Indigenous veteran honours late father, also a veteran, by having his medals blessed and smudged
CBC
Floyd Powder, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran, is taking his late father's medals to Ottawa to have them blessed and smudged by Indigenous veterans.
The late Tom Eagle, a Yellowknife-based Indigenous veterans advocate, found the elder Powder's medals but wasn't able to give them to him before they both died.
Powder hopes that he, and his son, will be invited to march with the medals alongside other Indigenous veterans.
"If we do have the opportunity to march in the parade, I'll have those two medals in my pocket above my heart and under my own medals," Powder said.
"That'll be a way of honouring my father."
About a decade ago, Powder and his oldest daughter, who was in cadets in Ontario, went to the ceremony in Ottawa and were invited to march in the Remembrance Day Parade.
"That was one of the most personally satisfying experiences. Again, the sound of you know, the applause and the guns going off, echoing through the streets … made me feel really proud," he said.
"I will hopefully have that experience again this year."
Powder also plans to put the medals on display in his home once he returns.
But it's not the only work Powder has been doing for Indigenous veterans.
Since May 2020, Powder has been identifying grave sites after an Indigenous veterans co-ordinator with the Last Post Fund — a non-profit organization that works to ensure no veteran is denied a dignified burial and a military headstone for lack of money — asked him to check the Lakeview cemetery in Yellowknife for the burial plots of two Indigenous veterans.
He looked in the veterans field of honour section, and noticed that there were eight spots that didn't have headstones.
He was able to confirm five and, working with their families, had headstones installed at each of them.
He said he saw three others in a different section of the cemetery that he was able to identify, and have headstones installed for.