exudes a lethality, you know, that its purposes for killing. And, and that whole idea, that war at a certain level is about killing the enemy. And that is its ultimate purpose and in its most terrible purpose for those who have to actually do the pulling of the trigger. Putting yourselves into those shoes, if you can't even, if you've never touched the gun, You can't even imagine, like, feel the weight of it.

It's just, there's so many barriers to trying to connect people to that experience. And so there's lots of different ways that we try and help get people through to feel some sort of connection. One of the things that I do with my Canadian military history class is there's an amazing collection of letters and diaries and other documents that have been collected and digitized at Vancouver Island University's Canadian Letters and Images Project. And they have the letters collected from hundreds of Canadian soldiers from the First World War, many from the Second World War and other events as well. And I get my students to read through the letters of a lot of these soldiers and then write an essay, that sort of think piece essay about what was the role of this personal communication? What did it mean to the soldiers? What did it mean to their families back home? What was being communicated here?

and it makes it personal. It makes these people who are normally just images in black and white photographs seem human. And, you know, my students tell me, like they're reading through these people's letters. They've read 20 letters that this guy wrote over a couple of years. And then all of a sudden the last thing is a telegraph saying, we regret to inform you that, you know, your son was killed in action kind of thing. And they weep, you know, they actually become personally invested in these people as human beings. And it's really quite powerful, actually, I think, and brings home in a way that we could then transfer and imagine in a present-day context.

What does that look like? What does that mean? How might that feel? Because, of course, the students in my class, that's the demographic that would have been overseas. Overwhelming majority of them would have been in a uniform. Absolutely. And when you say that, it makes me think of, I don't know if you saw, I think it was on Netflix, the Diaries of Anne Frank. I think it was Merrill Streep who did the voiceover.

for it. I can't remember for sure. But that experience of hearing her story and hearing the processes that she went through was very eye-opening. That and watching World War II in color were very moving in that you see the reality for the individuals and you see the fears and the concerns and how the layout of the kind of the politics is set up as well. And I think that that puts it, it gives more of that access. And I think that that's so valuable. Can you tell us about, so Hitler, I believe, was involved in World War I or the Great War. And then from there, it doesn't sound like he's having a great time. Can you tell us about how World War II kind of comes about?

Yeah, Hitler did serve in the First World War. He was gassed. He was a corporal served in the front lines kind of thing. So he did experience the horrors of war. But that seems not to have daunted him from the idea that it's worth pursuing. During the interwar period, Germany really struggles. The Allies punish them severely. The Treaty of Versailles and the reparations payments severely restrict the amount of military, you know, forces or equipment they're allowed to have.

And Germany is really humbled and many Germans are very bitter about the experience. Many veterans feel they were stabbed in the back by socialists and communists, you know, at home, rioted and sort of forced the German government to bring the war to an end in 1918. But the reality was Germany was also badly defeated by that stage. And so the Weimar Republic that crows through the 20s is a somewhat fragile, not very healthy thing. Its democracy is fragile. There are violent elements within that society, and some of them gravitate towards Hitler and the National Socialist Party that he develops.

He tries to create a coup at one stage unsuccessfully and winds up getting busted for that and serving some time. But eventually he comes back to the political game and achieves increasing support as a far-right-wing nationalist party in the early 1930s, particularly because Germany is heavily hammered by the Great Depression. And it creates conditions that are more conducive to the extremist kind of messaging to the scapegoating of Jews that are part of the Nazi message.

And E. Garn has a lot of support. Eventually, he manages to win enough support to make himself the government. And once in government, he pretty much dismantles all sorts of democratic structures to create essentially a dictatorship. But what he also does is he takes over control of the economy. He injects huge amounts of money into major works projects, like building the Audubon Highway systems. He builds up the military, starts investing in building up weapons systems. He abrogates the Treaty of Versailles. It says we're no longer abiding by that. And all of this

actually injects a lot of money into the German economy in a way that starts to pull the economy out of the doldrums. Faster than was happening, certainly here in Canada. There were a lot of people in Canada who admired Hitler at this stage, who thought, you know, what we could use here is a strong hand at the tiller like this to help lift us out of what seemed to many people to be the failure of capitalism after years of depression. And so, you know, Germany is increasingly aggressive seeming, you know, certainly Hitler's messaging is very much so, but he also starts to test the boundaries. So he remilitarizes the Rhineland, reoccupies that. And... What is the Rhinelands?

The Rhineland is a part of Germany that was in the Versailles Treaty, right on the border with France, that was declared a demilitarized zone, and it was occupied by the Allies for many years. And in this case, he marches German troops in and reoccupies and remilitarizes this. And if the Western countries, France in particular, had tried to resist this, he was prepared to step back. He wasn't ready to move to war yet. But they didn't. You know, a lot of people in the West were starting to think, well, maybe we were too harsh with Versailles, this is understandable what he's doing. And God knows we don't want a war. You know, there's so much trauma from the devastation and the death that followed the war that no sane country wanted to go to war. And this really affects, particularly Britain and France, who are the great powers in Europe, left to kind of try and deal with this now increasingly aggressive Hitler. Not only him, but also the fascist leader in Italy, Benito Muzalini, and in Japan, Imperial Japan itself is also becoming increasingly aggressive in Asia. It's taking over chunks of China. It then invades China in 37. Here in the West, we think of the war starting in 39, but realistically, the Pacific

theater, the war kicks off in 1937 when Japan invades China. And so there's a lot of instability in the world. All these three countries are pushing the boundary. Italy invades Abyssinia, which is present to Ethiopia. And the League of Nations, you know, thinks about putting sanctions on to try and stop them and eventually kind of backs down and lets them conquer the last free country in Africa that was actually a member of the League of Nations. And that kind of was the death knell for the League of Nations as some sort of international body that could keep the peace. And so Hitler then begins to push the boundaries even more. He reunifies Germany and Austria, which was something that was prohibited under Versailles, so that Germany is now larger.

He then starts to make rumblings about portions of Czechoslovakia, the boundary areas, that had a lot of ethnic Germans living in, called the Sedetan land, and had German agents trying to stir up trouble there. Eventually, France and Britain meet with Hitler and Mussolini, and they decide, okay, you can have the Sedetan land. They don't even invite the Czechoslovak leadership to the table. This is the height of appeasement, right? This is, if we just give them a few things that they want, they'll settle down and we'll have peace.

Unfortunately, all the appeasement sort of policies did was to embolden the aggressor nations even more. Because as soon as the Sedetan land was gone, Germany, in fact, invaded the Czech half and seized it right away and turned the Slovak half into a protectorate. And at that point, the Western aisle was like, okay, we can no longer trust a word. he said, you know, if anything further happens, it's time to stand up to Hitler. And so in the summer of 1939, Hitler decides that he's going to, there's a chunk of Poland he wants. He starts making threatening noises towards Poland, France, and Britain say, we guarantee Poland security. That if you invade, we will declare war. And Hitler doesn't believe them.

He still thinks it's a couple years before the Western allies will stand up to him. And so he concludes the pact of steel. with Stalin and the Soviet Union, and the two of them invade and share Poland between them. But as soon as German troops cross the line, the Western Allies issue an ultimatum, and then Britain declares a war on September 3rd, 1939. Can you just really quickly, because from my understanding, Hitler was very right-leaning, he was very against communist ideas, but he partners with Stalin, who's the ultimate left-leaning person in terms of communism.

Can you just share a little bit about that, and then please, free or free to continue? Yeah, the Pact to Steele really catches everybody globally by surprise because you could not imagine stranger bedfellows than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. One, a communist, the other, a fascist, both at the extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum. Both saw each other as an enemy. But in this case, they made common cause because both wanted to carve up Poland in between them.

But there's, I can remember there was a great British satirical cartoon that came out in the newspaper showing the two of them, shaking hands together and, you know, both of them holding a knife behind their back kind of thing. It's, oh, the scum of the earth, I see. Oh, yes, the spawn of the devil. You know, making a deal with the devil. Both of them thought they were. But it was a short-term thing because, of course, Germany will eventually invade a Soviet Union in the summer of 1940. Right. And please feel free to continue. Yeah. So, yeah, anyway, the war breaks out in September 1939 in Europe. Canada isn't automatically included in the war by Britain's declaration.

And so the Canadian Parliament is recalled because it was in recess at the time. It took about a week to get everybody together. It was briefly debated in the House of Commons and then a near unanimous declaration of war was passed by Canada on the 10th of September. Who was the Prime Minister then? Prime Minister is Wilford Lyon, McKenzie King. Okay. He's our longest serving ever, Prime Minister. He comes to power in the early 1920s.

Serves throughout most of the interwar period, except for the first five years of the Depression. He kind of got lucky that way. He didn't do very well at the very beginning of the Depression. And so we got booted out, and R.B. Bennett came in for the Conservatives from 1930 to 35, which is the worst of the Depression. And then Bennett was turfed out because he didn't fix the Depression. And McKinsey King came back in, not because people loved McKinnell. Kenzie King, but because he wasn't R.B. Bennett, mostly. Oh, interesting. And then King

stays in power until 1948 when he retires. Wow. And so then what happens? So we unanimously agree to go to war? Very nearly. Yeah, the only dissenting vote comes from J.S. Woodsworth, who's a member of the CCF, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. It's a foreigner today's NDP, who is a real pacifist. And for him, philosophically, he can't go there, but the rest of his party, some, you know, votes in support. But it, you know, it wasn't a given that Canada was going to come into the war, especially with McKenzie King at the helm, but through a lot of the interwar years, Canada was quite isolationist. The war was scarring.

We, you know, for Canada, we lost 66,000 plus dead in the First World War. And for a small country, that was, there's hardly a family unaffected in the country. And so people didn't really want to go fight other people's wars through the 1930s. It's one of the reasons why we were happy to have the status of sitting at the League of Nations, but we didn't want the responsibility of collective security. And part of that was because we felt safe. In fact, Canada's representative at the League in 1923 made a famous speech in which he said, you know, we live in a fireproof house far from inflammable materials.

And so Canada wasn't really keen on the collective security provisions of the League Charter. We actually made a lot of important things that helped weaken the League. Like we didn't want to be forced to go fight other people's wars. So we managed to get it sort of rejigs so that, well, you were supposed to, but your parliament, your government could basically decide if and how much you'd participate. And so, you know, some of the reasons for the league's inability to respond to the rise of Italy and Germany and Japan, frankly, lie at the feet of Canada and our leaders. And McKenzie King was at the forefront of this. He was badly scarred by the experience of the First World War, right? That conscription crisis, it tore the Liberal Party apart as much as a tour of French and English.

Canada apart. And as a liberal leader, he depended on both French and English MPs to stay in power. And so for him, national unity was the lens through which he viewed all things. And anything that was going to potentially lead Canada into a war, could potentially lead Canada to conscription, could potentially lead Canada to breaking French and English Canada apart, and the destruction of the country. That was the equation in his mind. And so anything he could do to avoid taking action. Sanctions. Well, that's just a halfway house to war. He kept telling Britain, don't do anything. I can't promise that we're going to be at your side. He didn't want to encourage Britain to be too bellicose. And so some of Britain's enthusiasm for appeasement was in part because

Canada and the other dominions were not always clearly going to be on side if they got into a war. And most Canadians, I think, supported that appeasement, you know, when the British and French governments were selling out Czechoslovakia to Hitler. McKenzie King was there with his pom-poms and his cheerleader skirt, just singing the praises of Britain for doing this. And in some ways, to us today, because appeasement became a bad word,

because we know in the end that it led to, you know, just encouraging Hitler and Mussolini that it was a failed strategy. At the time, it made sense. Nobody wanted to go back to war, you know, and the thought of it was enough that you would take some pretty, what we now see as moral,

problematic actions in order to avoid that war. In the end, of course, we couldn't avoid war. And McKenzie King knew that he couldn't keep Canada out of a war if Britain got involved in a serious war that threatened Britain. Because in English, Canada, there's still a lot of sympathy for Britain, a lot of British Canadians still identified in some ways, more or less strongly with Britain and the British Empire. And because we tended to look at Britain as sort of the defender of a lot of the philosophical and ideological values that we cherish. Freedom and democracy, that sort of thing, which we're very much seen as that threat, that the kind of government that Hitler and Mussolini were leading were seen as very much attacking this kind of way of life.

