After The War
Prince was honourably discharged on June 15, 1945 and returned to his home on the Brokenhead Reserve, working in a pulpwood camp. In 1946, a woman attacked him at a dance and cut his cheek with a beer bottle, requiring 64 stitches. After this incident, he left the reserve and moved to Winnipeg.
Using funding from the Department of Veteran's Affairs, Prince began a small but relatively prosperous cleaning service. He married Verna Sinclair, with whom he had five children.
In 1946 he was elected chairman of the Manitoba Indian Association. Entrusting his business to friends, Prince devoted his time to working with government to improve the conditions for Native peoples. He worked with the association to lobby Ottawa for changes to the Indian Act. While some revisions were made, little actual improvement followed. Frustrated with the red tape of Ottawa, he returned to Winnipeg to discover that his cleaning business had folded in his absence because the friends running it had crashed the truck and sold the parts as scrap metal. Prince worked in lumber camps and a concrete factory to make ends meet.
Read more about this topic: Tommy Prince
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