Algonquins in the Second World War
[…]
Germany Rearms
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, times were tough worldwide during the Great Depression. The economy of every country in the world was hit hard during the Depression, none more so than Germany. The Great War had nearly shattered Germany’s economy. The Great Depression devastated it. Germany started the Great War in 1914 and lost it in 1918. The victorious Allied forces (American, British and French; Canada had barely a part after it was all over) drew up the Versailles Treaty in 1919. The British and French hated the Germans and to take away their rising power, the Treaty of Versailles made Germany pay millions of dollars in war reparations to France and Belgium. Germany was humiliated. The Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its industry, which was distributed to France and Belgium as war reparations. German farm produce was also shipped to France and Belgium as war reparations. By 1923, Germany was starving. They barely had enough food to feed themselves. The Germans were working their fingers to the bone to feed England and France. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, Germany’s overworked economy finally collapsed. German money was worthless after 1929, and the Germans had to adopt a barter system. They used coal blocks as money. Coal bought food. The Allies nearly turned Germany back into a feudalistic farmer state.
This, tragically, initiated an uprising in Germany. It was a nationalistic rising that became known as Nazism. The man who led the Nazi uprising was Adolf Hitler. He promised to put Germans back to work so that working men could put food back onto their tables. Most German families needed to hear this, and in 1936 they made Adolf Hitler the leader of their country. He built the German Autobahn and rebuilt industry, which was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
The Allies could do nothing about it. Adolf Hitler put families back to work and the German population supported him Once he had this support, he built up an army next. The sabers started rattling again in Europe and on September 4, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. England and France retaliated by declaring war on Germany. The Americans refused to get involved. When England declared war Canada was also at war, again, twenty-one years after the Great War was supposed to be the “war to end all wars.” The Canadian Army paid 33 dollars a month for men to sign up and fight in the Great War. The daily pay was a little better this time around. The men got one dollar and forty cents a day, or forty-three dollars a month. After struggling to survive the Great Depression, forty-three dollars a month was a fortune to the men who joined the Canadian Army in World War Two. They could eat again and they could send money home to feed their families. Another generation of young Algonquin men joined up to fight a newer and even deadlier German Army. They joined up out of necessity and probably patriotism was not their first concern, but in Holland they would see firsthand why this war had to be fought.
Algonquins in the Second World War
It is nearly impossible to tell a story without background information. Of the twenty-eight Algonquin men and women who joined the Canadian Army in World War Two, the discharge papers of some were lost and, with these papers, their regimental numbers. This was not anyone’s fault. House fires happen on the coldest winter nights, sometimes a basement floods due to heavy rains in the spring. Papers go missing and, with them, the stories. The National Archives in Ottawa holds tons of war documents and without a regimental number to identify a veteran, the job to find their records is like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks.
Also, the National Archives maintains a policy to protect the memories of not just the veteran, but also his or her spouse. For example, a veteran recently passed away in 2004. His military personnel records are sealed until 2024. When his records will finally be opened, his widow will be gone. Dan Whiteduck passed away in 2001, his military records sealed until 2021. John Cooko passed away in 1999. His records will not be opened until 2019. Michael Chabot on the battlefield, Kiska 1943. Harry Brennan passed away in 1987. His records will not be opened until 2007. Michael Chabot passed away in 2004; his military records will not be opened until 2024. Sam Cote’s records have just recently been opened. Sadly, some records might never be found because the veteran’s papers and regimental numbers were lost. To try and find these missing regimental numbers would require an absolute effort. However, each of these men and women deserves a mention.
A Few Stories
Harry Brennan holds the record on our reserve for the most enlistments: three. He enlisted in the Canadian Army for a third time on June 19, 1941, at Toronto. He was thirty-nine years old. Because of his age, he was posted to the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps stationed in Canada.
Kichi Jim Brascoupe enjoyed his time so much in England during the first war, he signed up again with the Canadian Forestry Corps overseas. He joked that he was going to bring back a second Scottish wife.
Angus “Ignace” Baptiste was the son of Joseph John Baptiste. Like his father, he served in the Canadian Forestry Corps overseas. He was working as a guide at O’Connell Lodge in La Verendrye Park after the war when he was cast as an Algonquin guide in a documentary film.
James Albert Chabot also served in the Canadian Forestry Corps overseas
James Albert Chabot
Simon Dumont fought in Italy and was wounded there. He also fought in Holland during the Liberation in 1945. He met a Dutch girl named Elizabeth out there, married her and they lived in Ottawa after the war.