So it was really fundamental kind of values at stake. And I think that's really what motivates Canada to go to war. It wasn't just a knee-jerk kind of colonial, who Britain's at war, we've got to go help mom kind of thing. There's something of that in there, but it's a deeper commitment to the war. And so when war breaks out, you don't see the enthusiasm and spontaneous parades of 1939, but more Canadians offer themselves for service in the first four months of the war in 1939 than they did in 1914. So can you comment on, you talked about the social Darwinism of that sense of like, oh, we have to see, which is greater. It doesn't sound like that was the case in World War II. No, I don't think so. I think in a lot of ways, the first

World War is much more an imperial struggle of empires, right? And that racial tones certainly framed a lot of that. The Second World War is much more a war for between democracy and fascism, you know, between totalitarianism and a free-thinking democratic society. At least that's what we were fighting for when we went into the war. Of course, by the end of the war, and we didn't know this until the end, we didn't see the full scope of the horror is the Holocaust. And at that point, I think many people in Canada and elsewhere realized that, in fact, this was a war for the very sole humanity in a lot of ways. There was no, it was a just war. It was a war that had to be fought. It was a war that Canada had to be a part of. We couldn't

avoid it. That is just hard to even imagine in today's society, just to try and put yourself in these shoes. And I don't, you can't blame McKenzie King for his position. but I do see like a lot of parallels of like the culture today to the circumstance like when we were dealing with Afghanistan. I felt those tensions even growing up of like should we be there? Should we and like the United States goes through this regularly of is what we're doing right? Should we invade to try and build the democracies? And these are still conversations that sort of take place today. And it isn't clear what the right answer is because obviously with Afghanistan we're seeing that whatever we try to.

to do for 20 years didn't take um but was you couldn't know that until you're you're out of there and you're looking back going it didn't work the optimism perhaps can proceed and you can i guess tie this in with the ideas of are we going there for good reasons for oil for is are we being altruistic or are we being malevolent in our going into afghanistan and all those types of questions can you tell us like more about the values that people people were willing to, because I think that that's so valuable to, to kind of dissect is the willingness to die and fight for your values. That doesn't seem to resonate with many people today. We seem very malleable if there's a problem. Maybe we, we bend the rules a little,

like there isn't that same, I watched Haxall Ridge and watching him struggle and stand up against something, but still believe in the need to go to war, that kind of fight. Sorry, could you tell me his name again? Oh, I'm putting you on the spot now. You are. I have seen the movie. I'm familiar with the case, but I can't remember the name of the individual who's portrayed in that. Okay, but anyways, his willingness to be like a conscientious objector of death, to me, like,

that's so important that people are willing to stand by their values, but also, see the war as necessary. Like, watching that movie just, it struck me because that is so important that we are able to have our values and be able to move forward as a consequence. So can you share some of the values that people had during that time and perhaps why we need to revive these values? Well, I think we still feel these values. It's just events like a global total war bring them into sharp crystal focus.

and when they're at risk, when they're really, really genuinely threatened. I think it's harder in, you know, the contemporary context when they don't feel so threatened. And so we aren't called to take a stand in a way. In 1939, Canadians are called to take a stand. And it is clear, maybe not initially, because initially Canada tries to fight a limited liability war, and that's McKenzie King. Again, it's always everything by half measures, and in part his half measures help keep France and French and English Canada together and united. But once France falls, then it's a war for survival from then on in. And everybody is involved.

Canada is in a total war. We enlist huge numbers of men. And again, mostly volunteerism. You know, the vast majority, like 11 million people live in Canada in 1939, and 1.1 million Canadians would put on a uniform during the Second World War. So, one in ten people. It's extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary. I mean, you think our population is now, what, 36 million-ish?

So I mean 3.6 million Canadians? That's almost impossible for us to imagine in a contemporary context. But if there was an existential threat and it was required, you know. I mean, it is an interesting question. Would people step forward? And we never know until you're called. Yeah. But you do see people come together in a crisis.

I think early COVID days really showed that, that people mostly really pulled together in Canada. Not everybody, and then not everybody did in the Second World War either. You know, you still had a thriving black market and people were doing things they shouldn't do that were against the regulations and, you know, hoarding food and stuff like that. But by and large, people pulled together in a time of crisis. And this was very much time of crisis. and those values that then come really to the fore. There's kind of this process where I, in one scholar looking at New Zealand, that this called it a social tightening,

that people kind of look at each other, look, they kind of rally around the flag, they look at every component of their society and say, look, are you with us or against us? And also, who are we and what are we fighting for? Because it matters. You know, if you're going to enlist, if you're going to put your life at stake,

you kind of need to feel really clear about that. why am I doing this? What is this for? Is it worth it? And it's clear in the Second World War for hundreds of thousands of Canadian men and women that it was worth it, that they did, in fact, volunteer to enlist. Canada does bring in conscription, but it's initially only for home defense. So that starts in 1940 after the fall of France. And so there are tens of thousands of Canadians who are conscripted and who serve out the whole war in Canada, defending BC's coast after Japan enters the Pacific War. For instance, by attacking Pearl Harbor.

But the vast majority of those who go overseas are volunteers. Only a few thousand conscripts actually make it overseas in 1945 just before the war ends. So that's an extraordinary thing. And that is also part of a Canada's tradition that our war efforts have been voluntary things. We haven't forced people into the war for the most part. There have been conscripts who have served, both in First and Second World Wars. But by and large, Canadian service has been a voluntary thing. And so that draws people in because they see their values at stake, things that are important to them.

If they believe in democracy, if they believe in freedom, in the equality of humanity. Those were the things that people said they were fighting for in the Second World War. Those are the things that were quite clearly at stake in the war against the fascist states. If we had the same kind of existential threat today, I think Canadians do value the values and moral structures of our society, of democracy, of change through political, you know, action, not violence, of equality of voices across the board of different genders, different sexual orientations, and the city's faiths, that everybody has a right to say, everybody has a right to their beliefs and their values. values. If those are genuinely perceived to be threatened, that changes the equation. And that's not to say that everybody goes to war as a crusader. I mean, I often tell my students it's worth keeping in mind that the target demographic

of militaries the world over has always been your 18, 19, 20-year-old male. There's a reason for that. That age, you're bulletproof, you think you're indestructible, and you're still impressionable and impulsive, right? you don't always wisely consider all the potential consequences of your choices. And so, you know, lots of men signed up in a sort of intellectual and philosophical state. But others, it was more of a whim. They bumped into their buddies who were heading to their recruitment offices and they said,

hey, come with us. And they thought, what the hell? Sure. And they just popped in without really thinking about it. So not everybody gives it a lot of thought. I don't want to give that impression. But, you know, obviously for many men who did it. enlist and women too. It was a carefully considered decision. They spoke with their family members

about it. They spoke with their pastor about it. They participated in public discussions and debate. They read the newspapers and tried to understand who's going on in the world. And so they came to it as a considered action. I guess I hope that that's what people get out of this aspect of the discussion is that you should try and live your life like that. You should try and live your life. Why am I doing this? What are the impacts going to be? What are the benefits?

What are the cons? What is the impact that I'm looking to make? Because for me, this is all a lot of work. To try and do law school, to try and do this. It's something that I had to commit myself to and say, what is the benefit that it's hopefully going to yield for people? And is it worth my time, energy effort to try and organize all of this, put in the effort and do it to the best of my own ability, not just kind of like let's just sit

down on the side of the road and have a conversation and I'll record on my iPhone. How do I take this seriously and utilize the time that people like yourself share to try and provide people with a better framework to look out into the world with? Because I think that that is part of war does put your pressure on like, why am I going? I'm going to get on a boat. I'm going to learn how to fight people. I'm going to be in the middle of nowhere. I could die. Like, it's the ultimate sacrifice in that way. And if you even have half of that mindset, even a quarter of that mindset, I think your life is going to be so much more meaningful when you're putting things into the perspective

of, is what I'm doing going to help my family? Is it going to help my community? How could I make it do those things? How can I rearrange my world in order to have a lasting positive impact? I'm not perfect. Nobody's perfect. But how can I move forward at least pointing in that direction? And I think that that gets so lost on so many university students that are like, I'm just going to go work at this place and I don't know why.

And I just want $70,000 and to do minimal amount of work. And it's like, you may be able to live your life like that, but that's not going to give you that legacy that gives you such a meaningful outlook on the world. And that makes you go to bed at night not stressed about things because you've got your priorities in order. And I think that that's where right now it feels like people miss out on that. And that's why I asked about conscription and whether or not that would be beneficial, because I have a lot of peers who attended university who didn't do it with any mindset of where they want to go with it, what their goals are, what their aspirations are, why it matters to their family, to their children. All of those organized thoughts don't seem to be there. But when you're looking at your family and you're saying, I might not come back, but I love you and I wish you guys all the best. And I'm doing this for you.

That puts everything in the perspective. And I think that that's just so important for people to try and. and take away. Why am I going to university? Why am I working at this job? Why am I doing the things I'm doing? Am I treating my family right? Could I fix the relationships with my family if they're not good? How do I go about doing these things? And that's kind of what I hope people get out of this. A certain living with intention and being engaged in the process as opposed to having it happened to you. Exactly. So could you tell us about how this war, some of the events, how Canada was involved, and then we can move into the indigenous side and the more British Columbia side.

Sure. A second war war becomes actually far more transformative in a lot of ways than the First World War was. As I said, a huge number of Canadians enlist and served all over the world in every theater of conflict in the air and on the oceans and on the ground. In particular, in Europe, the majority of Canada's focus was in Europe. in the Battle of the Atlantic as well. And so most Canadians, for them, the war, was looking east. And Canada poured enormous amounts of effort into this,

not just in terms of building up a large army again, which we did, which served in Italy and in northwest Europe, D-Day, through Belgium and the Netherlands and into Germany eventually in 1945, you know, and suffered again tens of thousands of casualties. We also build up a massive air force over about a quarter million strong this time, which was a huge contribution to victory as well. Participated heavily in the bombing campaigns of Germany, one of our largest contributions.

And Canada's Navy massively explodes in size from maybe 10 to 12 vessels at the start of the war, over 400 by war's end. And hugely important in escorting convoys across the Atlantic, making sure the supplies of men and material keep getting to Britain and then feed the build-up to then launch the invasion into Europe in 1944 and 45. And so all those contributions on the military side are immensely important. Arguably, even though they don't attain the kind of elite status in the same way that we saw in the First World War, still led to, I would argue, if anything, a greater contribution

to Allied victory in the Second World War than in the First. On the home front, the war is massively transformative. Economically, it pulls Canada out of the Depression. Finally, Canada's economy doesn't get back to pre-depression levels until 1940, 41. But, you know, our gross domestic product more than doubles during the six years of the war. That's extraordinary. Their full employment has reached by 1941, early 42, where literally there's a job for every single man and woman over the age of 16 and then some. Then the problem becomes labor shortages in key industries, and the government takes a really strong controlling stance in the economy, in society, to direct the war effort, to manage the human and material resources of the country.

Our industries explode in expanse and in sophistication. We become very much an arsenal of democracy and also the breadbasket of democracy, huge amounts of food, resources, salmon. you know, timber, ore, steel, iron, and vehicles, hundreds of thousands of military vehicles are produced in Canada during the war tanks down to jeeps. Everything you could possibly imagine was being produced in Canada for the war effort. And in fact, more than any of the other allied countries, we used the least amount of what we produced. Most of the rest of it went to Britain, to Soviet Union, and to other allied forces. And so Canada's contribution is really quite important across the board, economically and militarily.

And it has a real impact on Canadian society. It brings women into the workforce in a massive way, much more so than the First World War. There were tens of thousands who came into the workforce. In the First World War, there are hundreds of thousands of Canadian women who fill the spaces left by men departing for war. And not just in light industry, but doing heavy industry, riveting and shrewing. machine work. And the government even creates programs to, you know, government-funded daycare programs, for instance, so that working mothers can actually work in a factory or a shipping yard. They create emergency vocational programs and welding and electrical and variety of other

things so that women can get crash courses and how to do these things to fill roles that are needed filled in Canadian industry. And so it's quite transformative for women in terms of being an enlightening experience. And quite honestly, Canada becomes wealthy as a result of the war. War is, in some ways, strangely, for Canadians, always an economic boon for us. Canada's economy is thriving. People are investing huge sums of monies in victory bonds, war savings certificates, so that by the time the war ends, everybody's got a nice nest egg sitting there ready

to build a new little house in suburbia kind of thing. while their husbands are overseas fighting and sending their pay home and that sort of thing. So economically, it's good times in Canada. And we tend to think of the sort of development of a real consumer society as sort of the 1950s suburban leave-at-the-beaver kind of era. But that really starts to kick off in the Second World War. It's challenged by the fact that there aren't a lot of consumer products around, but even still it's time when people are beginning to do that, particularly women, really leading the development of consumer society. finding, you know, appliances for the home and, and other things. And in part because of that, there is also a thriving black market in liquor and women's nylons and a variety of other

goods as well that are hard to find in the context of wartime rationing and that sort of thing. Right. And so how does this sort of wrap up? So we're exiting the war or how does World War II and how does Hitler end up losing power? How does Japan end up falling? How does that all come about? So the allies are really under the gun up into 1942. The Axis are sweeping everything before them. Germany has conquered most of Europe, you know, from almost the gates of Moscow to the Mediterranean and to the coast of France, is under German sway. Italy, you know, is in control of large parts of North Africa. It tries to invade Greece. That doesn't work so well. Japan is expanding massively across the Pacific, beginning in 1941, after Pearl Harbor at the same time, you know, it's attacking the Philippines, it's attacking Hong Kong where there are Canadian soldiers stationed further south towards Australia, very soon on the northern

borders of Australia, bombing Darwin and other places, if you've seen the movie Australia, depicts that bombing, as well as island hopping across the Pacific, taking possessions that were American or other, you know, run by other countries. countries in the lead-up to the war. And so it seems like the war is very much swinging the way of the axis until 1942. And then there's a series of really important battles that happen in different parts of the world in the Pacific, the Battle of Midway and others that helped the Americans turn

the tide against the Japanese. In the Mediterranean, there's the Battle of Bel Alamein in North Africa, which allows the British to begin to drive the start of driving the axis out of North Africa. and in the Russian theater, the Battle of Stalingrad, which is an epic, long, and brutal battle between the Soviet army and the German army that eventually leads to a massive disaster for the Germans and begins the process of the Soviets starting to drive Germany back out. So from late 1942 on, now the momentum is with the Allies.

