Perspective: Quirk of history makes it common for Canadian Native Americans to join U.S. military.

Michael Seeley

FREDERICTON, New Brunswick — Someone gave Theresa Seeley tobacco to scatter on her son's coffin, a gift, in the Indian tradition, for the elders waiting to greet his soul.

She was uncomfortable with it. "That wasn't what we believed in," she said.

Her son Michael was raised "like every other Joe Canadian," with little time for the folklore of his Mi'kmaq tribe.

But as she looked around the crowded graveyard at the funeral, on a New Brunswick hill near where Michael had cavorted on his bike and skipped school with full-of-life glee, it was hard to pick the group in which her son had fit.

There, saluting in solemn slow motion, were soldiers — U.S. officers, formal and stiff — who had brought his body from Iraq as one of their own. There were other soldiers, Canadians, honoring a casualty of a war not theirs. There were non-Indians, Michael's friends from school and town. And there were representatives from two tribes, come to acknowledge the cost of a centuries-old custom that has sent Indians to fight in U.S. wars.

Seeley gently tossed the tobacco into the grave.

Cpl. Michael Seeley, 27, was killed Oct. 30 by a roadside bomb outside Baghdad. He was on the last two days of his second tour of Iraq, the first with U.S. Marines, the second with the U.S. Army. He lived in Canada, overwhelmingly opposed to the Iraq war. But he but wore a U.S. military uniform, as do at least two dozen other native citizens of North America entitled to fight for either country.

"It hearkens back to the warrior tradition that is part of the culture of many tribes," said John Moses, an assistant curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa. "Culturally, it remains a significant rite of passage among North American Indians to perform some military service.

"And if they are trying to get in the thick of things quicker, enlistment in the U.S. armed services is probably the way to go," said Moses, a First Nations, as natives are called in Canada, who served in the Canadian armed forces.

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