Patrick Carle was the son of the Great War veteran John Carle. Patrick joined the army and after his basic training, he came home on leave before going overseas. He suddenly took ill while on leave. He died a few days later.
Bertha and Bernice Cooko. The sisters both died young. Bertha died in 1952 from a lingering illness. Bernice was living in Ottawa after the war. She drowned in the Ottawa River in 1953.
The brothers Simon and Jim Brascoupe (not Kichi-Jim or the James Brascoupe who was accidentally drafted in 1918) were sailors with the United States Navy. Their brother Xavier Brascoupe joined the Canadian army.
The brothers Jim and Simon Cayer never talked about their experiences in the war. They are both gone now.
Alonzo Cayer came home on leave after his basic training was completed before shipping out overseas, but his mother protested because he was the only wage earner at home. His mother had that right. The Indian Agent was obliged to write a letter to the War Department in Ottawa on her behalf. This did not happen. Alonzo was at the Band meeting when the Indian rights activist Jules Sioui ordered him to take off his uniform because it “wasn’t our war.” This is why Alonzo’s name is not on the Algonquin veteran’s memorial at Kitigan Zibi.
Joseph Ottawa served in the Unites States Air Force and was posted in North Africa in 1943 and then later to Northwest Europe in 1944.
Michael Scott was a big lumberjack. He was assigned to the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland. Michael and his comarades were outnumbered by a detachment of Scottish troops, Michael finished the war in Germany in 1945.
The brothers Kenneth and Raymond Budge. Kenneth was an infantryman, Raymond was a gunner inside a Sherman tank. Raymond’s unit landed under fire at Juno Beach with the first wave assault on D-Day morning. In the Normandy fighting that followed, Raymond and his tank mates had to take on the powerful German tanks. Twice, Raymond had to bail out of a burning tank.The crewmen had just seven seconds to get out before the Sherman’s gasoline tanks ignited into searing flames. Both Kenneth and Raymond fought through France, Belgium and Holland. Raymond finished the war in Germany.
Matthew Cooko joined the United States army and served in Northwest Europe and Germany. After the war, Matthew worked in Syracuse, New York, where he suffered a severe accident that left him with a permanent speech impairment. Matthew was nearly lost for good. He was in a VA hospital in the States in 1981 and he couldn’t speak anymore. No one knew who he was. All he could do was draw pictures. An American nurse finally figured his story out. His brother, John Cooko, was contacted in 1981 and the Cooko family brought Matthew home to Kitigan Zibi. He lived out the rest of his days among friends and family.
John Cooko was 28 years old when he left Maniwaki for Europe in 1944. He reached Amsterdam in April of 1945. The war was nearly over.
Angus Dancey served with his friend Michael Scott in the Canadian Forestry Corps overseas. His father was Peter Dancey, who also served with the Canadian Forestry Corps during the Great War. Angus was active in veterans activities after the war and he was instrumental in the fund-raising that established the Veteran’s Memorial for the Kitigan Zibi Algonquins.
Michael Chabot was with the joint American-Canadian expeditionary force that invaded the Japanese-held Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska in 1942-43. On Kiska Island, the American-Canadian force fought against a Japanese rearguard unit that had been left behind. Michael was in a sniper unit and he and his comrades hunted Japanese snipers holed up on the island. The Americans had their own way of dealing with Japanese snipers: flamethrowers.
Private First Class Joseph Wilfred McDougall, 965875. United States Marine Corps Pacific Theatre, and later American Occupation forces of Japan, 1946 to 1947.
Everyone knew him as Frank. He fought at Iwo Jima. Frank was a qualified marksman and anti-tank gunner. The island of Iwo Jima lay one thousand kilometers from the mainland of Japan and it was part of Japanese territory. The Marine Corps commanders thought the battle would be over in three days. The battle for Iwo Jima lasted thirty-six. The battle began on the morning of February 19, 1945. The Japanese garrison were all below ground at Iwo. They had built nearly thirty kilometres of interconnecting tunnels and underground chambers beneath an island that measured eight kilometres long by six kilometres wide. Iwo Jima was intended to be a death trap for the eighty thousand Marines assigned to take it.
On February 23, 1945, a Marine patrol of forty men fought its way to the top of Mount Suribachi, the volcanic mountain that dominated the western end of the island. In one of the most famous photographs ever filmed, six Marines raised the United States flag on Mount Suribachi. From his position on the beach, Frank McDougall witnessed the famous flag raising. Frank’s anti-tank gun unit went into action on February 24, 1945. The Marines were running into Japanese machine gun nests firing from underground bunkers cut into the volcanic rock. The only way to kill them was to blast them out at point-blank range with tanks and anti-tank guns. There were no front lines at Iwo. The Japanese were underground and they could pop out anywhere from holes in the ground to shoot Marines in the back. At night, the Marines in their foxholes could hear the murmur of Japanese voices moving around in the tunnel passages below them. Night was the scariest time for the Marines at Iwo because that was when the Japanese came out to search for food, water and ammunition. The Marines had to sleep in shifts.
Frank was twenty years old when he left home in 1941 and went to work as a lumberjack in Nobleboro, New York. His grandmother, Elizabeth Commanda, gave him a string of wooden Rosary beads. The Rosary, she told him, would protect him on his journeys. They did. Frank was wounded on March 15, 1945. After nineteen days of constant combat, the men in Frank’s unit took a moment to relax. A hidden Japanese sniper took aim and fired. Frank probably heard the bang when the bullet tore into his steel helmet. The bullet ricocheted around inside Frank’s helmet and cut a gouge across his scalp. Frank was evacuated back to the beach and the next day he was safely inside a hospital ship. Japan surrendered on August 9, 1945. Frank re-enlisted with the American Occupation Forces in Japan and served as a Military Policeman from September 1946 to December 1947. He passed away in 1998. The Rosary beads that had seen Frank through an odyssey that took him from River Desert to the Marine Corps base at Parris Island, North Carolina and then on to the troopship at San Francisco, California and finally across the Pacific Ocean to Japan were buried with him. The Purple Heart decoration he received for wounds suffered at Iwo Jima, was embedded into his military headstone at the Algonquin cemetery on Bitobi Road.
The Liberators
The victorious German armies conquered France in May of 1940 and sent the British army retreating across the English Channel The United States joined the war in 1941, after the Pearl Harbour attack. Once Japan declared war on the United States, so did Germany. With America in the war and on the side of the Allies, it was only a matter of time before the liberation of German controlled Europe began. The American, British and Canadians forces invaded Italy in the summer of 1943, but this was only a sideshow for the real invasion. It took the Allies in England four years to build up the men and equipment needed to fight and defeat the German armies in France. On the morning of June 6, 1944, the Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy to start the invasion and eventual liberation of Europe. It took the Allies eleven months to fight their way from Normandy all the way into Germany and end the war in 1945. The ifght for freedom has its price. These following profiles represent the soldiers’ experience in Europe.
Corporal Sam Cote, C121475. Le Regiment de la Chaudiere, Normandy & Northwest Europe, 1944-1945.
Sam rarely spoke about his combat experiences in Europe during the Second World War. Sam enlisted on June 9, 1943, at Kingston, Ontario. Exactly one year later, Sam landed at Normandy and was sent to Le Regiment de la Chaudiere, or the Chaudieres, as they were commonly known in the Canadian military. The Canadians in Normandy went up against the 12th SS Hitlerjugend Division, the most fanatical and violent of all the SS divisions in Normandy. The 12th SS Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) Division was made up of teenagers; all of them were eighteen years old and they had been indoctrinated as little boys in Hitler’s youth camps in Germany to hate and kill Allied soldiers without mercy. Sam was with the Chaudieres in the murderous battles of Carpiquet and Caen during the hot July of 1944. At Carpiquet, the Chaudieres had to battle against the 12th SS in ferocious house and street fighting.
According to an account left behind by the late Paul-Armand Cere from Maniwaki, also a member of the Chaudieres, Sam frequently went out on night patrols into the SS lines. Night combat was Sam’s forte, but he never talked about it after the war. Sam fought all through Normandy, across France and into Belgium. Sam was wounded in Holland in April 1945.
The wound was serious enough to warrant a transfer to a military hospital in England. In the next bed over was a wounded French-Canadien soldier. Sam spoke French and while they were conversing one day, the French-Canadien soldier proudly showed Sam a picture of his wife. Sam was surprised when he recognized the young woman in the picture: it was his cousin Marie Brascoupe! The French-Canadien soldier turned out to be Fernand Carriere from Ferme-Neuve, Quebec, whom Sam had never met before. For Sam, this remarkable meeting in an English hospital with a “cousin-in-law” he never knew was the highlight of his European experience, the one wartime story he would talk about.