And they're driving, you know, Axis armies before them in all theaters of the war. it's in my late 1943, Canadians for the first time allow themselves to start thinking about what might come after. There's no talk of peace or the post-war, or very little talk of it, up until really the fall of 1943.

And then all of a sudden, it's like people that's okay, okay, we're going to win, it's just a matter of when. And so they start thinking about what do they want out of the war? What's supposed to follow all of this? How do we make sure the peace after this war is better than the peace after this? The first

World War. Because a lot of people felt they won the First World War, but they lost the peace afterwards. They came home and there was recession and hardship and the Winnipeg General Strike and people were really unhappy and then the economy was terrible. And then, you know, in the 1930s, of course, you get the rise of all these totalitarian states in the Great Depression. So the First World War didn't create the kind of peace that we wanted. How do we make sure we do a better job this time? That becomes the debate. So Allied armies then invade D-Day, invade Italy first in 1943 and began fighting

the way up the boot of Italy invade in Normandy on June 6th, 1944, and began to gradually drive German armies eastward back into Belgium and then into the Netherlands and to the very borders of Germany and eventually into Germany

in the winter and spring of 1945 as Russian armies are driving in and then overwhelming Berlin at the same time. So it's really the world is closing in on the Allies, on the axis. And in some ways, maybe the war was extended a little bit because the allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, had decided that absolute, complete defeat and, you know, a surrender of the axis is the only option. There's no negotiated settlement. And so they fight to the bitter end. And so it's not until May 8th that victory in Europe Day is finally achieved. Hitler commits suicide. Mussolini had been overthrown.

earlier and eventually killed by a mob in Italy. And so Germany capitulates on the 8th of May, 1945. And then later that summer in August, Japan does as well in the wake of the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the kicking off of the atomic age. That brings the Second World War to a close

after the deaths of tens of millions during the war. Wow. It is so hard to like ask another question after that type of information and kind of walking through what it's like to go to war and what it's like to have that resolve and to know that somebody committed suicide before that they actually were willing to ever confess or be held accountable for their actions. It's just very interesting to learn about. And can you now walk us through your research of looking into indigenous people's role in World War II? what came about for like what jumped out to you about that why why wasn't it researched why wasn't this an area of interest for so many yeah it's it is interesting and part of it lies in I think what I mentioned earlier the idea of sort of military history becoming a bit

marginalized and separated from social history and that was developing and growing in the 1970s and 80s and 90s and there was a real massive growth in it in the history of indigenous peoples in Canada and the indigenous settlers relationships was a really dynamic part of the discipline. There's a lot of really exciting new work being done. But the interest of those scholars tended to be not in the war, or in wars generally. It was in other issues. People who were interested in studying Canada's military past tended not to think about indigenous cultures or people, other than in the early colonial areas where indigenous warriors were important as allies or as enemies of European powers. And so after that, indigenous people largely disappeared from the meta-narrative of Canadian history or Canada's military history.

And so what you get is these two fields kind of separated by this wide gulf. And an indigenous participation in the wars of the 20th century and experiences in Canada's armed forces kind of fell into the void in between. And so occasionally, you know, one person, you know, the odd person from one side or the other would sort of dip the toe in and kind of touch on it or look at it briefly. But always, you know, the military strength never really invested in learning about indigenous peoples and cultures and trying to understand both sides of the equation and vice versa. Those who were coming out of from an indigenous perspective often didn't read the military history and didn't understand the war effort and the impact of war in society and how militaries function in the place of indigenous soldiers. and were experiences in that military component. And so that's kind of where things were when I found the topic and starting my master's in 1993.

And there was not a lot to work with to start. I was kind of writing into a void. There was one small book that had been published by a historian from the Canadian War Museum. But it was very brief in a lot of ways. And there was not much else. A couple of M.A. Theses had been done. around different parts of the subject matter.

And so that's kind of what drew me. At the same time, it was, starting in 1970s, First Nations veterans who would largely kind of disappeared and been forgotten after the war, began to organize initially in Saskatchewan and then elsewhere because they felt that their stories, their sacrifice, their service had been forgotten, and they wanted to see that recognized and remembered. and they also had really strong grievances around their access to veterans benefits and their treatment as veterans in Canada after the war. And so that was what galvanized them to begin to agitate for a hearing, you know,

and it took a long time. It took through the 1980s into the 1990s. And then eventually even while I was writing my master's thesis on government policies around recruitment and conscription of indigenous people, the standing committee on the standing committee on Aboriginal peoples produced a report or was the standing committee on veterans one of the two produced a held hearings across the country veterans came out and gave their talk to their experiences and from that they produced a report on these issues that kind of brought it to the political stage for the first time and then in 1996

of course the Royal Commission Aboriginal People's huge report on the state of Canada's relationship with indigenous communities. And there's a whole chapter on indigenous veterans. And the fact that they didn't get equal access to benefits after the wars, that they had served and been loyal, but then, you know, been let down in a way afterwards and that this was an injustice that needed to be corrected. And so all of that was part of the political realm in the 1990s. And that was part of what was, I think, inspired me to be interested in a subject. I hope that the work that I could do would help to, you know, improve or increase recognition and understanding of the experiences of indigenous recruits and their service and their status as veterans.

And so I went on and started my Ph.D. in 95 in Ontario. That was looking less at indigenous people and more at English-Canadian's perceptions of indigenous people in the way that the war and indigenous military service kind of shaped how people were viewing indigenous peoples. And that eventually was published as my first book, which was Red Man's on the Warpath, which was a great quote that I found in a wartime newspaper, a way that people used to talk about indigenous peoples in the wartime context.

And then as almost as soon as I'd finished my dissertation in 2000, and I come back to Calgary for a post-doctoral fellowship, I was contacted by what was then the National Roundtable on First Nations veterans' issues. This is a process that started in 1999. It was kind of trying to find a political agreement and solution to the challenges that indigenous veterans had placed before Canadians in the 90s. And so this was the Assembly of First Nations, Aboriginal veterans organizations from all across the country, sitting down with Department of National Defense reps, Veterans Affairs Canada, and Indian Northern Affairs Canada, to try and agree on what had happened.

And so they brought me in in 2000. They'd sort of been arguing for a year, and then they'd worked down to a small group that had actually established quite a successful working relationship, and they were all kind of on the same page. They didn't want to get a clear sense of what had happened. I already done a lot of the research, so I was well-placed to kind of step in,

and all the different departments had pooled their resources, their personnel data files and all that sort of thing. And so I had access to a lot of information, that wouldn't have been available otherwise. And over the span of about two months, they flew me out to Prince of Rhode Island where Veterans Affairs is located to look at personnel case files.

I did some additional research in Ottawa for a week, and then I went home and wrote the equivalent of a master's thesis in about a month. It was crazy. But it was really interesting process. I just come out of a PhD where that's a very lonely process. It's a long road as a grad student. here, you get off in your own wilderness.

A lot of people never get back out again. And the only thing you're thinking about is, okay, as you're writing stuff, well, is anybody to care, but mostly you're worried about your supervisor and your committee, because they're the ones who are going to judge you when you finish. Writing this report was entirely different. It was supposed to be a consensus document, which meant First Nations veterans organizations, Assembly of First Nations, and the government departments, all we're going to have to sign off on it.

And as I was writing stuff, I felt like I had people looking over my shoulders saying, ooh, I wouldn't say it that way. Or no, no, no, you can't say that. So it was really, it was a challenge for sure to write it. But the report itself eventually was accepted as a consensus document, which I was really proud of. And eventually in 2003, the government offered a formal apology to First Nations veterans and compensation to veterans and to their descendants, immediate descendants.

So it did come to a successful fruition in that sense that indigenous veterans grievances got a hearing and there was an effort made to write that wrong. Who was leading that? Was that just government officials? Was that Stephen Harper at the time? Who was kind of at the helm of allowing this to come to like a healthy clothes? Yeah, that's a good question. 2003, who was in power? That was pre-Harper.

I think that was still I can't remember who was in power in 2003. I can remember like a hundred years previous. But anyway, no worries. Really what was driving it was the pressure from the veterans. That was really the driving force and all of this, forcing it on to the political stage. And then at that point, it became, I think, impossible

for the federal government to ignore because what happens in the 1990s, there's this explosion of remembrance that's sparked by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and then the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995. Those are really important anniversaries. And it's like all of a sudden, not just in Canada, but all across the Western Allied countries, there's kind of an explosion of remembrance. Some scholars have called it the memory boom, where we kind of rediscovered our veterans.

And a lot of Canadians, people started to go to Remembrance Day ceremonies again. Like large numbers of people, they'd take their kids. That didn't happen when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. This was new. It was different. And one of the things I think that really stunned people was part of the ceremonies for VE Day, the anniversary in 95, was to be a parade of Canadian veterans. And a lot of Second World War veterans went back for the celebrations and the ceremonies of the anniversary. And there were several thousand of them that paraded through the state.

streets of the Dutch city of Appledorn. And it's not a big city. It's, I think, a couple hundred thousand, something like that. And they thought maybe 150,000 people would show up for this, something like that. And instead, it was like a million plus. People came from all over the Netherlands. Because the Dutch remember, they remember, it was Canadian forces that largely liberated the Netherlands. And in particular, as the German army pulled out in 1944, 45, that winter, they ripped everything edible out of the country. So the Dutch were starving when the Canadians took over the lance. And so they fed them and helped keep them alive. And that connection has remained really close ever since. And so, you know, grandparents were bringing

their grandkids to see the heroes who had, who they remembered having saved them in that winter, that starvation winter. And, you know, the coverage on CBC was kind of amazing. And I think a lot of Canadians were kind of stunned. You know, it was these veterans who were, they were in their 70s at that stage, a lot of them, you know, they were not the most mobile. It was supposed to just be an hour or two. I think it took them like six or seven hours to get through the whole town because everybody was, you know, giving them gifts. It was like the liberation celebrations of 1945. And it was really powerful, really moving. And all of a sudden, Canadians thought, wow, these guys did something really amazing. I can't believe I've never thought about this or never remembered this. And so it became really politically difficult for the government to then turn. turned a blind eye to the grievances of indigenous veterans. They had been there. They had served equally alongside other Canadians, and they'd come home and they hadn't been treated equally, and that was an injustice that just couldn't be allowed to stand.

And so the federal government, to their credit, you know, the various, and certainly all of the representatives that I met from the various government departments were very supportive of the process, totally acknowledging that there had been major problems in the way that those benefits had been administered, and we're looking for a way to find, you know, some reconciliation in this process. Right. That is such a moving story to have kind of that reoccurrence, to have that revival. And I, to be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing that again, and I hope that we can continue to

work towards that, because I think tying in indigenous people into these discussions of Remembrance Day, hopefully people, I know a lot of people are looking for recognition. reconciliation with indigenous communities, so hopefully we can have that rise, perhaps again, through a new lens. I think it's actually an important thing. I mean, reconciliation, a lot of reconciliation has to be about remembering some pretty dark and awful things in Canada's history and coming to grips with that before we can find a path to reconciliation. But I think maybe there's also value not only in remembering those stories, but also stories like the Second World War, where, you know, Indigenous and non-Indigenous soldiers served as equals in a common cause and in a spirit of mutual respect and comradeship and achieved remarkable and important things together.

Those kinds of stories, I think maybe we need to foreground some of those too as part of this process of reconciliation. I completely agree, and that's why it's such a pleasure to have you on, is because I think that you're at the forefront of this. You've kind of paved the road of how we can start to have the conversation and without people like yourself to kind of help out inform the conversation. conversation. I think that it's a low, like, I've had people say, like, did you hear about how indigenous people were treated or that they went to war? And it's like, that's the knowledge they had. That one sentence is what they have to contribute, whereas I think we can get more into the weeds a little bit of understanding how that all came about, because it's my understanding, perhaps this was with specifically the Great War or perhaps World War II.

