Belgium honours Indigenous First World War veterans

As a piper walked past row after row of people bundled up for a chilly November day, he played The Road to Passchendaele — a fitting tribute for a Canadian who died in the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. 

In a national ceremony on Canada's Indigenous Veterans Day — the first time Belgium has ever marked the occasion — a plaque was unveiled honouring Alex Decoteau of Saskatchewan's Red Pheasant Cree Nation, in the very spot he was killed in action in Flanders Fields.  

"I'm very happy to be here to honour him as well as my family and Canada," said Decoteau's great-nephew Rick Decoteau, who travelled from Fraser Lake, B.C., to help unveil the plaque. 

It was part of a week of commemorative events leading up to Remembrance Day on Monday, and part of Belgium's efforts to recognize the roughly 4,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit soldiers from Canada who fought in the First World War.

'They are not forgotten'

Decoteau was an Olympic runner, and Canada's first Indigenous police officer. He served with the Edmonton Police Service before joining the army. 

"By 1914, he was promoted to sergeant, and commanded his own police station," said Corps Sgt. Major Christa Laforce, of the Edmonton Police Service, during the ceremony.  

Decouteau is buried just 400 metres from the plaque, at the Passchendaele New British Cemetery. Canadians, together with Flemish people, visited his grave to pray, smudge and lay tobacco. 

"Know that they are not forgotten and that we will never forget," said Anishinaabe Elder Debbie Eisan, her voice breaking with emotion as she stood over Decoteau's grave.

Eisan is from Nova Scotia and also a 36-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces.

She was among the group that performed the Mi'kmaq Honour Song, a spiritual anthem performed at gatherings and celebrations, at the Menin Gate Friday night. 

The names of 55,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found on the battlefields of Flanders are written on the Menin Gate, where every night since 1928, buglers have played The Last Post, the traditional salute to the fallen.

Though it was not permitted during the Second World War, the tribute was performed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Merging traditions

On Friday, Canadian Indigenous culture merged with the almost century-old tradition of honouring those who paid the ultimate price.  

"I think it's huge because they recognize that not everybody is the same," said Eisan.  

"We have different spiritualities and different cultures and they respect that and they honour that."

Visit Flanders invited the Canadian delegation, comprised of Indigenous people from Eastern and Western Canada, to honour two veterans: Decoteau and Sam Glode — a Mi'kmaw soldier from Nova Scotia's Acadia First Nation. 

"It's important to make people aware that people from diverse backgrounds came to Flanders Fields to fight and strive for peace," said Veerle Viaene, co-ordinator of heritage for Visit Flanders, an organization that works to attract international visitors to the region.

As Jeff Purdy retraced the steps of his great-great-grandfather, Sam Glode, in Belgium during the First World War, he marvelled at the depth of the tunnels dug by his own flesh and blood beneath German lines. 

"I've always wanted to come here to Belgium, and walk around, but I never dreamed that I'd be able to walk where Sam walked," he said, standing at the edge of a crater in Sint-Elooi, Belgium, believed to be left behind after an explosive detonated in a tunnel his ancestor helped dig. 

50 hours of research

Battlefield tour guide Erwin Ureel, a former soldier with the Belgian army and a volunteer with the Passchendaele Society, hadn't heard of Glode prior to learning about him from Canadian organizers. 

He then spent upward of 50 hours researching his story. Using an interview Glode did in the 1940s and cross-referencing it with war diaries kept by every unit detailing their actions during the war, he was able to pinpoint Glode's steps with the Royal Canadian Engineers No. 1 Canadian Tunnelling Company.

He took the group to where Glode fought in 1917's Battle of Messines, one of the most successful British operations on the western front, before going on to Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. 

Glode, who was in Belgium for about a year and a half, digging tunnels toward the enemy — deep under no man's land, the perilous and unclaimed territory between the opposing forces — planting explosives and waiting for just the right moment to detonate them.

"My interest was in minority groups in the Great War who were often forgotten or whose stories were more or less wiped out," said Ureel. 

'Shook up bad'

He took the group to the aforementioned crater that Glode helped create. 

The soldiers knew when the mines were set to explode, and were watching from a nearby hill. 

"At 2:30 in the morning, there was a kind of a thud, then the ground shook to and fro like it was shivering, then we saw flames shoot up high in the dark over the ridge," Sam Glode said in an 1944 interview in Cape Breton's Magazine. 

Ureel also brought the group to a field where he believes Glode was caught in a tunnel collapse with 20 other men, while digging under no man's land. 

In his 1944 interview, Glode described how he took a pick and began to tear a hole in the roof of the cave, trying to fight his way out for "hours and hours," running out of air. 

"I had to force myself to work, but I was desperate and I was strong," he said. 

He said they were "shook up bad," but were eventually rescued, and all of them survived. 

He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery. 

Glode made it home to Nova Scotia, and lived to be 79. He died in 1957 at Camp Hill Veterans Memorial in Halifax. 

But many of his comrades are buried at Ridge Wood Military Cemetery in Ypres, Belgium. 

The Canadians who were on tour walked through the cemetery, stopping to place tobacco on the grave of an Ojibwe soldier, Pte. S. Comego. Some were moved to tears.   

Purdy acknowledges that, had Glode not been one of the lucky ones, he likely would be lying in that cemetery.  

"The friendships that he created, his spirit still here," he said, grateful his great-great-grandfather's story is being shared in Belgium. 

"It's beautiful right, it's emotional. But I'm one of one family, when you think nationally of the [Indigenous] communities that gave up so much to come here to fight. It's very honouring."