Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand by R. Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman (review)

Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War represents an innovative work of scholarship in the fields of Indigenous and military histories. Working within a transnational and comparative framework, Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman explore the wartime service and experiences of Indigenous peoples across four different settler societies, arguing not only for a reinterpretation of our understanding of why Indigenous people chose to serve, but also for a greater understanding of the consequences and legacies that resulted from those choices.

This study is driven by several questions. Why did Indigenous peoples choose to enlist in the first place and serve settler militaries and governments? How did wartime conditions change or shape Indigenous agency? How did governments respond to these shifts in agency? And finally, what legacies did Indigenous wartime service leave within settler and Indigenous societies? The authors address these questions in three distinct sections. Part I briefly addresses the legacies of settler colonialism within the four nations and the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler militaries in the twentieth century. Part II focuses on the wartime experiences of Indigenous peoples, including voluntary and conscripted service, home front experiences, acts of resistance and contestation, and the social and cultural effects of war. Part III explores the post-war realities of demobilization, the tensions of (re)integrating Indigenous soldiers into their respective communities and broader society, the relationship between service and activism, and policy reforms within each nation that resulted from Indigenous service.

While these themes and questions are found in other scholarship, Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War is uniquely important because it employs a transnational framework: national studies too often rely on the trope of the "forgotten warrior" and perpetuate binaries in their portrayal of Indigenous service, including "settler versus Indigenous objectives, enlistment as assertion of citizenship/sovereignty versus participation as collaboration with the colonial state, Indigenous loyalty versus opposition, and racism versus equality" (5–6). A transnational and comparative framework, Sheffield and Riseman believe, allows for a cross-examination of themes and ideas, often bringing to the fore patterns of continuity and change within Indigenous service that are obscured by national studies. They are careful to avoid the potential downfalls of transnational scholarship, namely the trap of employing parallel rather than integrated analysis, and the risk of applying such a broad lens that it renders Indigenous experiences homogenous across national contexts. First, they acknowledge that their study is not meant to be a comprehensive representation of Indigenous experience but rather an exploration of patterns that allows room for both anomalies and generalizations. Second, they ensure that any comparative analysis is undertaken only when the evidence permits comparison. Thus, the comparative elements are organic rather than forced. The resulting conversations demonstrate that, far from being static and isolated, relations between settler societies, governments, and Indigenous peoples were dynamic and under constant negotiation.

Chapter five, exploring the issue of conscription, is an excellent example of this transnational methodology, and offers a fresh analysis of the binary of resistance and collaboration that will appeal especially to Canadian readers, as the tensions around conscription were felt more deeply in Canada than in the other three nations. Indigenous peoples across all four nations resisted conscription and, in the case of New Zealand and Australia, succeeded in receiving exemptions from mandatory service. However, in Canada, military service was viewed as an extension of the assimilatory policies favoured by the federal government. Thus, conscription became a battleground between assertions of Indigenous sovereignty, the obligations of citizenship, and national belonging. And unlike the United States, which simply bestowed citizenship on all Indigenous peoples, the Canadian government maintained both that Indigenous peoples were British subjects eligible for mandatory service and wards of the government without full citizenship rights.

Indigenous Peoples and the...