The indigenous people had to give up their status in order to serve. Is that, am I correct? That's widely believed to be the case, but that was not actually. the case. Okay. Please. But I mean, the fact that you say that is really interesting because it's clear that that circulates in indigenous communities today. I've been, I've been asked or told that dozens of times throughout my career. It's very widely held belief. But the reality is that there was no policy that required them to sacrifice status either to enlist or when they came back. It was never talked about in Indian affairs. There, anything like that. Now, some soldiers did. enfranchise and surrender Indian status when they came home. And it might be that, and I can

certainly imagine that there would have been enthusiastic Indian agents who were, of course, it looked good for their reports to their superiors to say, oh, and I've got this many people have enfranchised. Sorry, could you tell us about enfranchised? Yeah, enfranchisement was a sort of legal process of unmaking a status Indian. So it was the process by which a status Indian would extinguish their status, they would receive their share of banned funds, they would receive citizenship benefits or rights and responsibilities, and they were no longer considered an Indian. But of course, that also meant they could no longer enter an Indian reserve because you cannot trespass on a reserve if you were not status. And so for them, it also meant surrendering any

connection to family, community, culture. And so most people didn't do it. It was a relatively rarely used thing, which, you know, the government administrators often didn't understand why people wouldn't want to take this step. But for Indian agents, this was something that they tried to encourage, of course. And so I can very much imagine that overly enthusiastic Indian agents might have coerced or lied and said, well, you have to enfranchise in order to enlist, or now that you've been a soldier, you know, you have to enfranchise. You can't come back and used it an opportunity to try and encourage or enforce more enfranchisement. And so I do think that occurred.

But the overwhelming majority, the vast majority of status Indians who served were still status Indians after the war. Most return to their reserve communities after the war. That is very interesting. And I'm so grateful that you were able to shed light on that because that is something that I'm parroting from people who have told it to me. And so it's good to be able to clean the air and have a better understanding of how that came about.

Do you know some of the motivations for indigenous people being willing to participate because you could make the argument like, well, we're not being treated very well, like there's Indian residential schools, there's all these terrible things the government's done for us. Why would we want to go fight a war in a country that we didn't even know existed prior to you guys getting here? So how did that? Did you learn about that? Yeah, that is. And often that's the big question. You know, that was part of what I was interested in. Indigenous people are marginalized, they're oppressed, they're treated terribly. Why would they fight to defend the society that oppresses them? It seems illogical in a lot of ways.

And so that is often the very first question people ask me, and it's one I've always been interested in. And there is no one answer that, you know, people enlisted for a wide range of reasons. And that was the case whether you're indigenous or not indigenous. And many of those reasons were shared. You know, after the Depression for a lot of people, it was a steady job. And good pay, you could send half your pay home to your family, or if you had dependents, you had dependence benefits. So as a means of contributing to your family income, supporting both yourself and others, great thing. And that was the case whether you're indigenous or not, especially early in the war, when there weren't other jobs available yet.

So that's certainly one. And for others, you know, a sense of adventure, a chance to travel. In this day and age, people couldn't just travel overseas. It was really only the very wealthy who could do that kind of international travel. Well, in this case, somebody else is going to pay to ship you to Europe. You get a chance to see the world. And that was the case, whether you're living in, you know, small town Chilliwack, or in the kind of stultified atmosphere of a reserve where you're kind of really under the Indian agent,

the chance to get out and to experience something else and to have a sense of venture, especially if you're a 19, 20-year-old kid, you know, that would have been a big deal. And so that was certainly there. And then I think maybe a sense of duty or patriotism. Now, duty or patriotism might have looked or been articulated slightly differently if you were a status Indian than if you were not. But I think the word still fits, even if we might shape it somewhat more differently. So there's lots of shared things that would motivate people to go to an enlistment center. But there were also some things that were kind of distinctive and unique to indigenous societies and communities that were part of the equation as well.

You know, some communities cherish the role and honored the role of warrior. In the plains, for instance, Urquan societies in Ontario and Quebec, warrior status was important socially and culturally within your own community. And so the opportunity to go off to war to achieve that would have been something desirable for a young man, you know. and that comes from within their own community. But not every community felt that way. Stalo, here in the, and most Coast Salish, had a more problematic view of warriors within their culture and communities. And so Stalo, a man, that went away to war,

sometimes we're going against the wishes of their community, and were ostracized a little when they came back because warriors are dangerous people that can be a little problematic. So it wasn't all just the same in that way, but for those communities where warrior status mattered, that was something that motivated some people. Others went to war because they saw it as honoring the sacred covenant of the treaties that have been signed between their people and the crown, that they were trying to uphold those treaties.

And so in many parts of the country, you know, this was seen as something that was, you know, for their community, they should be doing this. still others would have done it as a kind of political act as a statement of equality that they had the right to do this they had the right to belong in Tommy Prince was Oji Kree from Manitoba

and he became the most highly decorated indigenous soldier the Second World War and he said that he enlisted because he wanted to prove that an Indian was as good as any white man and he tried to lead by example he never let people forget he was indigenous he was proud of it. He wore it on his shoulder like a badge, and he probably took more risks

and accomplished remarkable things in part because he had that chip on his shoulder. He was trying to prove a point. And he went back to Korea for most of two tours as well, in part still, I think, trying to make that statement. So, you know, those would have been distinct rationales for some indigenous people to enlist that maybe other parts of the the population wouldn't have shared. Sorry, could you say that person's name again? Thomas Prince, yeah. He became a sergeant.

He actually served in a really unique specialist unit called the First Special Service Force. It was made up jointly of Canadian and American troops, and they were especially trained in paratrooping and mountain warfare and that sort of thing. And they served in Italy with the United States Army. He was awarded a Silver Star for some of his actions there. as well as other medals, and then became a, you know, an important leader of small unit tactics and patrolling in Korea subsequently. So Tommy Prince is a somewhat tragic figure in some ways because it's quite clear that for him military service and the war gave him a sense of purpose, a sense of pride in himself and his place. But he struggled when he got back home, you know, that the time, the years between the Second World War and the outbreak of the Korean War,

were difficult. I think he felt a bit lost. I think he struggled in his marriage. And so when Korea broke out, he jumped at the chance to kind of rediscover that sense of himself as a war hero in a way and went off to serve in Korea. After he came back from Korea, probably suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder, you know, he struggled again to find his way in life and eventually wound up living in poverty and anonymity in the streets of Winnipeg, and he was kind of rediscovered in the 1970s, just before his death. And so, in a way, kind of like in the United States, Ira Hayes is a famous, he was a Pima, a indigenous person. He was one of the soldiers who had been famously photographed raising the flag over Iwo Jima, you know, sort of one of the iconic

images of the United States' Second World War effort brought back to the United States to go through big, you know, fundraising drives and that sort of thing, and really struggled with all the interest and all the attention put to him and ended up becoming an alcoholic and died of exposure in a ditch in, you know, 1953. And so Ira Hayes and Tommy Prince in some ways they're kind of similar tragic figures, I guess, of war heroes who came back and wound up outside of Canadian or American society wound up, you know, not being able to enjoy the peace that they'd sacrificed to help achieve. Yeah, that makes me think of, I don't, I think it was the Vietnam War where a bunch of

soldiers had come back, but they were using, I think, some sort of drug, like cocaine, it was cocaine or it was some sort of drug. Mostly heroin. Heroin, and then the people who ended up being able to get off it with very little side effects in very long-term, no long-term effects, were the ones who were able to return to their family, return to that suburban life, and like reintegrate into their community. But the people who struggled with those addictions were the people who weren't able to return home to the community, to their family, and to reconnect properly with the people who perhaps missed them. And I think

that that is something that you struggle with any time you go off to war is you're going to have a certain subsection of the population that really develops who, they are through that lens of the world. And it's very hard to take off that lens when you get back and get back used to playing board games, reading the newspaper, having a cup of coffee when you've been in such a traumatic place and really adapted to it and been able to figure out a way to move forward as a consequence. And you see that, you know, a lot of First Nations veterans, as with other veterans, but it's really evident for First Nations veterans. A lot of them were restless when they got home. You know, that was hard to find stimulation. And

everyday life after being in a war where the intensity of your lived experience is often something you simply can't and maybe you wouldn't want to replicate in your everyday life, but they struggle to settle down into their relationships and to work. Many left the reserve. It became part of the wave of urbanization of indigenous communities that starts to happen in the 50s. Well, it had started during the war, but then it kind of reversed a little at the end of the war and then takes up again in the 1950s. And a lot of those were veterans trying to find something, trying to find their way in life and find a better career and that sort of thing. And some of that was maybe a legacy of those war experiences that they never quite were able

let go. Right. Could you tell us about how indigenous people may have, not necessarily just from Canada, but across Australia, the United States, how they may have impacted the war for the betterment of succeeding? Yeah. It's one of the things that I looked at in my research. search is sort of, like having looked at the Canadian experience, I was curious to look at that kind of transnationally, because if you look at the United States and the experience of Native Americans in the United States, if you look in New Zealand and Māori, people there or of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, there's a lot of remarkable parallels. You know, these are all indigenous minorities living within a broader,

mostly Anglo-Saxon, settler society. All of them participated in the Second World War often in very similar ways, sometimes reliable to conscription, participated on the home front, got involved in the workforce in a way that they never had before, and contributed in really important ways to the overall Allied war effort, both fighting in the battlefront and also economically at home. And through helping to create that broader sense of political unity that we're all in this crusade together. And that did matter to people, you know, that was important. And so those contributions are really quite manifest.

And sometimes they're more obvious. You know, in New Zealand, Māori leadership sort of demanded a segregated Maori battalion. They wanted their soldiers to fight together in an infantry battalion, not a labor battalion like had been created in the First World War. And that was relatively unique. There's a few other segregated units. but most indigenous people served as individuals integrated in. And so their service was maybe not as visible as the Maori battalion, but the Maori battalion has a very visible service.

They initially had white officers, but as more Maori officers began to get experienced, they moved up the ranks, and there were half a dozen different Maori battalion commanders during the war. And the Maori battalion became quite famous as one of the best of the units within the New Zealand division, famous for unorthodox, sometimes very aggressive tactics. They were very successful, feared by their enemies,

took very high casualties, maybe in part because they were so aggressive. But Māori people also had a very, you know, kind of a strong warrior culture that lent itself to this activity. And that Māori Battalion was this really manifested this visible presence of an indigenous contribution to the New Zealand's war effort. in a way that non-Malry New Zealanders could cheer and appreciate and want to, you know, reciprocate in the wake of the war to try and do better in their relationship with Māori. That is so interesting. And I'm interested to also know what some of the challenges they faced after they came back were more specifically because I think of, at least in the Fraser Valley, I'm well aware. aware of the struggles, the lack of access, perhaps historically to resources, to address PTSD,

to get resources. It seems like indigenous communities were already at kind of a deficit to help their people get through perhaps traumatizing events that had occurred and then to come back to that community that didn't have those resources. What did you see through your research in that? It's an interesting story. And it's actually a bit mixed because the reality is, there's almost no resources for any veterans.

The idea of what we today call PTSD, and the Second World War is called battle fatigue or combat exhaustion. And there was more understanding of it in the Second World War than in the First World War where it was called Shellshock. But there was still not the same understanding of the need for post-war rehabilitation and counseling and all of that sort of thing. None of that was available. You know, for veterans of the war,

counseling was what you did at the Legion Hall with your buddies over a beer. or many beers. That was kind of as much as you got. And there's actually some suggestions that, that in fact, because of certain cultural practices within indigenous communities, that sometimes indigenous soldiers actually had more social and cultural methods to heal in a way

than was the case for non-Indigenous soldiers. And really prominent, one of the very earliest academics to begin to chart the idea of indigenous military service in the United States, Tom Holm, who's a indigenous academic, he wrote some really interesting research about First Nations or Native American veterans of Vietnam and how healing ceremonies, sweat lodge, and other cultural practices in some ways may have provided actually better support to Native American veterans

than non-Indigenous veterans in the United States received, Because, you know, in a much more individualistic society, where there aren't institutional supports, it was kind of up to your family or your spouse to try and somehow help you, but they didn't know how to help you often. And, you know, many men returned struggling with addiction and other issues. And so, but because indigenous societies were more collective, more communal, and there were cultural provisions for how do you deal with warriors coming back from. for more. How do you help them heal? How do you help them reintegrate into society in a healthy way? And many of those practices were still used, were still practiced. You see that in New Zealand, you see the United States. And I think you would also see that here in parts of Canada as well. But not in every community, because indigenous communities are so culturally

varied. And so, you know, for Stolle, perhaps there wasn't that mechanism. But for Plains Cree or Sineboin, there might have been in a way that was perhaps more supportive. So it's a more mixed package, I think, in the post-war years. I don't disagree. And that just you making those comments makes me think of the sweat lodge and sitting with elders and having those conversations that perhaps those were the resources that they needed within their community that would have helped them get through those processes. I had never thought about it that way because we have such an institutionalized view of what counseling needs to look like, what services to fix problems need to look like in order to be effective, and that's not always the case.

