First Nations veteran goes overseas to make offering to spirit of uncle who died in WW I

Aside from an oval photo framed in bubble glass and hanging on the wall of his grandfather's house on Peguis First Nation, Randall McKenzie knew little about his great uncle Oswald McCorrister — only a name and that he died young in the First World War.

"Grandpa had never really said anything. He basically just kind of kept it simple, that it was his brother that had died in the war, and that was about it," McKenzie, 56, told CBC Manitoba Information Radio guest host Emily Brass on Friday.

"My grandfather was only 10 years old when Oswald had died, so he didn't really know who Oswald was, I guess."

When he got older and served in the Canadian Forces as a naval radio operator, McKenzie's interest in his great-uncle reignited, and online records helped provide answers to his questions.

"I was able to search through quite a few of them, including the Canadian Virtual War Museum and the Manitoba Vital Statistics, and kind of connect all the dots together about who my family was," said McKenzie, who is Cree and Anishinaabe.

"I had a big interest in Remembrance Day and understanding the significance."

McKenzie discovered there were actually three brothers who served and died in the Great War. Oswald, born in 1897, was the youngest of the brothers, with Robert born in 1887 and William in 1895.

They went overseas on the same ship, but Oswald was separated from his big brothers upon arrival and ended up in a different unit.

A member of the 16th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, he died at age 20 in February 1918.

William was part of the 78th Battalion (Winnipeg Grenadiers) and died at age 24 in June 1919, seven months after the war ended. He is buried in Selkirk, Man., the original location of Peguis. The land was illegally taken in 1907 and the reserve was moved 140 kilometres to the northwest. 

Robert died at age 30 in October 1917. He was also a member of the Grenadiers. He has no known grave.

He is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial at the eastern side of the town of Ypres (now Leper) in West Flanders, Belgium. It bears the names of 55,000 men lost without a trace during the defence of the Ypres Salient on the Western Front.

When McKenzie learned Oswald was buried in France, he resigned himself to the unlikelihood of ever visiting the grave at Étaples Military Cemetery, a world away on the northwest coast of France.

But that changed this past summer when he went to Paris for work. McKenzie is a CBC Manitoba videographer and was assigned to cover the Paris Olympics.

"It was quite a thing to see it and know that all those headstones represent a person," he said about Étaples, which holds more than 11,500 dead from both world wars.

"I'm the first one to go [from the family] and actually see it," McKenzie said about Oswald's marker. "I was really in a surreal place because I could see my grandpa's name there: McCorrister.

"I'm thousands of miles away from home and this is family here."

He placed a handful of berries — strawberries and blueberries — at the base of the headstone "as an offering to feed the spirit," he said.

"It's sort of like a feeding the fire ceremony, where you would offer food to the fire that would feed the spirit of your ancestors. I also left a penny as a token that a family member visited the site, so that other people coming by will know that family was there."

McKenzie also briefly laid down a Canadian flag with the image of an Indigenous man superimposed on the maple leaf.

"It's my flag that I like to fly for Indigenous Day [National Indigenous Peoples Day], and I placed it on the ground there just to have a little ceremony of my own and little moment of silence to remember," he said.

"Just as we're finishing that, a couple of people from France had showed up there, and through Google Translate, the app there, I was able to explain to them who I was and how I was related to this person. And the only word they said to me back was the word respect.

"They understood I was there to respect the service and sacrifice of my uncle there, great-uncle."

Friday is Indigenous Veterans Day, first established in 1993 by the National Aboriginal Veterans Association to honour the thousands of First Nations, Métis and Inuit who served in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Manitoba became the first province, in 1994, to formally recognize the day.

For McKenzie, it's always been an opportunity to remember his own service and the people he was with, some of whom have since died.

It's also now about remembering those he has only recently begun to know but who are linked by DNA.

"Knowing my uncle was so young when he died, you know, makes me sad that he never had a future [but also] proud of the bravery to leave these beautiful fields here in Manitoba to go to a war zone in a country that he probably never thought he'd ever be in," McKenzie said.

"That's bravery."