RAINY RIVER FIRST NATIONS — A new exhibit has opened in the Rainy River District that aims to bring light to the Indigenous soldiers who gave their lives in service of our freedom.
Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre is hosting a special exhibit called “Ogichidaa: Warrior, Veteran” from now until November 14, 2024.
The exhibit is a special look at the identities and lives of ten Indigenous soldiers from throughout Treaty #3 territory who gave their lives in the line of duty or while serving their country in wartime. Not only constricted to the World Wars, some of those featured at the centre served in Korea or Vietnam.
All of them, however, have been brought into the exhibit in an effort to ensure that they can be remembered for the people they were, rather than as statistics and historical record.
Jessie Richard is the curator for Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung and she has been working for the past month and a half to set up the exhibit, working with material that volunteer and exhibit co-creator Marjorie Stintzi has been collecting for years.
Richard said the exhibit has been a difficult one to put together owing to just how young the men featured were when they died or were killed in action, but it’s all been in service of helping share their stories and have the District get to know them as human beings.
“The exhibit features 10 men who were all genuinely, really, really young when they enlisted and many of them didn't reach 30,” Richard said.
“I think one of them reached about 31 years old. So quite, quite young. But it's just a super simple exhibit, showing you the person behind the number and the person that fought for this country.”
Not every person in the exhibit served in the Canadian Army, owing to the Jay Treaty, but all died in the line of duty or while serving.
The records have also not necessarily been easy to track down. In some cases, Richard and Stintzi were unable to find photographs of the individual in question. In other cases, however, even surprisingly personal details have been brought to light that have helped to illustrate the personality of individuals that might otherwise have been lost to history.
“What I was really aiming for in this exhibit, in the write ups, was humanizing everybody,” Richard said.
“Memorial or Remembrance Day and everything kind of encapsulating around that, can be very cold and numbers kind of thing, and so I wanted to ensure that the Indigenous peoples of Treaty #3 were being celebrated for themselves and for their acts, but most importantly, for their history.
"One of them, Ivan {Clifford Broeffle), I found a letter from him to his sister. There was a lot of information in there I didn’t involve in the exhibits, just simply because it felt too personal. I found a picture of the letter, but I didn't think it would be okay to share that, because if this was me and my brother, I wouldn't want that to be shared to the public, because that's private.
"But I was able to see how he dearly missed these bologna and onion sandwiches, and wrote in his letter just compelling his sister about how much he missed these sandwiches. And so his sister responded with an onion and bologna in the mail. And so it's those moments of humanity and that connectedness before the biggest sacrifice that anyone can ever give in their lives,” said Richard.
Ivan Clifford Broeffle is just one of the ten soldiers who is being recognized as part of the exhibit. His poster details his dates of birth and death, but also shares an anecdote from personal correspondence he sent his sister about how much he missed baloney and onion sandwiches while he was serving in Vietnam. His sister responded by encasing pieces of meat and onions in wax and sending them to Broeffle through the mail.
Stintzi, who put together an exhibit on the district’s war dead last year, said the count has reached 305 from across conflicts throughout the final century of the previous millennium, and that the work can be at times slow, but at other times incredibly quick, especially when people get to see exhibits like this and help personally connect the dots.
“Canada has the virtual war memorial and that helps somewhat,” she said.
“Ivan was from Atikokan, he came from Seine River. I found Peter (Norbert Bruyere) because I’m involved with a lot of military research, and the name came up because we have a memorial in Windsor for all our Vietnam dead.
"There’s about 108 men there. You research backwards. I pick a place name and suddenly ‘hey. He’s not on anything, but he does belong here.’ you just keep looking under every rock until you find something. But someone’s already contacted someone about (Robert Leo) Kavanaugh, and that’s golden to me.”
Stintzi echoes Richard’s desire to see these individuals represented to the district and beyond as more than just names or numbers, hoping to honour their legacies and give them the recognition she feels they deserve, especially as their own countries asked them to sacrifice almost everything they had in order to serve in the first place.
“People see their faces and it brings them to life,” she said.
“You can't dwell on their deaths, that’s why I try with my information to make them alive. It makes them real.
"Particularly for the Indigenous because they lost so much when they signed up. They would lose their status, they couldn’t come back onto the reserves, a lot of them, afterwards. They couldn’t join the Legions. They eventually let them, but a lot of them wouldn’t.
"The war dead here, their families never got their pensions because the Canadian government gave them less through Indian Affairs, so they just kept their pensions and they got less money. They didn’t get a full war pension, and I think a lot of these guys thought that when they went over, they would be providing for their families. It didn’t happen.”
The exhibit is an ongoing work, with Richard and Stintzi looking to learn as much as possible about any and all of the war dead of Treaty #3, and actively encourage any members of the public to call or email them at the Mounds with more information, stories, or photos about the soldiers they have already identified, or those who may so far have not been discovered.
“This is an ongoing, ever-changing exhibit, and because we're building into our Indigenous Veterans of Treaty #3 exhibit, we welcome the public to give us input and knowledge,” Richard said.
“If they have an uncle, if they've got a great-grandfather or whomever, or an aunt, please let us know who they are. Give us their story so we can include them in the next exhibit. We want to make sure that everyone is being shown and the next exhibit is going to be absolutely huge, and everyone deserves to have have their face on that wall.”
To contact Richard about a veteran or war dead, email her at [email protected], call the Historical Centre at 807-483-1163, or drop by in person to speak with her.
Fort Frances Times / Local Journalism Initiative