Having healthy dialogues with an elder might be what that person needed in order to kind of reintegrate and having those conversations on a weekly basis is counseling. It's just not done by a person who's registered under the Canadian Counseling Associate. Like, it's just different. It is. It is. And one of the commanders of the Māori battalion talked about this. He, his brother was killed in a battle in North Africa. And when he heard about this, he went over to the, you know, they'd captured some German prisoners, and he just killed them in cold blood. He was so, so furious, so angry.

And he said he was like that the rest of the war. He just, he was ruthless. He killed anybody who got the chance to kill on the German side. Until he got home and they performed the pure, you know, the elders kind of helped them through. And this, within Maura society, there was a ceremony to, to, take that violence and the anger out of the warrior so that they could then be successfully part of the community again. And I think for many people, that would have been a really important and valuable thing. And you're right, we do tend to think of these things in an

institutionalized way, and we're still struggling with it. You know, Afghanistan revealed both to the United States and the Canadian armies, they were utterly unprepared for the trauma and the PTSD that our soldiers returned with. And a lot of them really suffered. silence. The sports weren't there. There wasn't still enough understanding of it. And after the Second World War or Korea, there was nothing. And so unless you have those communal supports, it falls to the individual. Yeah, that has got to be so difficult to come back and to have to be your own best advocate, because I've talked about this before. When you're going to see your doctor, you really should go in with your significant other or somebody who's close to you

because you'll downplay the impacts. You'll downplay the pain that you've been suffering. My partner struggled with that. She's struggling all weekend long. We go in Monday and she's like, yeah, I'm doing okay. Like, it's not great. And it's like all weekend, you could barely get out of bed. Like, you were suffering.

And I think that's so important to have that. And so many relationships I think lack that person who's able to say, this is how they normally are and this is what they're going through. It's significant. And to be gone for so long and come back, I think that there is likely with the spouse a certain amount of guilt that they don't understand and they don't want to assume and so they take more of the passenger seat of like I'm going to let you figure this out and whenever I've watched movies on and like movies

aren't perfectly accurate but you see the spouse kind of go like I don't know but I don't want to judge I don't want to assume I don't want to force them into a doctor's office to try and fix this so it places kind of everybody yet like they're stuck in the same position they were in yeah for sure I think that that's very much that's very much part of how that equation works out. And, you know, the ones that suffer are the veterans. Because, you know, and they used to talk about it as, you know, people would come home with ghosts, haunting them.

And those linger for years and years and years. And the people who are, you know, trying to help them aren't trained and don't know what they're going through and can't really understand. Which is one of the reasons why veterans always went to Legion Halls. Because the only people they could talk to were the other people who had experienced, what they had experienced because they're the only people who understood them.

Yeah. And so that mutual and it was really important and especially coming out of the military. The military, one of the things that training, basic training and the experience of comedy welds you into

into a brotherhood closer than brothers, right, is often the kind of terminology that soldiers speak about the intensity of connections that they had with each other in their small units.

That's what kept them going. That's what they got them through. And then you bring them home and you break that all up and you just say, go home and you're just John now or you know Bob or whatever and that that sense of connection to the group is lost yeah and and so the Legion Hall becomes really important in that sense as that place to at least have bits of that reconnection and I mean for

indigenous people that was really hard after the war too because Legion Hall served alcohol and up until the new 1951 Indian Act was passed it was a legal for status Indian to enter an establishment that served liquor. So status Indian vets couldn't go to a Legion Hall. They were cut off from that counseling social connection center that was so important to every other veteran. Unless they gave up their statuses. Unless they give up their status. Interesting. Yeah. That is, that is fascinating. And so sort of tragic in a way, can you tell us about, I've heard a lot about veterans benefits. It's been in the news. I think more when Harper was the leader of Canada, and it's definitely usually in the news with the

United States. Can you give us a lay of the land for people who don't understand? What are the services that they kind of got previously? How has it been improved? And is there something that we could be doing more so? Yeah, that's a big topic. There is a long track record of veterans benefits. The first time in the First World War, First World War benefits were quite meager, a little bit mean-spirited in terms of how they gave out pensions and stuff. They were kept small to try and force veterans to keep working and that sort of thing. And so in the Second World War, the people who put together the architecture of the veterans charter, which is a whole bevy of different programs and legislation, looked at

the First World War experience and were determined to try and do a better job. Second time around, they were learning from their previous experience. And they actually started planning for this, as soon as the war broke out. The first committees were established in 1940 to begin planning for what this is going to look like. And in the end,

Canada's Veterans Charter was actually this really broad, very flexible, very generous, maybe one of the most generous veterans' benefits programs developed by any of the combatant nations during the war.

And it came in sort of three different tiers. The first tier was a bunch of benefits, minor kind of things that you would get as you exited the door when you were demobilized. So you'd get a, a month of pay that would give you like exit pay. You'd get some money to buy civilian clothes again because, of course, you've been wearing nothing but fatigues for five years. You didn't

have any clothes. They do mental or medical and dental exams. And there were a variety of other sort of finite kind of transition, immediately transitional benefits. And then the second tier were the most important. They were the ones that were supposed to help veterans reestablish, we settle into civilian life and hopefully into a new career or into their old job if it still existed. And that was one of the benefits that if your job still existed, it was guaranteed to you when you returned. And so all those people who were employed during the war, a lot of women, a lot of indigenous people, other minorities, were forced out of those jobs to make room for returning vets to come back to those jobs. They also had privileged access to civil service jobs if they

were qualified. But the main benefits, the first one was what was called a reestablishment credit. Actually, I should back up. In the first year, there was a rehabilitation, no, not rehabilitated. A war service gratuity. This is basically the thank you from the Canadian government. It was based on the number of months you'd served, and you got a top-up for the number of six-month blocks you'd spent overseas.

And, you know, it really... ranged a lot. If you had only just started serving in 44, late, you know, 45, you might only get 170 or 200 bucks or something. If you'd been in for five or six years, it could be like a thousand bucks, which was a lot of money in those days. That would be like an annual blue collar salary at the start of the war. So that was good money, and that would be paid out to you at your rate of pay, depending on your rank, for as many months as it lasted. So again, you had money to help you transition in the short term. So in that second tier of benefits, then, the first was the reestablishment credit.

And it was equal to the amount of your war service gratuity. But you didn't just get cash. It was like an account you could buy stuff from. So it could be used to get household goods if you were going to set up a house. You need to pots and pans, furniture, that sort of thing. You could use it to get a truck. Let's say if you wanted to start a trucking business or something, a delivery business, to buy tools if you were not a mechanic or something.

and so there were a lot of different ways it could be used. And that was what most veterans did. The vast majority of veterans came back. They got the reestablishment credit, used that to set up a house and found work, got their old job back, whatever the case might be. Probably over 70% did that. The second option, and all of these were mutually exclusive if you chose one, you couldn't do the others.

Second option was education. You could either choose to go to university if you qualified or to vocational school. And the government would provide monthly stipend and pay for your tuition and books, as long as you kept your grades in good standing. And that was really valuable for a lot of veterans. In fact, Canada's universities exploded in size. New ones started to get built to accommodate all of the veteran students who came into Canadian universities. And they tend to be excellent students who are very dedicated, very determined, very focused on their work.

And so, you know, maybe 15, 20% of veterans actually went into either vocational school or went to university. And then the last program was the Veterans Land Act. And this was quite flexible. It was primarily about getting farmers onto the land, as veterans onto the land as farmers. Either in a small holding, like something that would be a supplemental kind of income, you could use it to get a small mobile timber, or to start a fur farm. And it could also, it did add commercial fishing opportunities as well. So it was quite a flexible, quite a flexible program.

The main VLA grant and loan option was up to $6,000. And if you paid it off in good standing, the last 2,320 would be forgiven. Now, the problem with that is that you couldn't get one of those if you were on an Indian reserve. Because Indian reserve land is held in trust by the crown for the good of the community. community, therefore a bank cannot foreclose and seize property from an Indian reserve. So they will not give a loan to anybody on reserve. So status Indian veterans couldn't qualify for a VLA grant and loan. And so they had to add in a special section to that legislation, 35A, that made just the grant

portion available, 2,320, so they didn't have to pay it back. But it wasn't actually enough to get a farm going. Even 6,000 wasn't enough. Pardon me. And that's why after the war, there are additional grant programs and loan programs that are made available to Veterans Land Act Settler or farmers so that they could build their farms into equitable and viable economic businesses. And so instead, for Indian veterans, if they could get this,

and in fact, Indian affairs pushed Indian veterans to get the VLA 2320 grant, they would use it to get them a house. but you couldn't usually build a whole house. Usually it was like bare stud walls inside. So sometimes they could find a little extra money to help finish the interior. But that wasn't the purpose of the grant. The grant was not to necessarily be a housing program. It did work that way for a lot of other veterans as well.

But the whole point of it was to actually help establish you in a way of life, in a way to make a living so that you could support yourself and your family going forward. And so instead, Indian Affairs essentially was using it to augment their inadequate on-reserve housing budget, which was very meager. And a lot of veterans were living in appalling circumstances. In fact, there's a huge housing crunch throughout Canada during the war years that's felt by everybody. And so on-reserve housing is desperately overcrowded, very ramshackle in many communities.

And so this did provide some benefit in terms of improved quality of life. The problem was it was a finite thing. And it didn't help the veteran establish themselves in a career or with the, way to make a living to support themselves going forward. And so that's one of the grievances that people had is that in a way of Indian affairs interference in this kind of mutated the purpose of these grants and instead used it to augment Indian affairs, you know, budgets. Right. That is very interesting. Can we talk briefly about the experience in BC because I think that that's where hopefully it'll hit home for listeners, that they'll be able to kind of see what British Columbia

looked like during the Second World War? Yeah, it's an interesting thing about British Columbia's Second World War. There's really only one story that we tend to hear about the Second World War in British Columbia, and that is in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the decision initially to intern all the residents of Japanese ancestry, whether or not they were Canadian citizens or not, in camps in the interior of BC in Alberta, and some in as far east, is Ontario. They were removed because they were perceived as a threat. And not only that, of course, their homes, their businesses, their possessions were all seized and sold at a fraction

of their value, and much of that money never made its way to those families. And then they were banned from returning to the coast until 1949, four years after the war. And in fact, at the end of the war, there was a program to send Japanese and Japanese Canadians. People who were born in Canada, never seen Japan, to just get rid of them. And several thousand actually were shipped to Japan before the growing awareness of human rights and that this was an injustice that was being perpetrated here led to that program being halted. And so that's really the main story we know of British Columbia and the Second World War. There's very little else that's told. If you look in the history, the broad survey histories of BC history, there are a few

other things that are talked about. They talk about the growth of the economy in the same way that we talk about it nationally, about women coming into the economy to some extent. There's a fair bit of attention paid to the rise of organized labor, which is battered in the Depression years, but which really regains its strength during the war because it's labor shortage, because there's so much urgency to produce that they win strikes. And the government often sides with them, and in fact, they win recognition of the right to strike and to organize and unionize. It wasn't officially legally recognized before the Second World War. So it's a really important era in terms of Canada's labor history and working class history.

