CBC Spews More Indian Residential School Distortion on Percy Onabigon - Part 1

– Repeaters, not Reporters.

By Michelle Stirling ©2025 with files and research by Nina Green.

“…many traditional [Indian Residential] boarding schools, in some cases well into the twentieth century, took in sick, dying, abandoned, orphaned, physically and mentally handicapped children, from newborns to late adolescents, as well as adults who asked for refuge and other forms of assistance.”

-Robert Carney, historian, and

father of Prime Minister Mark Carney

On May 03, 2025, CBC published an article about the repatriation of the remains of Percy Onabigon (aka Nabigon), allegedly a former Indian Residential School student who suffered from epilepsy and partial paralysis, who died 1,200 kilometers from his home in the Long Lake #58 First Nation at the age of 27 after years of institutional care in the southern regions of Ontario.

According to a related story on 24 March 2025 in the Anishinabek News:

“Percy Onabigon, my mom’s brother, came to Residential School when he was eight-years-old, the same time my mom and her other two brothers Kenny and George came,” Claire says, noting that Percy had epilepsy. “This was their third admission into St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School and Percy’s first. This presentation is about the journey to bring Percy home. When he went to Residential School in September, two months later, he was sent to McKellar Hospital [and] from there, he was sent to institutions in southern Ontario. They were Ontario hospitals, they were mental institutions. Percy was just eight-years-old and he lived in institutions until he died at 27.”

But that’s not how Kimberly Murray tells the story in her report “Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience.” Kimberly Murray was Special Interlocutor on Unmarked Burials and Missing Children Related to Residential Schools. In her final report, she says that Percy “was taken” to Indian Residential School when he was six.

If the issue was about schooling, none of the Onabigon/Nabigon children needed to go to an Indian Residential School because there was a day school on the reserve. Like ordinary public schools of today, the day school children lived in their own homes with their families and attended classes during the day. People have been misled by the repeated tropes of “forced to attend” by CBC and like-media and Indigenous activists when historian J.R. Miller stated, as a critic of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports that ‘At no time in the history of residential schooling in Canada were parents “compelled to send their children to residential schools.”

Children were required to attend SOME kind of school – just as they are off-reserve then and now. But if there was a day school on reserve, the Indian Residential School was simply another offering that provided 10 months of food, shelter, clothing and education for your child, at no cost to you.

As noted in the CBC article, it seems that Percy’s sister and brothers were returning to residential school for the third time. Parents voluntarily enrolled their children, and the admission form and medical examination had to be approved in Ottawa at the Department of Indian Affairs. Clearly, if they were returning for the third time, the parents deemed the Indian Residential School to be a better solution for their family’s circumstances.

…TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO