Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture of Six Nations of the Grand River, photographed in Brantford, Ontario, circa 1910.
Photo credit © Six Nations Public Library / Donald D. Lynch Collection / SNPL000308V00i.

By James Turtle | North of Polite
First Nations and Métis Veterans Series · Part Four · November 4, 2026

At an American military hospital in Vittel, France, Edith Anderson was on duty when a young soldier with a gunshot wound to the neck began bleeding badly. A boy who delivered bread helped her get what she needed, and they managed to stop the bleeding. The soldier seemed better the next night, but the bleeding returned and he died. Anderson found his mother’s address in Iowa and wrote to tell her she had been with him when he died. More than six decades later, at 93, she still remembered him when she spoke to her local newspaper, The Grand River Sachem.

Ontario turned her away

Charlotte Edith Anderson was a Kanien’kehá (Mohawk) woman born in 1890 and raised in Ohsweken, at Six Nations of the Grand River. She wanted to become a nurse, but several Ontario nursing schools denied her admission. Parks Canada records that those schools admitted almost exclusively white students. Anderson went to New York State for her training, graduated in 1914 and took a job as a school nurse in New Rochelle.

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Anderson joined the American Red Cross Nursing Service and served with the American Expeditionary Force. She spent more than a year nursing sick and wounded soldiers, mainly at Base Hospital No. 23 in Vittel, where a former resort hotel had been turned into a military hospital. Her patients included men who had been shot or exposed to poison gas. The hospital had its own demands, long after a wounded man had been carried away from the fighting.

What service changed at home

Anderson’s wartime service qualified her to vote in Canada under the 1917 Military Voters Act, which extended voting rights to eligible British subjects serving with Canada or its allies. That was an exception available to her because of her military service. Most First Nations women had to wait until 1960 to vote in a federal election without giving up their legal status under the Indian Act. Consider what that meant for Anderson. She had gone abroad first to get a nursing education and then to put it to work in a war. Her service overseas opened a door to the ballot box back home.

She came home to Six Nations in 1919, married Claybran Monture and raised four children. She continued to serve her community as a nurse and midwife and worked occasionally at the local hospital until 1955. The family in Iowa kept in touch. The young soldier’s parents invited her to visit, and she did. Years later, after travelling to Vittel themselves, they visited her at Six Nations.

A military record can tell us where Edith Anderson Monture served. The letter tells us something about the work she took on herself. She had already done what she could for the young man in her ward. Then she sat down and wrote to the person who would spend the rest of her life missing him.

© 2026 North of Polite. Original reporting, analysis and commentary. All rights reserved. 🍁