Author’s note: We are indebted to Mrs. Eleanor Cote, Sams’ widow, and Mr Russell Cote, Sam’s son, for sharing their memories towards the writing of this bio/profile. Interviewing the widow of a veteran is always hard. The long moments of silence are uncomfortable, when the widow has to pause and collect her thoughts. The war came home with these men and it was their wives who had to live with it every night. A story is always told on emotion and the long silences were the most emotional. Sometimes, the words unsaid are the most powerful. In the end, the author will always be grateful to have shared this moment with them.
Private Daniel Whiteduck, C70377. Canadian Forestry Corps. Attached to Le Regiment “22”, the Van Doos, Northwest Europe and Germany, 1944-45.
“I had a nightmare once that I had died and they were putting me in one of those holes… you were thankful to come back. I was so happy, I married my wife in 1946.”
Dan Whiteduck quoted on his military experiences during an interview in 1996.[1]
Dead Canadian soldiers were wrapped in their blankets or rain ponchos and then interred in shell holes and bomb craters, sometimes as many as fifteen men to a hole. The army chaplain marked the graves onto maps. After the war was over, these graves were opened and the bodies exhumed for reburial in the newly opened Canadian military cemeteries that led like a trail from France to Belgium to Holland. Many Canadian soldiers, like Dan Whiteduck, probably wondered when their time would come to be buried inside a shell hole. In April of 1945, the Canadian army was given the task of liberating Holland while the American and British armies fought for the prize: Germany. Every Canadian man and woman who was there was affected for the rest of their lives by what they saw in Holland. The German army in Holland had confiscated all of the food resources from that country. All cattle, livestock and grain were sent to Germany to feed its own population. The Dutch called the winter of 1944-45 the “turnip winter” because that was all they had, and even that was not enough. One million Dutch civilians starved to death that winter, and when the Canadians moved into Holland to force the Germans out, they were shocked and angry to find Dutch children eating hay, leaves and even tulip bulbs. The Canadian soldiers were ordered by their officers not to give any food to the starving children. The reason being that when starved human beings are suddenly faced with food, they will eat and eat until their stomachs literally burst, or their hearts become overworked in the digestion process and simply stop. Starved people will literally eat themselves to death. Canadian army nurses were immediately flown in from England and Belgium to help wean the starving children into eating solid food again. As fast as the Canadians liberated a town, Allied bombers flew over and dropped tons of food supplies and medicines by parachute for the Canadian nurses to begin administering food programs for the Dutch children. The Canadian soldiers who liberated those Dutch towns in the spring of 1945 never forgot the Dutch children, hundreds of them, holding their hands out and begging them for food. Dan was there. He saw this..[2] Some of the Canadian soldiers noticed that there were no dogs or cats in these towns. The Dutch had eaten them all during the winter.
By May 1, 1945, the fighting in Holland was nearly over. The German garrisons still holding out there would finally capitulate on May 4, 1945. Germany’s final surrender came on May 7, 1945. Dan’s regiment, the Van Doos, were diverted from Holland and sent into Germany as part of the post-war occupation forces. Inside Germany, the Allies found hell on earth when they began liberating the concentration camps. The Van Doos liberated such a camp. These were Jewish women. Most of them were bald because their hair had fallen out from malnutrition; some of them had no teeth. The German SS prison guards had already fled when they heard the Canadian tanks coming. When the Canadians broke down the gates and entered the camp, they were greeted by an eerie silence. Slowly, faces began to peer out from barrack windows. The inmates began to come out. They didn’t speak; they couldn’t. Neither could Dan and his comrades. Slowly, skeletal hands began to reach out and touch the Canadians. They were real. The Allies had finally come to rescue them. The war was over. When Dan Whiteduck returned home in December of 1945, he got off the train at Maniwaki and immediately went to his mother’s house along the Gatineau River. Men always think of their mothers when they are in war, and that is where Dan went first. Dan also had a sweetheart he left behind, and he went looking for her next. He married his girl Aline and they were together for the next fifty-five years. They raised seven girls and two boys.
Private Basil Alias Odjick, C52889.The Royal Regiment of Canada.Killed in Action, August 28, 1944.
