In September 1874, a North West Mounted Police patrol heading west to Fort Whoop-Up to rein in the violence of the whiskey trade, hired Métis scout and interpreter Jerry Potts. For the next 22 years he was an invaluable asset to the force, arguably as responsible for the peaceful settlement of the West as the Mounties he served. Potts was born with each foot in a different, dangerous world, that of his mother, a Kainai (Blackfoot) woman who named him Ky-yo-kosi, or Bear Child, and his Scottish fur trader father. In childhood Potts moved between both worlds. With the Blackfoot he learned to track and hunt and became a formidable warrior; with his adoptive father he travelled between trading posts, learning several Indigenous languages, acting as a cultural go-between and becoming f...

During the Second World War the Germans used a machine for sending coded signals. The Allies called it Enigma (Greek for riddle). Each branch of the German services developed its own version, but at the heart of them all was a set of five to eight interchangeable rotors that continuously scrambled the letters of the alphabet. There were 103 sextillion possible settings—that’s 103 with 21 zeroes behind it. Starting positions of the rotors were changed with each message and the machines were reset every day, according to a key list distributed monthly. The Germans thought the codes were unbreakable. They were wrong. But to break the code, the Allies needed an Enigma machine. In May 1941, they got one. The Royal Navy captured a U-boat in the North Atlantic, recovering its Enigma m...

Their ancestors fought beside the British in the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution and the War of 1812. In 1885, they navigated Africa’s Nile River on a British military rescue mission and volunteered for Canada’s first international expeditionary force at the dawn of the 20th century, fighting with the British in the Second Boer War in South Africa. But when Great Britain called for aid during the First World War, the support of Indigenous Peoples—First Nations, Inuit and Métis—initially caught the Canadian government off guard. Thousands of Indigenous people answered the call after the Second World War was declared. Status Indians were “wards of the government and did not have the rights or responsibilities of citizenship,” historian L. James Dempsey, who is of Kainai (Blood...