And so those are also sort of parts of the story. There's a little bit of attention sometimes to the politics. Canada's politics in this time period is really interesting because in the Great Depression, the CCF, the cooperative Commonwealth Federation, comes into being and becomes a real force in BC, where there's a strong working class support for socialism, social democracy, and the CCF. And although they didn't gain a lot of traction during the Depression, in the Warriors, they really start to gain a lot of traction and support. And in fact, they become, they get as much support as either the liberal or conservative parties do. And so the liberal and conservative parties actually create a coalition government, both to keep the socialists

out and to retain power. And so there's a coalition government that serves through most of the Second World War from 1940 to 45 and beyond. And it is actually a fairly effective government during the war, but the attention tends to be just on the political figures. And there's some interesting characters like Duff Patala, who is the premier in the Depression years and in the early part of the war years and that sort of thing. And so we tend to focus on these characters, but it's more old-fashioned sort of the dead white, powerful men kind of story. The story of what's happening with British Columbians in their communities, in, you know, remote regions of the country, of the province is not so much known. It's not so much talked about. So we don't

know if the war looked or felt the same in Cranbrook as it did in Fort St. John, as it did in Rupert as it did in Rupert, in Burney, or in the heart of Vancouver. And so those stories are out there, but they're hard to find. They're buried in local. popular histories that have been published at one time or another in a few specialist studies but there's really very little out there and I've spent much of the last year on sabbatical

reading as much BC history as I can know 20th century histories I can get my hands on and what I'm astonished by is how there's bits and pieces here and there but it's it's incoherent it's disconnected and it's badly in need of having the story kind of stitch back together because the war in fact was really important

in British Columbia. You know, it touched every home, every household in some way. Lots of people, of course, enlisted. But it's hugely important economically, whether you're working in the forestry industry, if you're in shipbuilding, fishing, every part of the economy. And new industries are created like the Boeing plant. You know, there's Boeing workers, women workers here in the Fraser Valley and creating, building aircraft in the Second World War. So it touches everybody in a lot ways there's there's rationing. So what people can make for dinner at night is shaped by the government and the war. And then, of course, you also get what's different in British Columbia is that we become part of the front of the Pacific War when Japan enters the conflict

attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. And all of a sudden, for people on the coast, they're vulnerable. They're not, I mean, up until that point, the war was this distant thing away, a long way away in Europe. And for most British Columbians throughout the war, the war remained a distant thing. You know, if you were in the interior, the war was a long ways away. But for people living on the coast, especially more exposed parts of the coast, like Rupert, like, you know, Port Elberney, Victoria, Vancouver, people felt threatened. If Japan could attack Pearl Harbor and destroy most of the American fleet, what's to say that they couldn't launch at least a nuisance raid or, you know, launch aircraft from an aircraft

carry and bombard our ports and that sort of thing. And, you know, the likelihood of that was always small. And Canada's military leadership and political leadership in Ottawa knew that. But, of course, that's easy to say from Ottawa, right? If you're in Port Albertian, that nuisance raid means bombs drop in your children's school, well, that's a lot more visceral. You'd take that much more to heart. And so the war became much more immediate, much more, you know, in people's face in the ladder portion, particularly along the coast. And I'm really interested to see what that look like. And so you get the rise of things like the Pacific Coast militia rangers, which was a local defense organization, kind of informal. It was connected to the military,

but these were made up of men who usually weren't medically fit to enlist or were an essential service like forestry or the fishing industry, and often lived in remote regions of the coast. So the west coast of Vancouver Island, all up and down the coastline. And they were composed to the people that lived there. And often that meant indigenous communities. were living in some of these more exposed parts of the coast. And eventually, more than 15,000 British Columbians are part of the Pacific Coast militia rangers. And they patrolled the coastline, kept an eye out for Japanese submarines or ships or aircraft or anything of that sort. Their job was to fight as guerrilla fighters if there was an invasion.

And, you know, that was a very real way for people, even though they were home, to still contribute to the defense of their local communities in a very real and manifest way. then so the war was very much on people's minds you know it brings a lot of growth to british columbia british columbia is 800 and some thousand before the war and not long after the war we crossed the million mark a lot of people moved to bc to partake of wartime industries shipbuilding grew from maybe 3,000 to like 30,000 plus people working in that industry in vancouver and victoria prince rupert and elsewhere so you know there were jobs to be at people move from the prairies, from the interior.

You couldn't, in fact, the government actually made it illegal to move to certain cities during the war because of the housing shortage, unless you had a wartime written need to be there. Either the military sent you there or you had a war job, war-related job to go to. You couldn't move to Victoria or Vancouver. It was illegal. Wow. That is just incomprehensible now.

It is. We can't imagine the government controlling our lives or putting those kinds of, well, maybe we can a little bit more after COVID, actually. having gone through, you know, stay-at-home orders and that sort of thing. It puts the passports in more perspective as well. It does. It does. And, you know, the anxiety about them in a way, when you compare it to the constraints of the Second World War, you know, there are similar things. The government is taking a more overt hand and trying to control things in the public interest, you know, for particular reasons. And not everybody is on board with it. Some people resist.

some people, you know, try and subvert those regulations. But most people see the need and follow through on it, and it's much the same as we see today. But, of course, the war lasts for six years. You know, you can imagine how tired people are now of COVID and this sense of ongoing crisis and when the hell is going to end. How about if it was six years of this? You know, and it got worse before it got better again kind of thing. And government controls were even more can.

down. How would we be able to stand it? You know, would there, would we still be able to pull together? And yet British Columbians, for the most part, were able to, you know, and continue to contribute in all kinds of ways. That's such a good example, but I have to ask, how did, how do you approach this? You said you were spending a year research and what is it like for you? What is your driving force behind this, I guess? Like, do you get excited when you get a new book and you get to read about these experiences? Or is it like, this is what I got to do. How do you approach doing this type of research? I do, actually. And for me, it's exciting because I spent more than 25 years working the subject of indigenous military

experiences. This is a real change of field in a way for me. It's a big change of topic. I've taught BC history, introductory BC history, but you don't have to understand the history in the same depth to teach it as you do if you're researching in it. You really have to become deeply, intimately familiar with everything that's written. And, you know, for me, it is exciting. I was happy to have a break from teaching as much as I love my teaching and the chance to sit down and read. When I'm teaching, I don't have time to read stuff unless I absolutely have to kind of thing because you're just pulled, you know, in different directions all the time. And so having that time in the sabbatical to read, I read over 100 books

and a couple hundred articles and theses and master's and PhDs and stuff and really immersed myself into that literature and I start to see, it's not until you do that, you start to see the contours of the landscape of the literature and where the things are that we know and where some of the gaps and holes and low points are that we really don't know and, you know, how widely separated all these little bits that we do know are from one another and how little they interact with each other. And that does make me excited again. It helps me rediscover the joy of being a historian, you know, that initial enthusiasm that drew me to pick up history books when I was a kid.

Can you tell us about how that came about for you? When did you start getting interested in this and what really pulled you into it? I was just a kid. I mean, eight, ten years old, I was always fascinated by old war movies. Of course, they were always American. But, you know, if we went to the bookstore or whatever, there'd always be the big picture books, World War I, World War II. that's where I would go.

I'd go and I'd flick through these and I'd look at the pictures and that sort of thing. And I just was fascinated by this. This is so alien to my imagination. To understanding. And then again, trying to figure out, I knew Canada was involved,

but I couldn't find those stories and wanting to know more. And that's really where it came down to. I read military history as a hobby before I went to university. I loved to read. I read a lot of stuff. But I like to read history.

and particularly military history and so when I went to university and had strange weird delusions of being a dentist initially but I sucked at science and math was just never going to happen and I was never going to be a dentist in reality but I took history courses still because I loved them and that kept me sane

and it was actually I did a year at the college in Cranbrook which was not entirely successful although I loved the school and I had a great history teacher there who also inspired me, Donna Lomas and then I went to UVIC. My parents decided I was doing too much partying and too much hunting, and I needed to do more schooling. So they sent me to you, Vic, for my second year,

which was wise in retrospect. And I still was trying to take sciences and math, and then I was staying out in Calwood, ways out of town, and I missed the last bus out from the bars one night. I was in with friends having a nice evening. So I had to thumb a ride, and it was about a 25-minute drive.

And the nice person picked me up, I had no idea who they are. asked me what I was doing. I said I was going to university and they asked me what I was taking and where I was going and I was explaining how I was struggling with the science and hating the math, but it took history to stay sane. They said, why don't just do what you like? It's one of those, ding, you know, like literally a light bulb went on and off where I had. I thought, I could do that. What would I do with that? No clue. But all of a sudden, that was an enticing, exciting thought, you know, and so I started to take more history and geography and and political science and things that I was excited and interested in engagement. My marks got way better, and I still didn't know where I was going. I started to think eventually maybe I would try law school. History degree is an excellent platform for launching into law school. And then by third and fourth year, I was so loving my history classes. I loved university.

I loved the environment. I loved the intellectual exchange. I love learning new things. and I started to think about the idea of becoming an academic, you know, of doing grad school, going to do a master's and a PhD. And I still held on to the idea of law school. Fourth year I was going to do the LSATs and apply to both, but it was expensive to apply to everything. And I decided eventually that, you know, I was excited about the idea of doing a master's. And although I thought I would do well in law, I wasn't excited about it.

And so for me, that kind of swung me to, and I thought, I'll do the master's, if writing 100-plus page master's thesis is excruciatingly painful and I hate it, that's only two years I've invested. I could do law school still, and that's fine. But I loved it. And so I went on to the PhD and, you know, I loved the process of graduate school all the way through. And I loved being an academic.

I get paid to talk about history with other people who are also interested in history. And that's amazing to me. You know, I love the job I have an enormous amount of control over what I do, when I do it, and how I do it. And that's something you don't always have in most jobs. So I've never regretted the decision, but, you know, it's a long road. It's not for everybody. It's, for me, it was 12 years of school where you're not really in the job force kind of thing, although I did all right doing scholarships and I did make some money.

But, you know, I was fortunate that my parents supported me. me and my undergrad, and my spouse supported me in grad school and helped me get through my academic habit for the years I was doing it. And then I was able eventually to land a tenure track job was great. But it's definitely, it's a challenging long road to go down. Absolutely. And I'm particularly interested in your experience because there are, so specifically for UFE, I know their criminology and criminal justice department, it's huge. They're nursing, at the Chilliwack campus, it's big. I also know that

history and philosophy, they don't get the love that I think they deserve. Like there are certain, it's like eating your vegetables to me. I think the university needs to say, okay, there are certain programs, like philosophy is, it's getting close to dying. Like, it's going in the wrong direction.

And to me, this is where the university needs to say there are certain things that are just good for you. There are certain things that will nourish you, whether you like it or not. You need to support these endeavors just because they're not as financially alluring. It doesn't matter. These are important. And you kind of talking about how military history isn't getting that respect or the love that I think it deserves. I'm interested to know what that experience was for you because as somebody who wants to is interested in the topic and who sees the value, you're obviously passionate about it.

You're passionate from a young age. But then the universities are kind of saying, maybe not. Maybe we don't need those courses, those programs. I'm interested in like your thoughts on that to have to kind of fight and protect something that we should all want. Like I think that any person who understands the importance of history should cherish that as like a sacred. We don't touch this. We kind of leave it there. It deserves our recognition. These people who died deserve your recognition. I'm just interested into how you process that when you were applying and when you were being told like, yeah, you might be able to do that 10 years after you officially get. get your protection and you have tenure. What was that like for you? Were you a little, like,

did that ever bug you that you're like, this is so important? Like, how do you guys not see what I see? Yeah, I mean, it did. Yeah, sure as a grad student, you know, you're idealistic and you kind of quietly rage against the machine and that sort of thing. But I was fortunate that I did actually get hired to teach military history. I didn't have to hide it in the end. You know, and and when I applied to you, I just said, look, this is what I am. These are my strengths. And honestly, I didn't think it would match with what the department needs.

I mean, it's a strange game. You know, as you go through grad school, as a colleague once told me, you're kind of fashioning yourself into a very specific key. And then once you get out, the other end, you go around, you try locks. But it's really hard to find the exact fit. And so in some ways, I tried to make myself into a bit of a skeleton key by doing some indigenous stuff, some military stuff, some sort of race and ethnicity. And so I was kind of, I could apply to different things, but I wasn't always the right one thing

for each of those, because I was only a portion of that. But my particular weird mix of things was a good fit for UFE, as it turns out, even though they already had some people who taught military history and that sort of thing. In the end, it suited me. But to your broader point around the issues around liberal arts, you know, philosophy, history, English, and some of the social sciences as well, the liberal arts education, yeah, it's taken a real battery, you know, especially the last 25, 30 years. It used to be that that was seen as a good foundation for going on into any number of careers. And then, you know, popular culture and in the governments, you know, the liberal government under Christy Clark particularly was very much of the opinion that. that these were not good things to get people to do,

that what they wanted was more vocational programs. They wanted people to come out with tangible skills, that they could plug into. And so they threw money at certain jobs. And so for us, I think, in the liberal arts, we felt often our fight was not so much within our own institution or administration. In fact, we had a lot of allies there that also valued and saw the value in what we taught. The problem was more broadly amongst British Columbians and Canadians

and amongst government officials who maybe didn't see the value in that. and who looked at universities more as like a skills-producing technical programs and stuff like that, instead of what a liberal arts education does, which provides a lot of marketable skills. And so we really took kind of a battering through the 90s and the early 2000s and 20 teens. I think some of that is starting to change. But the reality is that, and partly we've changed as well, we're actually much more clear with our students when I teach them as a department. about, look, this is what we're giving you. These are the skill sets we're giving you.

This is how you can market yourself. And we went through this wave of growing accreditations where increasingly people wanted to go to school and come out as a thing, a teacher, a nurse, you know, a welder, a lawyer. And if you come out of school with a BA in history, well, you're not a thing per se. You know, you are potentially amenable to many things,

But that's hard, you know, and so you get lots of stories of, oh, yes, the person for the BA who's the, you know, been baristaing at Starbucks because they can't find a job. And it can be tough to find, often for graduates to find that first toe in the door. But the reality is that liberal arts graduates come out with a lot of important skill sets that are fundamental to today's modern, you know, economy. They come out with critical thinking skills. They come out with communication skills. They can write clearly and coherently. They can speak clearly and coherently. They come out with the ability to problem solve.

