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James Eagle
by Tracker Sun 28 May 2023, 7:17 am
Obituary: James Eagle served in the Canadian military after suffering residential school
“It’s very important to do our bit for the country,” he said. “And we aboriginal people are forgiving people, and I forgave what they did to me at residential school to serve my country.”
Andrew Duffy
Published May 27, 2023
Ottawa’s James Eagle possessed a special kind of heart.
He served his country in the Korean War as a member of the Canadian military despite suffering the indignities of the residential school system as a boy.
In doing so, he once told an interviewer, he was joining hands with the more than 8,000 Indigenous people who fought for Canada in the First and Second World Wars.
“It’s very important to do our bit for the country,” he said. “And we aboriginal people are forgiving people, and I forgave what they did to me at residential school to serve my country.”
Following a 25-year military career, Eagle moved to Ottawa, became executive director of the Odawa Native Friendship Centre and fought for more than a decade to establish the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument that now graces Confederation Park.
“Jim Eagle was the kind of person who would always advocate and stand up for others,” Ottawa West-Nepean MP Anita Vandenbeld told Eagle’s funeral service earlier this year. “Right up until the end, he was still calling me to talk about Indigenous seniors’ housing.”
Eagle died earlier this year from heart failure at the Queensway Carleton Hospital. He was 88.
James Wilfred Eagle was born into a family of 10 on the Tootinaowaziibeeng Treaty Reserve in western Manitoba. As a boy, he knew poverty and hardship and attended Pine Creek Residential School between 1941 and 1946. (The school, opened in 1890 and operated by the Roman Catholic Church, did not close until 1969.)
Eagle’s younger brother, Raymond, died at the residential school in May 1944, when another student threw him onto a concrete pad, smashing his skull.
Eagle’s son, Don, said his father hated his time at the school. “He said they were forced not to speak their language and were punished if they did. He said they were not fed properly.”
Soon after leaving school, James Eagle decided to join the army as an infantry soldier. It was December 1952, and the Korean War was in the nation’s headlines.
The war had started in June 1950, when 100,000 North Korean troops streamed across the border in an attempt to reunite the country, which had been divided at the end of the Second World War into a communist northern half and U.S.-occupied southern half. In response to the invasion, the United Nations authorized member states to provide military assistance to South Korea.
Eagle was 19 when he was shipped to Korea as part of the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada to police the recently signed armistice. He would spend more than a year in that country.
He always sent home some of what he earned to his family so they could afford more to eat.
After returning from overseas, Eagle married Cecilia Shingoose, a young woman from a Saskatchewan reserve whom he had met on a train. Shingoose had spent five years of her life in a tuberculosis sanatorium. They would have six children together in a marriage that lasted almost 68 years.
Eagle’s career took him across the country and around the world. He did two tours of duty as a peacekeeper in Cyprus, spent four years in Lahr, Germany, and was stationed at bases in Edmonton, Calgary, Suffield and Winnipeg.
He retired as a sergeant and then launched a second career as a community organizer. Eagle became heavily involved in the friendship centre movement, which emerged in Canada in the 1950s as large numbers of Indigenous people moved into cities. Indigenous-owned and operated, the centres started as community meeting places and evolved to provide front-line services to Indigenous people in urban areas across the country.
Eagle was executive director of the Manitoba Association of Friendship Centres, then moved to Thompson, Man., to run its friendship centre. He also spent four years as a board member with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission.
He came to Ottawa in 1998 to take over as executive director of the Odawa Native Friendship Centre, then on MacLaren Street.
In Ottawa, he also served as head of the local chapter of the National Aboriginal Veterans Association and pushed for a monument to commemorate the sacrifices of Indigenous soldiers. He helped raise money for 10 years, his son said, before realizing the dream of a National Aboriginal Veterans Monument. It was unveiled in Confederation Park in June 2001.
Eagle suffered personal tragedy in his life, including the untimely deaths of three of his children, but he never stopped trying to help other people, his son said.
“He believed in moving forward,” Don Eagle said. “He always tried to mend and build relationships.”
Eagle, 58, said his father was a caring and loving person who was full of wisdom. “Dad always said, ‘Head up, eyes forward, be proud and be strong. Because, if you can’t be strong for yourself, you can’t be strong for anyone else.’”
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