Cape Croker vet was part of Dump Site 41 battle

By Stephen Bede Scharper Toronto Star November 4 2012

“They were trees like these,” Wilmer Nadjiwon suddenly remembered one summer day several years ago, quietly carving a wood sculpture in his outdoor studio in Tobermory.

A World War II veteran, Nadjiwon, gazing at the trembling aspens, recalled an incident from early February 1944 while serving in Italy with the Canadian Army. An anti-tank gunner with B Company, Perth Regiment, Nadjiwon had just made a visit to the cook at C Company to repay a poker debt, and was sitting down to savour a bit of hot chow when German artillery pulverized the company kitchen. Spared by dint of where he chose to sit, he recounted, “Since we had no ladders, we had to shake the men down who were blown way up into the trees.”

“We had to try and catch them.”

Or what was left of them.

This story is just one of several World War II memories recorded in Wilmer Nadjiwon’s Neither Wolf, Nor Dog: An Ojibway Elder’s Tales of Residential School, Wartime Service, First Nations Politics, and Some Experiences with the Great Spirit (The Tobermory Press). The book will be formally launched Thursday, Nov. 8, from 5:30-8 p.m. in the Member’s Lounge at Toronto City Hall. (The public is welcome.)

Nadjiwon, now 91, is one of several thousand aboriginal Canadians who fought in World War II, and one of the few still bearing witness to that conflict. Of the more than 1 million Canadians and Newfoundlanders who served in the armed forces from 1939 to 1945, according to Veterans Affairs Canada, an estimated 107,600 were still alive as of last March. Their average age: 88. These veterans are rapidly leaving us. Approximately 300 perish each week, an attrition rate greater than that of the war itself.

Despite the ghastly horrors of the war — “War is no place for human beings,” Nadjiwon once quipped — it was a time when Nadjiwon did not feel the sting of racial discrimination. Within the army, he felt that he and the other recruits were treated equally. “I truly felt that I was one with all the other soldiers.”

Aboriginal soldiers were widely recognized as effective fighters, imbued with courage, endurance and coolness under fire. Often, when prisoners were needed for interrogation, it was native soldiers who were tasked with silently slipping through the enemy lines and bringing back prisoners, something German soldiers apparently found deeply unnerving.

That sense of respect and equal treatment was quickly shattered for Nadjiwon, however, when, fresh from overseas, he returned to Wiarton. Ordering a beer with his father at a local pub, he was told flatly, “We don’t serve Indians.” Although good enough to serve in the war, he was not good enough to be served a beer. Nadjiwon came home to find himself once again a second-class citizen.

As his book details, Nadjiwon had to wrestle not only with the scars of war, but the demons of other atrocities. His own bucolic childhood was abruptly clipped when, after his mother died in a car accident, he was ordered to go to St. Peter Clavier Residential School in Spanish, where as a young boy he suffered years of cruelty, deprivation and sexual abuse, experiences he describes with heart-rending clarity.

Though “crippled” emotionally by these experiences, Nadjiwon served as chief of Cape Croker for 14 years, founded the Union of Ontario Indians, became a celebrated wood carver and fought, and continues to strive for economic development and independence for native peoples.

When well into his 80s, Nadjiwon also joined native activists and local residents in opposing the proposed Dump Site 41 near Elmvale, which would have jeopardized not only one of the most pristine aquifers in the world, but also the crystal clear waters of Georgian Bay, one of the cleanest systems in the Great Lakes, and the principal life source of the Ojibway people on the Bruce Peninsula.

Through his art, activism, and life story, Nadjiwon has engaged in a lifelong struggle for dignity and self-determination. His frank and probing autobiography is a powerful reminder to Canadians that Remembrance Day not only commemorates sacrifice through war, but ultimately the quest of the human spirit for a life of justice, dignity and meaning.

Stephen Bede Scharper is associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Toronto. stephen.scharper@utoronto.ca