They come up with cultural sensitivities, you know, that are increasingly important in a modern workplace. And that aren't always necessarily covered in other kinds of programs, professional programs. And when you combine liberal arts with a little bit of technological know-how, you're really prepared for a wide range of things. And that ability to learn, which is one thing, our graduates do have is they know how to learn new things. And so most people in today's world will probably change their career once or twice through the year. They won't be like me. I kind of

hit my track and I found my job and then I work on it until I retire. That's not the norm anymore. Most people, because their job's end or they get downsized or new opportunities come up and they have to remake themselves, you know, multiple times through their lives. And so being nimble, Being adaptable, knowing how to learn and teach yourself and refashion yourself is something that our graduates are actually really well positioned to do. And so they do tend to do well. Once they get the foot in the door, they advance. They move up the ladder. They find good pay.

They, you know, surveys suggest to have much higher job satisfaction regardless of the line of work they're in than the norm. And maybe that's something to do with being very self-aware and engaged in the process, you know, of what they're doing. I don't disagree, and I'm very grateful for UFEs because it sounds like they've done, I had John Haidon, who's a criminologist at UFE, and he said something similar, which is they kind of just let me have my own little space and they let me do it the way I wanted to, even though I came from the United States, even though I was fairly new to this country and was still building relationships here, I got to stay here and have like my little niche. And I think that your statement about being able to find your niche and to just kind of flourish,

to do what you're interested in and to share that passion with other people is attending UBC that is something I think I've struggled with more is I don't feel that same connection with the professors and they're not as engaged with each and every student and I think that UFEs done a good job of kind of creating that space

for both the student and the professor to kind of flourish. We're very fortunate that we do maintain small class sizes and it's harder and harder you know the economic pressures on Canadian universities have amplified since the 1990s massively. And so most universities have responded by moving to larger and larger first and second year classes.

So you get huge lexer halls with 100, 200, 500, 800, 800 students in a class. And as a professor, you can't know everybody. And, you Vick, my history classes, my first year classes, first and second year that capped at 36, third year classes at 30, fourth year classes at 20. So I do get to know my students by name.

a lot of first person, you know, face-to-face interaction. If anything, I get down on my knees and beg them to come and talk to me and use us as a resource because young students often don't. You know, we have our office hours and we sit there and twiddle our thumbs and complain to each other about how nobody comes to see us anymore. And they're missing out, you know, a valuable resource of the back and forth of the conversations. I used to go talk to my faculty all the time. And it was really useful in helping me learn how to develop as a student, how to develop my thinking. It helped me build relationships that, you know, when I came time to go looking for letters of recommendation, I had good relationships. They knew me. They could write strong letters

for me. So, you know, from a pragmatic standpoint, it's also beneficial to students to do that. But most of them are uncomfortable, or they're more comfortable connecting through social media and, you know, especially through COVID, through Zoom and that sort of thing. And some of those tools are helping a bit, but it's still something we'd like to see more of. Absolutely. And I think that I learned about that more in my third and fourth year of the value of just being able to have a conversation. And I think that through doing this, I think I've been able to see professors as more

of peers with a specific knowledge base rather than a different person, a different creature of the world. And it can be very intimidating. And I think that through research on like how people, receive doctors. We look at them as you're all knowing and I know nothing and so there is that sort of disconnect. You've also like done all of this research. You've gone to university. You've built a life and I'm kind of interested to know what that journey was like for you with your family. How did you approach having to travel so much for your research with with a partner and

how did you two meet? How did this all come about? That's interesting. Yeah, it's I've always been incredibly fortunate. My parents were both went to university. They met at the University of Saskatchewan. My dad was a GP. My mom was an RN. I was born at University Hospital in Saskatoon. So I was born on a university. And so they've always been very supportive. I mean, they're supportive of my sister and I growing up in all kinds of things, you know, sports and my sister was into horse riding and band trips. And so we were always gone every weekend to soccer. tournaments or a horse show or whatever the case might be. And they always gave us every opportunity to trial lots of things. We had a golf, family golf pass in the summer and a

ski pass in the winter and spent thousands of hours doing those things. My dad took me hunting and camping and I learned to love the rugged wilderness of the Kootenys and be very connected to that place growing up. And I always kind of, I don't think we ever talked about it very much. But I would always, I think there was an assumption that I would go to university. I never questioned it. I never really thought too much about other alternatives, I guess. And my parents were, you know, supported me financially when I went to university and with tuition and help with rent and that sort of thing so that I was able to go to school full time. And it's a pattern you don't see now. You know, in my day and age, it was normal to go five courses

a term, and you'd go September to April, and you work in the full time in the summer. That was the normal pattern. Students don't do that nowadays. Tuitions have risen exponentially from when I was a student, and most students have to work full or part-time in order to sustain an education so they can go two or three courses a term, but they go all year-round. And it's a very different kind of pattern and way of life. And I was very fortunate to be able to, when I was in school, I was in school, and that was all I did, and it was 24-7, And it was really incredibly important to me to have that support from my parents and also understanding. You know, one of the things I was really struck by when I came to UFE, given the background of the valley, it's a very agricultural population, working class.

A lot of people who come to UF.E are the first in their family ever to go to higher education. And that's amazing, but it comes with challenges, you know, that sometimes their families don't understand the pressures and the challenges that come with. with that, that maybe there isn't always the same support to come from their home life that maybe would help them get through their school more easily or more successfully. And maybe there isn't the same appreciation for the value that that education will provide to that young person in terms of the development as a human being, as a citizen, and in building a career for themselves. And I've talked to a lot of my students and realizing this,

trying to maybe provide a little extra backfill for some of that. Because in looking back, I realized how fortunate I was. I mean, I still had to do the work, and that still had to come from me. I had to find something I loved and wanted to do, and I had to want it enough to do the work. But the path was eased beneath my feet by my parents supported me. And then I met my spouse at YuVic, the Jive and Paul Room Dance Club, which is way cooler than it sounds. And she was doing a bachelor's in art history. and we both thought about going on to grad school, actually.

She had better grades than I did, and was really, really, she would have done great. But she was also a really good artist, and I had no other marketable skills. And we sort of thought that maybe I should at least go to grad school first. We didn't think we could both do it together. And we worried, too, because grad school, because you'd become that very specific key, a lot of academic couples never wind up working at the same university. One of her profs had at UVIC had just been hired that year. and her husband had been given a spousal hire at UVIC.

And that was the first year and 12 years of marriage. They lived in the same city. Wow. And we didn't want that. So she supported me to go through grad school and made it a lot easier for me. I was able to get good scholarships and teaching assistantships and stuff. And we made it work and we got through, you know, well. But she also came from an academic family.

Her father was a biochemist at UVIC. And so she understood as well the... You know, the demands of an academic world and that intellectual pursuit, and it was immensely supportive of my journey through it. And it was difficult. She couldn't really get a career going because we moved from Victoria to Ontario to Calgary and back to Victoria. And so she kept getting uprooted and having to work sort of more temporary kinds of positions. And that was hard on her. And she sacrificed a lot in that way to help me get through the process. Having watched me go through the process, she says she's glad she didn't, she didn't ever love the reading and

the writing as much and think she wouldn't have done well, although I think she would have been awesome at it. But, you know, that was, those were hard decisions to make. And we, we don't regret it now. Our life has worked out well for us. It was hard for those years after my PhD. We moved around a lot. I spent a year in Calgary with a postdoc. And as soon as you get there, the first thing you're doing is you're applying for the next year. Because you don't know if you're going to have any income. You don't know where you're going to be living. You don't, if you're going to have a job or a postdoc or what.

And I was able to get another postdoc for two years in Victoria and New Zealand. So we went back to Victoria, which was great. And then we spent several months living in New Zealand while I did work there. We moved with two, an eight, a three-year-old and an eight-month-old, which was interesting. But it was a great adventure for us. You know, we bought a little station wagon when we were there. And we drove all over the North Island. And man, they have great.

playgrounds and great beaches and the meat pies were cheap and the fish and chips were great and it was a great place to travel with kids and so we had a lovely time and it was a good experience for us and then we came back to Victoria my postdoc ran out I picked up classes at Comoson and UVC trying to cobble together enough to support my family we had two kids at that stage then and and then I came up with a one-year contract or a 10-month contract in Kamloops but but I only found out a few weeks before the start of term in August. And my son was, my oldest, was already set for kindergarten in Victoria,

and we bought a little house there. And, you know, I had to decide to move to Camloops on my own. I rented a little basement suite, and for eight months I lived there. We only had one car, so my wife had to keep the car. I'd take the bus down a couple times a term and at Christmas, but it sucked. It was really hard. My youngest, he stopped talking to me. he was mad that I kept leaving.

And it was hard to be apart that long, you know. And so, unfortunately, I was able to get the job here. And so in the summer of 2005, we moved to Chilliwack and settled in here. And my career was able to become more stable and secure after that, you know. But it's not an easy road. I don't advocate, you know, all my students to take an academic path. a lot of people don't finish, you know, they get lost along the way in the master's. There's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, folks that drop out in the PhD.

And then even when you get out with the PhD, it can be years of temporary sessional work where you don't get benefits. There's no job security. Our universities, unfortunately, because of the funding shortfalls have leaned increasingly heavily on short-term workers. And so, you know, a lot of universities, 30, 40, 50% of the classes are taught by these highly qualified people who don't really get recompensed for it. And it's, you know, that transitional phase, I was fortunate it was only four years. And I had post-docs or work through it all, but five years, I guess, to carry us through. But, you know, lots of people struggle on a lot more. They move around. It's really tough time.

and, you know, we value them as our colleagues, but it's always a tough go for sessionals. Absolutely. And so can you tell us a little bit, it sounds like you really admire your wife and the sacrifices that she made and the sacrifices both of you made in order to take this path. Can you tell us about like how you guys ended up getting married and just a little bit about that journey? Because I think that that is the part that we get so lost in when we focus too much on somebody's career is that we forget that they had a supportive person in the background of often cheering them on and then that person's story doesn't get told and I had Brian Minter from Minter Gardens on and they have Minter Gardens which is very well known in the Fraser Valley

and he talked one interview I had with him was he was like nobody ever asks me about like her journey and what she had to go through and and she's a main she was like the bookkeeper of our business and she did all the background work and so I get all the kind of of glitz and glamour of being invited on CBC and stuff, but her story rarely gets told. And when I start to tell it, people kind of say, okay, back to the gardening or whatever it is. So I'm just interested to know a little bit more about that journey. Yeah, I'm always happy to, I'm a cheerleader for her as much as she is for me. You know, as I said, it was a long, long journey through my academic career.

And I was very fortunate that she understood the process and the challenges and the time. it takes, you know, it's a long time to be in a sort of impermanent state, always a contingent state. And then, of course, we had our kids, and for both of us, it made sense that she wanted to stay home to raise the kids. And so we lived on, even when we got here on one income. And that meant sacrifices as well. We didn't do things. You know, we could afford to travel overseas or we could afford to fix up our house, or we could afford to do fun things like go skiing or things around home. But we couldn't do all of those. So we had to make choices about things that we did. And I think after being home for 10 years and not working while raising the children,

I think she was a little trepidacious about going back out into the workplace. And, you know, she tried a few things, trying to, because she's an amazing artist, to try and earn some money on the side, to help out the family income. And it was always difficult. And some things just didn't quite work, or they worked a little bit, but not enough. And so eventually she started, once we moved here,

she started painting murals for a number of years, and she had some success doing that, which was great. But as we got into our later 30s, she decided she was getting tired of painting what other people wanted. And so she decided she was going to do her own stuff. And she started to paint patique. My Ph.D. supervisor in Ontario, Terry Copp, his wife, Linda, was an amazing boutique artist, and she painted landscapes. Most people don't use boutique for that. It's cotton or silk cloth, and then you put dye on and wax to freeze the colors and stuff. So it's very complex. It's very hard to do realistic stuff. And she always did it, liked realism. And so she started to experiment with that. And that's, I guess, it's been maybe 10 or 11, 12 years ago now. And she's started to turn that into this.

and quite remarkable career. She paints, you know, West Coast scenery and our travels around the world. We love to travel, and that's always been our shared passion. It's, you know, we spent six months backpacking after we got engaged and in between the bachelors and the masters, and we've took the kids to New Zealand, and we've always traveled any time we've had the chance. The last time I did my sabbatical was in 2012, 2013,

and that summer we went to Britain, actually, And we did a house exchange for seven weeks with a couple from London. And that was an amazing experience. And, you know, the kids learned so much. We go to castles and museums and all kinds of fun and amazing things. And she's an amazing travel organizer. So she always comes up with the coolest places to stay, castles and stuff like that. And the boys, I think, really have become more worldly and learned from those experiences.

