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Van Ee spent years searching for his Canadian family. Now he is a full-status member of the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation in Northern Ontario, has a totem pole in his backyard (that he carved) and, after his November meeting with the ambassador – his Canadian citizenship.

In my heart, I am a Canadian.

It is a lost identity that stayed hidden from him until well into adulthood.

The Dutch refer to “the wild summer of 1945.” The war was over and about 170,000 Canadian soldiers were stationed in a country that nearly starved to death under German occupation. Young people let loose. Couples, from two different worlds, drew close. Dutch clergy scolded the older generation for letting their daughters run wild. The Canadian military scolded the soldiers, while Ottawa took the position that children born out of wedlock to Canadian servicemen were not Canada’s responsibility. But the party didn’t stop. There were 7,000 illegitimate births in Holland in 1946.

Will van Ee was one of them.

His mother, Hendrike Herber, married Albert van Ee a few years later. The couple had seven additional children. The eldest harboured suspicions about his true origins, and thought he might actually be Japanese or Italian.

“I was the only sibling with dark skin,” van Ee says, chuckling. “The real Dutch — all blond hair and blue eyes — but not me.”

But he was loved and happy, and only became interested in digging into the past after getting married in the late 1970s. His mother grew quiet when he started asking questions. Van Ee believes out of a sense of “shame,” and from knowing, perhaps, that her true “love,” wasn’t the man she married. The truth came out after a cousin gave van Ee an old photograph. Hendrike is glowing in the image, alongside a beaming Canadian soldier named Walter Majeki. Van Ee’s aunt told her nephew that their family loved Walter, and then he had left.