Project Indigenous Legacy is a project by members within Royal Canadian Legion, Liberation of the Netherlands’ Branch 005 and was born in response to following action:
On the 21 June 2022, during a solemn ceremony at the National Military Cemetery (NMC) at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) unveiled the first two symbols representing Indigenous spirituality for military headstones.
The two symbols are the First Nations Medicine Wheel ‘and the ‘Métis Infinity Symbol’
At present the headstones at the Commonwealth War Graves are marked according to the services records and have no visual indication of Indigenous status as life symbol. just what is listed in their services records.
Our project team is planning to draw up a list of Indigenous graves in the Netherlands.
This will be done step by step with the help of:
Step one: is to identify the graves and compile a list of these graves and identify which Nation and Band is their heritage.
Step two: is to verify indeed if there is an Indigenous status on the comrade’s headstone.
Step three: is to obtain the traditional indigenous names.
Once this is done
The final step is: to place a tombstone with appropriate information and symbol.
This last step will be a big one as the cooperation of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is required.
We are presently active instep one. We have identified 19 graves in Holten and 36 in Groesbeek and 13 in the Bergen op Zoom site.
Later we will be starting on the other 460 cemeteries (over 928 Canadian graves) scattered throughout the Netherlands.
This all will be done with cooperation between Faces to Graves Foundation and Branch 005.
In the meantime, we planned to mark the identified graves with a small flag carrying the Indigenous or Métis symbol.
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