We love it. I mean, it's always action-packed, and we're exhausted by the time we get home. We need a holiday to recover from traveling, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah. And so that's still that, you know, our life is still very much about wanting to travel and explore the world, and we've been fortunate enough to be able to do that. It's one of the things I love about my career is that my teaching is primarily focused from September to April, and I work the gazillion hours a week for most of that stretch.

But I have more control over my schedule and, you know, made a August. August. And so we can take a few weeks and go for extended holidays to explore Turkey or Morocco or wherever we happen to find ourselves and have grand adventures, which is kind of amazing. That is awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about the courses that you teach at UFE and what students might get out of those? Or what, yeah. I teach a wide range of primarily Canadian history. So at the lower level, I teach introductory, pre and post confederation in Canada. I teach BC history occasionally. At the upper level, my specialized courses are Canadian military history. I teach a comparative settler indigenous relations in Canada and New Zealand

as well. And then at the fourth year, I have a number of courses that I teach. One is I'm teaching this year as a fourth year seminar in Canada and the world. It's sort of Canadian foreign relations, but also Canada and our identity and how we relate ourselves to the world more broadly. I have a a really interesting seminar in indigenous people in conflict in Canada from pre-contact to the present. That is a lot of fun. And then I co-teach with a colleague Robin Anderson History 440, which is a local history for the web course, which is kind of an applied history course where students, senior undergrad students are basically trained in how to do archival research. They are assigned to different archives in Chilliwack, Mission, Abbotsford, Surrey, Stalo,

Research and Resource Management Center, Langley, and they conduct research. We give them a broad topic, Second World War, or a particular thematic topic like sports and leisure, and they go and find themselves a topic in the archives. They research and explore and work with the primary documents and try and define and give shape to a story that they can tell. And then instead of having them do an essay, as we normally would in history, we ask them if they can, or we'd show them how to build a basic website, and then they write, create a historical website with images and content that's designed for a more public audience to bring

local history stories to, you know, a public audience made by local history students. I think I read about that, right? That one was the one that got a little bit of publicity from the progress and is still available now, right? It is, although our website's in hiatus at the moment. We initially started the class back in 2011. And the first time we did it, we used Dreamweaver. The students learned to write code. It was incredibly complex and a very big challenge for the students. And they did amazing things with it. But for various reasons, the class kind of didn't run for a number of years afterwards. We struggled to draw students to it. And so we revamped it a little bit, made it a little simpler.

We use Whizzywig kinds of web builders, like the basic Microsoft one now. But for a lot of years, we had to use an in-house UFE-centered program that was sort of like a web design thing. But it wasn't publicly available, but we had internal support to use that program. And so we're trying to switch all of those, recreate those as websites now, and then get it all launched, hopefully sometime in the new year, with the last five years that we've run the course again, all of the student websites on a wide range of topics, on cultural exchange, on sports and leisure, on the history of education in the valley,

Second World War, First World War And I'll be doing the course again in January And haven't yet decided on what the topic will be I just set up the broad topic And then I kind of unleash the students And they go make the history themselves Which is kind of amazing That is. You've also written quite a few books

And written articles Can you tell us about those books Where people can find them And what they're about? Yeah In history, the book is still really important to us. In a lot of other disciplines, they don't really write books anymore, but for history, writing big monographs is still the major achievement of your academic career. And so I've been fortunate to be able to produce two major books, either as the primary or contributing author and a third where I was another contributing author.

My first one was based on my PhD thesis, and it's called The Red Men's on the Warpath, and it's about the image of the Indian in English. Canada in the 1930s and 40s. And that was published in 2004 by UBC Press. It's still available through their website. And since then, I've published lots of articles. Most of that's academic information. But my second major book just came out in 2019 with Cambridge University Press. And that's the transnational look at indigenous people in the Second World War in Australia.

New Zealand, the United States, and Canada, and looking at it across those four nations and comparing and contrasting the different patterns and the similarities and trying to make sense and explain, you know, what we can tease out of that. And that was a crazy and vast undertaking. It took me more than a decade and a couple of different collaborators to put together and, you know, thousands and thousands of archival documents from each country to work with, not to mention all the literature that was published in each country on the subject, or near related subjects. It was a kind of crazy undertaking. And I was really proud to be able to finish that off. I worked with, it's actually an American scholar, but he's based at the Catholic University in Australia and Melbourne.

And I was an expert on Aboriginal participation in the Second World War in the United States as well. And I was stronger on Canada and New Zealand, so it worked as a good pairing. and we were able to complete that book and bring it out with one of the major international academic presses, which I'm really proud of on sort of my magnum opus. And that was sort of my final statement on Indigenous Participation Awards. And I've started to turn the corner in terms of topics since then, although I'm still known for that. So I still am drawn into that sort of thing. I did an interview for a Quebec documentary company last year on Indigenous. participation in the war.

I just did a, actually, an aftermatter paid section for a graphic novel by an indigenous author, who's Dene, from Northwest Territories, and talking about indigenous participation in the war and the uranium mining in the region that fed into the atomic program of the Manhattan Project. So I spoke a little bit about that for that. I'm going to be giving a talk webinar for the BC Museums

Association on November 10th along with another gentleman talking about remembrance and those communities that aren't always included in remembrance and so I'll be talking about indigenous veterans and remembrance and how museums might be able to engage

that topic and maybe broaden their holdings in the way that which they present and you know, contribute to the collective memorization or commemoration of those events in their own communities. Wow. I would be very grateful if you could send me that information when it releases when the graphic, if the graphic novels available now, so that we can share that with people because I love that you're making this more accessible for people. On the topic of Remembrance Day, I'm interested to know how you approach it or what you think, perhaps

listeners who've struggled with it, like myself. How do we engage it? What questions should we have in the forefront of our mind to take the day more seriously? Why does this, what should we be thinking in that minute of silence? And what have you thought about, perhaps, through seeing all the various stories of these individuals who've given their lives for us to have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to have all the luxuries that we take for granted today? And are boring politics. Yes. That's a really good question. I always tell my students that they should be thinking about it, that they should attend.

I always tend. It's important to me to attend. I take it as a very solemn occasion. It's never, I've heard people sometimes think that it's about somehow glorifying war or soldiers, and it really isn't about that. It's very much intended and designed as a remembrance of sacrifice, of those who sacrificed for the greater good, for us, for the things you talked about, you know, that we are, fortunate enough to enjoy in this not perfect but remarkable place in which we live. And yeah, in that minute of silence, I think about individuals. I think about those letters, you know, that soldiers wrote. I think about the human beings that they were, and they were no different than you and I. You know, they were swept up in things that were far bigger than they ever were.

and they were just everyday people but they got asked to do extraordinary things in not everyday things and they didn't shirk from that they stepped up they took it on and it was tough and it was brutal and some of them died and a lot of them were injured and a lot of them were tortured by the memories that they had of those events and that's a lot of suffering to think about it's hard sometimes to connect with that And so that's why I think for me making it individual helps to get you there, you know, to think about one person. Maybe it's a family member. I might be a grandfather, an uncle, a great-uncle, or something of that nature.

I think about my great-grandfather whose name is on the Vimy Memorial. His body was never found in the First World War. My nan never knew him. She was just born when he went off to fight and then never met him, had no memories of him. You know, and there's millions of stories like that in Canada, family stories. And so I think if people take the time to talk to their grandparents, talk to their parents, are their stories, you know, they can find that personal connection. And lots of people come into my Canadian military history class with those connections already in mind.

And I think they feel more closely connected to them by learning more about it. So, inform yourself, you know, find things out there that can help you to learn about the experience. There's a really good documentary series called No Price Too High. My PhD supervisor, Terry Kopp, was really involved. It was made in the 90s, but it's still, I think, one of the better things available on the history of Canada and the Second World War and of the experience of Canadian soldiers overseas. You know, take the time to educate yourself. Learn something more about it. And then think about that in that minute of silence.

Can you tell us about perhaps some of the documentaries that you've enjoyed that are on perhaps Netflix or other streaming websites that you've enjoyed? I think of like World War II in color. I think of how to be a tyrannical leader. It's on Netflix. How to be a tyrant. And they go through the various tyrannical leaders and what made them particularly, you know, or malevolent in their own right, like trying to control the populace, trying to control the people around them.

How do they approach these things? And then Haxal Ridge are just a few that come to mind for myself. Yeah, there's been a lot of, there's been a big wave, actually, as part of that memory boom. There was a real turn back to memories about the Second World War. You know, saving Private Ryan is maybe the most large scale and important example of one of the first really startlingly realistic, I think, recreations of battle. So much so that Second World War veterans often couldn't sit through that first 25 minutes of that film. And I've used that first 25 minutes actually in my classes in relation to talking about the Battle of Dieppe. Canadians

were involved in in the raid on France, where they made an amphibious insult and were cut to pieces on the beaches, to get a sense of the flavor, the feeling, the intensity, the noise of what that, just some small snippet of what it might felt like. And it can be, film can be really useful in that regard. I'm always hesitant, though, with film because often so much is sacrificed for the sake of good storytelling or creating drama or whatever the case might be. And I understand it's part of the medium. It has to be its own medium. But sometimes it doesn't always do the right things, historically speaking. But there are good historical films. World War II in color is another important one. And it's funny how color

makes such a difference. I know that the Vimy Foundation has been recolorizing First World War photographs, a lot of really famous ones. And oh my God, the difference it makes to see those film, because somehow black and white is a barrier to connection and empathy. And when you colorize it all of a sudden these black and white figures become people. And so I've started using these in my PowerPoints for my classes. And students really connect in a much real, in more real way. Peter Jackson just did a film a little historically problematic in the First World War, but using a lot of First World War footage that is then the actual moving picture footage is colorized

to kind of recreate some of that sense of the war and the intensity and the experience of the trenches. that is another place to kind of often I think what people learn is it's less about the facts and it's more about the feeling that you that you connect and have empathy and can start to see meaning through that to to past events and past actors in a way that helps remove some of that disconnect right that is brilliant and I just want to say that I really appreciate your willingness to come on to do work that I think risk not getting the appreciation, I think it would have deserved. I think that that's likely a challenge with your field is that it perhaps doesn't get out to the audience that I think that it deserves and that should be paying attention to it.

I'd also like to just appreciate your wife's willingness to support you through all of this and your family's support for this because I think that this is such a gift to have somebody fill that gap that existed for so long. wasn't a short period of time that there was this gap in knowledge and research and understanding and for you to look at that as an opportunity to take on rather than, oh, there's a gap there. I can avoid it. Like, I think that that sets such a strong example for others, but also your willingness to go out and share and to share your passion.

Like, I think that it's so easy for people to take that for granted. Like, I'm enjoying what I'm doing right now, but it's so easy for others not to go down that path for you to have ended up in the sciences, for you to end up as a dentist. and not share your true passion, I think, is more common than it is uncommon. And so when people like yourself choose to do that, I do think that it sets an example, but to use the metaphor of the flower again, we talked about how our seniors might not be able to share those same stories. And so we risk that flower dying.

I think people like yourself are coming in as like the gardener to help us keep those roots, to help keep that connection alive. And that's not something small. That's not a small task. So it took 10 years to write your book. And so that dedication to delivering that, I think, is just, it's such a strong example for others to figure out what they're passionate about and then commit 10 years to that, commit your whole life to it and have the people around you support that.

I think it's just a, it's a beautiful story to be able to share. And we just did over three hours. We're at three hours and 10 minutes. That's amazing. Thank you very much for that. That was very kind words. and I enjoy gardening. I don't think, I had never thought of myself as a gardener in that way, but I appreciate the metaphor.

Yes, yeah, I do think of you as a steward for our history, and I think that people like yourself share that information for the benefit of all of us. And I don't say very often, but I do think that you are the perfect type of person to start your own podcast, to be able to share it through this medium. I think you're an excellent speaker, and I think you bring that passion that I felt I lacked when I was in, like, assemblies, and so. somebody was telling me about it, your passion and dedication to this, I think once a week being able to just sit down and tell us one of the letters that impacted you, I think we need more of that because someone like yourself who does work to try and share this information, I think there's likely no one better because I've gotten a lot out of this and I have found myself struggling to engage with this type of material and I think that you made it very accessible and

I'm sure listeners will agree with that. I appreciate that. The idea of me doing podcasts, I think my students would find hilariously funny because I am such a confirmed Luddite. I continue to use overhead projectors and, you know, in my lectures until way after everybody else was on PowerPoints. And they used to give me a bad time. I was quaintly anachronistic until one time one of the projectors actually started to smoke in class. And that was my sign.

It was time to actually embrace the 21st century a smidgin. but I think that if I actually started a podcast series, my students would be giddy with laughter. Well, if I can help in any way with the audio equipment with walking through it, I promise you it's not that hard. The video part makes a little bit more difficult, but just a microphone and connecting it to a computer, I think would make a world of difference in helping build capacity on these topics.

So thank you again for taking the time. My great pleasure. I don't know.