Saturday April 28th was a memorable day for a number of Veterans and Members of Milton Branch 136, as they participated in the Special Memorial Service for Private Bertie Nakogee. The event was well covered by the major news outlets and appeared on the evening news editions of the CBC, CTV and GLOBAL and in the Monday GTA pages of the Toronto Star. A copy of the Star article is included in this post.
Poppy Chair and Member of the Executive Kathleen Blane placed a wreath on the grave site on behalf of Branch 136 and subsequently thanked Branch 75 for all of their support for this event. Some 100 people attended the service and then joined with their comrades at Branch 75 – Fairbanks for lunch and refreshments. This truly is the meaning and purpose of the Legion – WE SHALL REMEMBER THEM.
My special thanks to the Veterans and Members of Branch 136 who took the time to recognize the efforts of our own Comrade Bob Richardson, the man responsible for finding Bertie Nakogee and making sure he was finally sent on his voyage home.
All member photographs are now posted here (added May 22, 2012): Bertie Nakogee Service Milton Legion Photographs
The CBC coverage of the story is on the web at this location (move the cursor to the start at time = 14:40)
CBC NEWS: Bertie Nakogee Memorial Service
The following is the story in the Toronto Star:
Bertie Nakogee: Finally, welcoming a son from a different land
Published On Sun Apr 29 2012
By Joe Fiorito City Columnist jfiorito@thestar.ca
Maj. Rev. Catherine Askew wore a plain white robe over her military uniform and she said that she was nervous, but that it was good to be nervous on a serious occasion.
She is not just a military chaplain and a soldier; she is a member of the Moose Cree First Nation, and on Saturday morning, she was speaking to a group of some 100 people at the graveside of First World War veteran Pte. Bertie Nakogee.
You recall the story.
Bertie was from New Post, Ont. He was a guide and a trapper who enlisted to fight in the First World War. Bertie never made it overseas. He died in Toronto of pneumonia on Boxing Day in 1916.
He was buried in Prospect Cemetery, and his flag-draped coffin was carried to the grave on a gun carriage, accompanied by six aboriginal soldiers; he was buried here, because there was no easy way to ship him home. He was, inexplicably, placed in an unmarked grave. And then he was forgotten.
Not by his family.
And not by us, not any more.
Bertie finally has a headstone, thanks to the efforts of amateur historian Bob Richardson, who spearheaded the original research, called the War Graves Commission, and organized the graveside ceremony.
In attendance were distant relatives; members of the Taykwa Tagamou First Nation to which Bertie belonged; aboriginal veterans; also singers, elders, soldiers, members of the Legion, and a military honour guard.
Maj. Rev. Askew said, “We remember Bertie with song and drum and prayer and sacred medicine.”
Lt. Col. Patrick Bryden is the commanding officer of the Algonquin Regiment which absorbed Bertie’s old battalion, the Northern Fusiliers. He noted that Bertie would have “paddled, with kit, down from the north to the railhead in Moose Factory, to board the train for war.”
In the distance at the cemetery was an honour guard carrying M-16 rifles; in the foreground was the eagle staff of our aboriginal veterans, carried by Joe Paquette.
The staff is wrapped in beaver skin and holds 11 eagle feathers, representing the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. It is topped with deer antler; tied to the antler is a circle woven of sweetgrass; within the circle are bundles holding tobacco, cedar, sage and sweetgrass.
Elder Lloyd Fournier led a portion of the ceremony in which water and tobacco were sprinkled on Bertie’s headstone.
And then Maj. Rev. Askew spoke of the monument at Vimy; she said that here we had raised a monument for Bertie; she was also kind enough to say, “The people of this city welcomed a son from a different land as one of their own.”
We have done so now.
She said Bertie could not vote, but he had been willing to give up his life for people he did not know; he left behind the tamarack, the cooking smells of goose and bannock, and the soft sounds of the Cree language; she noted that here he was not far from the lake, but “the lake is not the Moose River, a living artery bringing life to the people along its banks.”
