VANCOUVER—Let’s start with the standard take.

In the First World War, Canadian soldiers first saw action in the spring 1915 when, fresh out of training, our volunteer and very green army of “farmers and lumberjacks” was assigned to the defence of the Ypres Salient in Belgium. Over four days, 6,000 Canadians would fall as casualties in a “baptism by fire” as our troops valiantly defended, and even countered, an overwhelming German offensive that included chemical weapons.

John McCrae, a Canadian surgeon who was attending to the wounded at Ypres, wrote “In Flanders Fields” — arguably Canada’s most famous poem — at this battle. In his elegy, McCrae’s valiant comrades, who are “the dead,” are as unwavering in their purpose as the poppies that, speckling those war-ravaged fields, were in theirs.

This is the standard coming-of-age story of the Second Battle of Ypres, and you will find it in any equally standard Canadian high school textbook. In the 20th century, this story of sacrifice and gallantry became a cornerstone for a new sense of national confidence for a dominion that had earned its seat as an equal among Western nations at the concluding Versailles peace conference, which recently marked its 100th anniversary.

But a century later, it’s a history that, ironically, is out of date.

Not that there are any factual errors or embellishments. But there is a glaring omission, such as the second half of this story featuring the Indian Army, which has long been edited out by the race politics of the early 20th century.

And in multicultural Canada, a century on from the Great War, the full version of the story has become much more relevant than the abridged version from the 20th century.

Back in Ypres, John McCrae wrote “In Flanders Fields” the Canadians “short days ago, lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,” but would “not rest” until their comrades took up their cause.

Those reinforcements were led by Punjabi soldiers from the Ferozepur and Jalandhar brigades of the Lahore Division of the Indian Army.

In the First World War, the Indian Army contributed a million combatants, of which half were from Punjab regiments, to the war effort, and lost more soldiers — 75,000 — than Canada, Australia or the other dominions. They suffered 9,000 casualties holding off the Germans in the First Battle of Ypres in the fall 1914. And again at Ypres, it was the Indians — airbrushed out of the war’s history for 100 years — who would take up McCrae’s “quarrel with the foe,” launch a counteroffensive, suffer more than 2,000 casualties and eventually recapture the lost ground to re-establish the collapsed flank.

But there’s yet more shared history to this story.

These Indian Army soldiers were brethren with the Sikh veterans and passengers aboard the steamship Komagata Maru that, a year earlier, had been refused the right to dock in Burrard Inlet by a government seeking to keep Canada a “white man’s country.”

Whereas in Vancouver the Sikh veterans aboard the Komagata Maru were portrayed as undesirables, in Marseilles — where the Indian Army disembarked two months later en route to the Western Front — Sikh soldiers were hailed as saviours.

The small number of Sikhs living in Canada at the time would refuse to volunteer for service because of the Komagata Maru incident. And for a time, there was uneasiness in India’s senior military ranks that its Punjab Regiments might also refuse to answer the call to war.

Had Canada’s loathsome racism been coupled with violence in Burrard Inlet, much like Jim Crow lynch mobs in the U.S. South from that era, it is possible to conceive of a speculative historical scenario where the Central Powers win the war? The Punjab Regiments were integral to defending the Western Front for the first year of the war while the severely depleted British forces recruited volunteers.

In their absence, the Germans would surely have seized Calais and the northern French ports, and possibly could have taken Paris by Christmas 1914, thus dramatically altering the trajectory of 20th century history.

But the Indian troops did answer the call when war was declared after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria dominoed into the world’s first mass industrialized war. And fortunate it was for the Canadians, because now, back in Ypres in 1915, thousands of Punjabi soldiers had just marched 55 kilometres, through hellfire, from their sector at Neuve Chapelle, France, to quell the German advance and save their brothers in arms.

The early 20th century was still a time when the British War Council was debating whether “barbarous” dark-skinned colonial soldiers should be permitted to square off against their “civilized” European counterparts.

And in Canada, our government was still practising exclusionary immigration policies and wanted to distance itself from association with the Indian Army.

When the Canadian Cavalry Brigade was assigned to fight as a unit within India’s 5th Cavalry Division at Cambrai, France, Canada’s minister of overseas military forces, George H. Perley, wrote to the British War Council to have the Canadian Brigade placed in a “purely British” division.

The unequivocal response from Lt. Col. R.W. Patterson of the Canadian brigade’s Fort Garry Horse regiment was that his troops wished to stay. “There is absolutely no feeling against working with the Indian troops and our relations with them have been most cordial.”

