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Indigenous veterans have been celebrated for their achievements in the two world wars, adding needed texture to Canada's half-century at war. However, Indigenous peoples on the home front have remained periphery to the study of Indigenous peoples' experiences of the world wars, leaving veterans and military eligible men as the main protagonists in the story. Those individuals left on reserve experienced the conditions of war, the mobilization of the Canadian state for war, and the enlistment of Indigenous men into the army differently than enlisted men. Analyzing Indigenous petitioners' political advocacy during the First World War and the Second World War offers a more textured and complex representation of Indigenous peoples' experiences during the world wars. By negotiating their place within the settler Canadian state, while also clearly defining their sovereignty and distinct political cultures, Indigenous peoples remained active participants in the political arena during the period from 1914 to 1945. Rather than "awakening" politically on the return of veterans in response to broken promises, Indigenous peoples on the home front deployed and evolved existing political tools and strategies to articulate their responses to wartime policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enlistment of francophones in the Canadian Expeditionary Force has always been estimated between 20,000 and 35,000 by historians. Unfortunately, these evaluations were not based on any reliable data. This articles tries to show that these figures are largely under-estimated, and that the involvement of francophones was probably almost twice as much as the perception that has prevailed for more than a century. In the absence of any accurate count of enlisted francophones, we will demonstrate that (1) it is impossible that Quebec contributed more than a relatively small proportion of anglophone soldiers and (2) that a far greater number of francophone soldiers than has generally been estimated came from outside Quebec. Through examination of the files of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, we will also see that more than 3,000 francophone soldiers lost their lives in France and Belgium during the war, which leads us to believe that about twenty times more may have worn the uniform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]