Description
Edith Anderson was born on the Six Nations Reserve in what is currently Ontario in 1890. Since First Nations’ women were excluded from nursing programmes in Canada, Anderson trained in New York and graduated in 1914. She volunteered with the US Army’s Nursing Corps in 1917 and shipped out in early 1918. Anderson and her unit arrived in Liverpool on 4th March, 1918, before making their way to Southampton and then sailing for France. Stationed at Buffalo Base Hospital 23 in Vittel, France, Anderson nursed thousands of injured soldiers and was often close to the fighting. As she recalled in an interview in 1983, “We would walk right over where there had been fighting. It was an awful sight””buildings in rubble, trees burnt, spent shells all over the place, whole town’s blown up.” After the war, she returned to the Six Nations Reserve and continued to work as a nurse. She died in 1996 at the age of 105 and was given a military funeral as the last First World War veteran on the reserve.
Bibliographic sources
https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/those-who-served/aboriginal-veterans/native-soldiers/nurse; details text from https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/bts/2018/10/29/first-world-war-native-stories/