A century later, that acceptance of diversity expressed by Patterson is not the exception but the norm in multicultural Canada, a country far more diverse and with radically different values.

Homogeneity has been replaced with plurality. This sense of inclusion can be viewed in our government-sponsored Heritage Minutes, one-minute vignettes that tell stories of the D-Day landing, Japanese internment, Vietnamese boat people and more. They are accounts intended to illustrate our shared values across cultural backgrounds.

Canadian textbooks have finally started recognizing the wartime sacrifices of soldiers from diverse and Indigenous backgrounds. These include men such as Francis Pegahmagabow, an Indigenous man who, on the Western Front, won a Military Medal for bravery at Passchendaele, and others from diverse backgrounds who, when denied even the right to enlist, travelled to distant Alberta to join regiments like the Calgary Highlanders.

But yet these are still mostly individual stories framed in sidebars. They are well-meaning, but isolated, pieces appearing on pages earmarked for diversity content in otherwise lengthy textbooks that hold fast to the orthodox Eurocentric narrative — one that remains based on omission.

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Our shared moments of valour, such as at the Second Battle of Ypres and other First World War engagements, need to be brought into the core of history curriculums.

Just as the story of this famous battle nurtured a sense of Canadian identity a century ago, its updated version can be repurposed for the same intent in a multicultural Canada that can too often seem fragmented and socially disconnected.

The immigrants growing Canada’s population base today are far more likely to be arriving from countries that were “the colonized” rather than “the colonizers” — and they are more likely to connect with the parts of our collective First World War history that have been omitted by the general Eurocentric filtering of the war’s narrative.

So while this is an argument for historical revision, it’s not one for pulling down an anachronistic statue.

The statue can stay.

But the pedestal needs to be widened if we are to amend for racial exclusion and sparing marginalized groups the Sisyphean burden of repeatedly having to explain what “they have contributed” to this country.

Annie Ohana is an educator in Surrey, B.C., where 32 per cent of the population is South Asian in heritage. Over nearly a decade of teaching high school history, Ohana has found it’s not the war’s timeline of battles that sparks discussion in her classes, but the war’s historiography — the history of its history — that gets students speaking up.

“When it comes to the First World War, the contributions of the Indian Army are barely mentioned, if at all,” said Ohana, “When that history is introduced, the students want to know why it was excluded and why a century later, our textbooks still tell a very Eurocentric narrative about the First World War.”

Steven Purewal is a community historian based in Vancouver who, for the past five years, has collaborated with community partners such as Simon Fraser University and the University of the Fraser Valley to have these intersecting First World War stories included in our history curriculums.

This spring, Purewal published a book — part graphic novel, part illustrated history — called Duty, Honour, and Izzat to document these stories. It has been approved as a learning resource by the Surrey school district.

For Purewal, the omission of Canada and India’s rich shared military heritage has come at a heavy social cost to the 2.5 million Canadians with a South Asian background. It has perpetuated suspicion and the “othering” of Indians despite decades of military service in the British Indian Army and countless sacrifices in wars fought on behalf of the empire.

This racism has surfaced in the ugly debates over admitting turbaned Sikhs into the RCMP or Sikh veterans into Royal Canadian Legion halls.

“If in 1919 the historical narrative reflected what had actually happened in the war and had statues been erected of the shared sacrifices of Canadian and Indian troops in the First World War, Indians living in Canada could have avoided a century of discriminatory treatment,” argues Purewal, who was raised in the U.K. but now calls Canada home. “But Canada back then was still under the spell of racist politicians like Vancouver MP H.H. Stevens, who made odious comments in Parliament to keep Indians out of Canada.”

By its very broadest and simplest definition, history is the recording of events from the past, seemingly hermetically sealed from revisions once rendered. But history is not a looping stock ticker of actors, dates and places. It’s a story.

And it is based on the weaving of often conflicting pieces of information into a coherent narrative, one that reflects parts of all of us and, when told in a captivating way, one that nurtures social cohesion.

In the world’s first “post-racial” society, Canadians can make history by “making history” that aligns with our modern values — inclusion, embracing plurality and collaboration.

And as we select, revise and discover new perspectives to our old stories, these new versions will not only speak to who we are today but will also inform who we ultimately want to be.

Correction - July 22, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled John McCrae’s surname.

Jagdeesh Mann is a media professional and journalist based in Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter @JagdeeshMann.

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