And then, having spoken of the Vimy monument, she said, “Bob Richardson is a stone mason, carving this story out of history.”
Yes.
I had a word, after the ceremony, with Stanley Sutherland of Cochrane, one of Bertie’s few remaining relatives. He said, “My dad always talked about Bertie; all we knew was that he died.”
We know the full story now.
And then, when most people had left, Linda Job, chief of the Taykwa Tagamou First Nation, took a pinch of earth from Bertie’s grave and wrapped it carefully, so that she might bring it home.
Kathleen Blane and Elly Koelewyn
Joe Hendricks and Albert Waddington
Joe Lilko and Family at Branch 75 Reception
Branch 136 Veterans Parade In for the Memorial Service
The “Final Farewell” by the Algonquin Regiment Honorary Firing Party
In the words of Reverend Catherine Askew:
In a land very distant from here, there stands a monument before which a few of us here have stood in awe. One of the statues of this monument is called “Mother Canada” and it is the draped figure of a woman with her head dipped in grief, crying for sons of Canada who were lost on that distant battlefield. The land around the monument is vast and open and even in good weather, the winds whip across the plains and you can get a small sense of what it would have been like on that snowy Easter Monday when the battle began.
That monument stands for Vimy and for all the wounded and dead of that critical battle. A grateful France gave to Canada the piece of land that the memorial stands on and craftsmen worked to carve statues of astonishing beauty.
Today I believe that we will raise up a monument for Pte Bertie Nakogee. Nearly ninety-six years ago, Bertie died in hospital, removed from everything in life that he had known and loved. To Bertie, this city of Toronto would have been just as alien to him as the Douai Plains would have been to the soldiers of Vimy Ridge. Although today you can board a plane in Toronto in the morning and be having lunch in Moosonee on the same day, nearly a century ago to return his body home would have been a journey of at least two weeks in the dead of winter. It just was not possible.
So many years ago, the people of Toronto welcomed a son of a distant land and laid him with their own. We see here the graves of other soldiers but we are also surrounded by husbands and wives, children and people from all walks of life. How he came to be laid here without a gravestone, we don’t know. That part of the story is not known to us. What we do know is that today, we will remember him, we will honour him and we will call him home.
Can you imagine this man, Bertie, signing up with the other men of Moose Factory, my own great-grandfather included, and not only committing to coming down to Camp Borden for training but to going overseas to fight in a war against people he had never heard of prior to a few months before? Aboriginal men were not even allowed to vote until the 1960’s so his commitment is even more amazing. He left that peaceful land in north with the smell of tamarac in the air and goose and bannock being cooked over fires. He left behind the Moose River and the feel of being on the water. He left behind the sound of families chatting in Cree and sight of little children running in play. He left his trapline and he left everything in his life to volunteer in this war.
And after his training in Camp Borden, he was brought to this city of Toronto. A city that would lay him to rest but would be so different from everything he knew. Massive stone buildings would have risen up in his sight. Houses would have been crowded beside each other and cooking smells would have been muffled inside. Lake Ontario was there but it was not the Moose. The Moose runs through the territory up there like a living artery, bringing life to all the settlements along its banks and bringing people up and down its length.
I imagine that Bertie longed for home in those last days. He thought of the smells and sights and people of home and longed. Just as much as those young men overseas longed for home, Bertie was also in an alien land, longing for home.
Today we will unveil a monument of sorts, one that some of us have been working on for years. Mr. Bob Richardson has been one of our chief stone masons, carving out from history and obscurity the story of Bertie Nakogee. He has mobilized us into a sort of Mother Canada, so that we may stand here today and mourn and grieve but also to honour and celebrate Bertie.
We are calling him home. We are raising up to the Creator Bertie’s spirit and honouring him with song and drum and tobacco. His Regiment is here to honour him and we have all come here to give our respects and remember.
As we come to that point in our service today when we say the Act of Remembrance, let our words carve into our hearts so that we may always remember and always be affected by the sacrifice of soldiers like Bertie Nakogee. Let us remember and let us tell their story so that the little ones remember as well.