Veterans’ Benefits and Indigenous Veterans of the Second World War in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States

Abstract

s p r i n g 2 0 1 7 w i c a z o s a r e v i e w “one day a notice came out of the first sergeant’s office with my name on it. It was my pass to go back to the states! After thirtyfour months, five campaigns, and many battles, I was going home! I had made it, but my brother had not.” With these words, Hollis D. Stabler began his journey home and his transition from an Omaha soldier into a Native American veteran. It is difficult to imagine the immensity or complexity of the feelings that Second World War Indigenous service personnel experienced, after months or even years away in military services, in anticipating and living through their homecoming, “most filled with jubilant anticipation, some plagued by weariness, and a few haunted by the dark memories of battlefield carnage.” For many, the warmth of welcome, the kinship of family, and the familiarity of home deeply comforted them. “I didn’t believe that I was home until I got to see my folks,” one Canadian Cree veteran recalled. “I said to myself, ‘I’m on home ground now. I’m safe.’ ” Such commentaries highlight the shared humanity and commonalities in experiences between Indigenous service personnel and their nonIndigenous comrades in arms. At the most basic and personal level, the war’s end was about a young man or woman returning home to families and lives left behind, each story unique though replicated countless times across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Yet arriving home was only the beginning of a war veteran’s experience. Subsequently, the legislative and administrative architecture veterans’ Benefits and Indigenous veterans of the second World War in australia, Canada, new zealand, and the united states