Mary Greyeyes

Mary Greyeyes Reid She was raised by her widowed grandmother, Sarah Greyeyes.

When she was five years old, Greyeyes was sent to the St. Michael's residential school in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. The school only taught students up to grade 8, but Greyeyes managed to obtain additional tutoring in later years from a nun at the school, attending evening lessons while helping with cooking and cleaning during the day. The Muskeg Lake Cree Nation reserve had been heavily impacted by the Great Depression, and by the early 1940s there was little work for youth on the reserve.

In June 1942, Greyeyes travelled to Regina in order to take the test for enlistment. Although Greyeyes worried that her grade 8 certification from the residential school would be inadequate, she passed the CWAC test and was accepted. In June 1942, not long after she had enlisted, Greyeyes was approached and asked to participate in a photo-shoot to encourage more women to join the army. Harry Ball, a Cree man and World War I veteran from the Piapot First Nation, was convinced to pose for the photo in Plains Chief regalia. He was not an actual Chief himself at the time, though he would become one later, and had never met Greyeyes before. Ball had to cobble together his apparel from borrowed items. In return for the photo-shoot, which was staged on Piapot land, Ball was paid $20, while Greyeyes received a free lunch and a new uniform. Greyeyes was sent overseas to Aldershot, England, to work at the Aldershot Base Laundry.

Post-war life When the war ended, Greyeyes continued working in London until she was discharged in 1946. Afterwards, she returned to Canada and went back to the Muskeg Lake reserve to spend time with family. She met her future husband, Alexander Reid, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They moved to Victoria and had two children. Greyeyes worked as a restaurant cook in Victoria, later finding employment as an industrial seamstress when the family moved to Vancouver in the 1960s.

In August 1994, Greyeyes attended a reunion of over 400 CWAC members in Vermilion, Alberta. She received a pension from the Department of Veterans Affairs for her wartime service. In 2003, in recognition that post-war benefits had been poorly managed and delivered to Indigenous servicemen and women, the Canadian government paid compensation packages to Greyeyes and other surviving Indigenous veterans.

Death Greyeyes died on March 31, 2011, in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was 90 years old. Greyeyes was buried on the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation reserve.