September 5, 1944:
Marie Odjck:
Minister of National Defence deeply regrets to inform you that C52889 Private Basil Alias Odjick has been officially killed in action twenty-eight August 1944 STOP If any further information becomes available it will be forwarded as soon as possible STOP
Basil was twenty-three years old when he decided to join the Canadian army like his older brother six months earlier. Basil left his lumberjack job at Maniwaki one day in February of 1944, said goodbye to his pregnant
wife, Marie, and their two young children, Hector Joseph, 4, and Kate Ilda, 3, and took the train to Ottawa and then on to Kingston, where he enlisted on February 11, 1944. He wrote his will the next day and left everything to his wife. He took his basic training at Farnham, Quebec. On June 27, 1944, he requested a transfer to Kingston, Ontario to join his older brother Robert. After the casualties suffered during the Great War, where brothers fought and died in the same unit— and whole family lines with them—this request was rightly denied. Basil felt close to his older brother because they had been through residential school together from 1927 to 1936. Indian Agent Gauthier had sent them there after their parents had temporarily separated. Basil was seven and Robert nine when they went to Spanish Residential School, and Robert being two years older was Basil’s best friend at Spanish. Basil sailed from Halifax on July 12, 1944, and landed at Liverpool, England on July 19, 1944. Robert landed in England sixteen days earlier, but the two brothers were not destined to meet again, because Basil received orders to sail for France on August 12, 1944. Three days later he was posted to the Royal Regiment of Canada holding the line outside the French city of Falaise to cut off the German Army’s retreat from Normandy. At nights, they watched as Allied bombers dropped hundreds of tons of bombs and incendiaries into the trapped Germans. On August 26, 1944, Paris was liberated. The German army in Normandy retreated across the Seine River to make a last stand.
To the Royal Regiment of Canada went the unfortunate honour of participating in the last battle of the Normandy campaign. On August 28, 1944, the Royal Regiment of Canada was ordered to outflank the retreating Germans at a French village called St. Ouen-de-Tilleul, just on the outskirts of Paris. St. Ouen-de-Tilleul was defended by a detachment of German SS troops armed with rocket launchers and anti-tank guns. The Royals pushed the SS out of St. Ouen-de-Tilleul that afternoon. Thirteen Canadian soldiers were killed in the street fighting. Basil Odjick was one of them. A German shell or rocket exploded against a building, which sent masonry and bricks hurtling in all directions. A brick smashed into Basil Odjick’s steel helmet, He died instantly. In 1949, the villagers at St. Ouen-de-Tilleul erected a memorial to the thirteen Canadian soldiers who died liberating their village five years earlier. Basil Odjick’s name is on that memorial. Private Basil Alias Odjick, C52889, is buried at Bretteville-sur-Laize Canadian Military Cemetery, Normandy, France.
Trooper Robert Simon Odjick, C122146. The Royal Regiment of Canada. Died of Wounds, April 17, 1945.
Robert was working in Port Colborne, Ontario when he volunteered for military service overseas. He took the train to Kingston, Ontario where he enlisted on August 31, 1943. He wrote his will two days later, leaving all of his earthly possessions to his wife Jeanne in Maniwaki. They had three children, Betsy, 4, Simon, 2, and Freeda, three weeks old. Robert took his basic training at Kingston, Ontario, where he qualified as a radio operator. He was fluent in three languages: Algonquin, French and English. But Robert did not want to be a radioman. He wanted to be a machine gunner and he requested of his commanding officer that he be given an opportunity at gunnery. Robert passed the gunnery course and became a qualified machine gunner. His commanding officer noted that Robert was cheerful, intelligent and always neat and groomed, as his portrait shows. Robert sailed from Halifax on June 25, 1944, and landed at Liverpool on July 3, 1944. Robert was sent to a training battalion where he remained until November 10, 1944, when he received orders to sail for France. On November 14, Robert was sent to join the Royal Regiment of Canada holding the Nijmegen Salient in Holland.
Robert wrote home regularly to his wife Jeanne and to his mother Katineen Riel. His letters were always cheery and thoughtful, never letting on at the cold and misery he and his comrades were enduring at the Nijmegen Salient over the winter of ’44-’45. The Germans were defending the north bank of the Rhine River and some nights they paddled over on rubber rafts to raid the Royals’ positions. When the Royals suspected the Germans were grouping to raid their tines, the Vickers machine gunners, Robert included, pointed their weapons and let loose one thousand rounds over the river that arced and came down on the German-held bank. But Robert never wrote about any of this to Jeanne. Instead he asked about the kids and then went on to talk about the weather. In February of 1945, Robert’s letters to Jeanne stopped when the Royals went into action at the Reichswald Forest on the Dutch-German border. The Germans put up a bitter fight. The fighting lasted the whole month of February and into early March. Robert’s letters to Jeanne resumed and he apologized for not having written for so long but admitted that they had been through a “tough time.” That was all. He then told Jeanne about his leave in Brussels and joked that the beer in Belgium is “not as good as our stuff back in Canada.”
