I'm Bruce Fummey. Behind me is the Church of the Holyrood where James the Sixth of Scotland was crowned.
On the other side is Stirling Castle, the reason for the Battle of Bannockburn. Mary, Queen of Scots
held pageants in the ground in between. James the Fourth was born there, Bonnie Prince Charlie besieged it.
There are pock marks in the walls of the church, where Cromwell's besieging forces received return
fire from the castle, but today I've brought you here for a very different type of history.
When I was here filming a video a while back, the groundsman at the cemetery pointed me towards
this memorial headstone. Here alongside Black Watch, Gordon Highlanders, Argyll and Southern Highlanders,
it includes the name of a Native North American. First people, indigenous, use your term of choice,
but this was a man, a human being, who found himself caught up in events that took him
across an ocean. If you want to know how he found himself here, then stick with me.
If you're interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history, then click the
subscribe button at the bottom right hand side of the screen. In the meantime, let me tell you a story.
I want to tell you what little I know about Nona Chakasuam. Now, one of the first things
that I don't know, is if I came anywhere close to correctly pronouncing his name,
but I do know that Nona was born in Attawapiskat on the Attawapiskat River in Northern Ontario.
It's the kind of place near Hudson's Bay that most of us would only see if we were watching Ice
Road Truckers, you know the kind of thing. Anyway that's me imposing modern constructs and things.
In May 1899, when Nona was born, Queen Victoria was coming to the end of her reign.
Now, there's a euphemism for approaching death most of us don't get to use, anyway Nona's people
would have still been living a pretty traditional lifestyle; coming down to the river for summer fishing,
and dispersing wider afield again to hunt in the wintertime. They'd have been doing it since before
the Hudson Bay Company arrived a way back in the 17th Century. Now life in Victorian Britain was
harsh for ordinary folk, and I'm pretty sure that the world, time and place into which Joannes Jacozam
and Anna Kostachin brought their son Nona had its own challenges. Now the fact that Nona's sister was
called Christina and his mum, Anna, suggests that Britain had already, at least, some kind of impact
on this family of a remote northern first nation, but that impact was about to become more direct.
In the summer of 1917, an army Recruiting Officer came to Attawapiskat. Britain had been
at war for three years, and they were now coming pretty far north and west looking for recruits.
The UK and Canada, and I know Canada didn't really exist until 1982, but you know what I mean.
The point is, that the First World War required huge quantities of wood
duckboards, shoring timbers for trenches, crates, the list goes on. It was effectively the motivation
for the Forestry Commission being set up here, but it was also the reason for the creation of
the Canadian Forestry Corps. Canada had agreed that 35,000 Canadian Lumberjacks would be put
to military service to cut down trees for the war effort. Now at first they were going to cut down
Canadian trees to ship to Europe, but it turns out that space on merchant ships were limited,
and they decided that men took up less space than wood, and so instead of sending wood, they sent
Lumberjacks to cut down trees in England, Scotland and France. So when Nona and 23 other men were
taken from their family, and their tribe, they didn't know they were coming to Europe, they
probably didn't even know why they were leaving at all. By all accounts they didn't speak English,
and when Nona signed as attestation papers on the 3rd of July 1917, he did it with a cross.
They left the village in eight wooden canoes, on what would turn out to be a two-week river journey,
then probably their first ever train trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, followed by an ocean
voyage, where many of them fell ill, before arriving in Liverpool in September 1917..
Was this any less cruel than Highland clearance in the other direction?
By November 1917, Nona had reached Stirling here. He cut down trees in the central belt
here, and further north in Nairnshire. Now there's an interesting parallel between John Macgregor,
who went from Nairnshire in the other direction, and became the most decorated Canadian in that
same war. I'll leave a link to a video about him at the end, it's genuinely really worth a watch. Now
let's be honest, we know very little about Nona's life or activities, or what went through his mind
during that winter of 1917, what we do know is that the following summer on the 7th of July 1918,
he came to the end of his reign. He'd survived just a year from that cross on a piece of paper
an ocean away, and he's laid to rest here with the great and the good of Stirling.
Somehow I'm guessing he'd rather be in what we now call northern Ontario, what he'd have called home.
Now there are more indigenous Canadian Forestry Corps soldiers buried here as well, including
Peter Jakazom, and trapper James Keeask. They both died of TB (tuberculosis) in hospital in Stirling in 1919. Now
they weren't on that list of 24 names taken by the Recruiting Officer visiting Attawapiskat
in the summer in 1917, so there's a far deeper connection and story to be told at some time.
I would ask two requests of you though; please share this as widely as possible,
so the story can be told, and if you're ever at the top of the town in Stirling,
why not pass by to spend a moment with Nona and these other first nation people, who laid down
their heads here in Scotland in the service of ...well that's another story. Also for the incredible
story of a Scottish Canadian who volunteered in this war, click the video about John Macgregor
here. Tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.