The Royal Regiment of Canada was one of the infantry regiments of the 2°d Canadian Division assigned to liberate the medieval Dutch city of Groningen. The assault was set for April 14, 1945. The Royals were moving forward to their jump-off positions at a little hamlet called Peelo on the outskirts of Groningen.[3] It was April 13, 1945. Most of the men were marching, except for the machine gunners. Because they were weighted down with their heavy Vickers machine guns and boxes of ammunition belts, they hitched rides atop the Sherman tanks. Robert was one of the machine gunners seated atop a tank. It was evening when the Royals pulled into Peelo. A German patrol suddenly ran into a Canadian patrol. Both sides opened up. The Royals walked into the crossfire. A burst of machine gun fire hit Robert in the stomach and groin. He was evacuated to a Canadian Field Hospital, where he died four days later at 4:20 in the afternoon of April 17, 1945. He was twenty-seven years old. His personal effects were sorted through and sent home, a wristwatch, bracelet, fountain pen, souvenir coins, coin purse, his marriage certificate to Jeanne and the three baptismal certificates of his children. His commanding officer noted that Robert was one of the best soldiers in his company, a conscientious man who did his job well. Jeanne received the telegram on April 23, 1945.
It read:Regret deeply C122146 Private Robert Simon Odjick has now been officially reported to have died of wounds, seventeenth April 1945 STOP You should receive further details by mail direct from the unit in the theatre of war STOP[4]
Trooper Robert Simon Odjick, C122146, is buried at Holten Canadian Military Cemetery, the Netherlands.
Author’s note: This account is as accurate as the writer/ researcher team could narrow it down to, based upon the regimental history of the Royal Regiment of Canada and Roberts’ commanding officer who wrote oft he ambush at Peelo in 1945. After nearly sixty years, the trail is growing coldf or surviving soldiers of the Royal Regiment of Canada who were there at Peelo in 1945. The Royal Regiment of Canada held a reunion dinner in Toronto on November 8, 2003, and, at the request of the author the question of Robert Simon Odjick’s death at Peelo was put forward to the last surviving Royals of World War Two. Lieutenant Peter Boyle of the Royal Regiment of Canada explained the death of Robert Odjick to the survivors. No one remembered him. This is understandable. The Royals had a high casualty turnover rate all through Normandy and into Holland. Boys were getting killed and woundedf aster over there than they could be replaced. A lot of times, these guys never got a chance to know each other, not even casually.
Conclusion
The Second World War, fought overseas to overthrow the Nazi Regime, was the one war in human history that had to be fought, because it was a war against racial intolerance. The Algonquin men and women who joined the fight to rid the world of tyranny were second-class citizens in their own country; yet the Second World War was a political awakening for the First Nations people of Canada. After the contributions and sacrifices made by First Nations soldiers and their mothers in two world wars for Canada, the time had come to finally speak up. First Nation soldiers fought to liberate Holland and save the Dutch children from starvation. Robert Simon Odjick died in Holland. Robert Simon was the son of William Odjick, the man who let the English family live in his hunting shack after they were evicted from their home in Maniwaki. “Mrs. Sawn-sew! Mrs. Sawn-sew…”
[1] Virginia Deschenes, and Brant Davy, ed., Kigitiziminanig Kimadinamagonanig (Kitigan Zibi: Kitigan Zibi Education Council, 2000), pp. 28-29.
[2] Personal interview with Aline Whiteduck, wife of Daniel Whiteduck. In a February 15′, 2004, interview at her home, Aline spoke of Dan’s memories of Holland.
[3] Major D.J. Goodspeed, Battle Royal: A History of the Royal Regiment of Canada (Brampton: The Royal Regiment of Canada Association, 1962), pp.558-559.
[4] The writer/research team wishes to express their heartfelt thanks to Jeanne Odjick, Robert Simon’s widow, for allowing us the use of two of Robert Simon’s letters home to help in the writing of his profile. Henriette Morin-McGregor remembers Robert Simon coming to her home in the winter of 1941 seeking traditional medicine for his daughter Betsy, who was suffering from an ear infection. Henriette’s mother, Delima Commanda-Morin made Robert Simon a poultice from an otter’s tail. Robert walked ten kilometres in the dead of winter to get that medicine for his little girl.
Source : McGregor, Stephen, Since Time Immemorial : «Our Story». The Story of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinàbeg, Kitigan Zibi Education Council, Kitigan Zibi, 2004, p. 261 à 270. With the permission du Kitigan Zibi Education Council.
