Reconciliation Shake-down;
The Nabigon Family Disappearance Drama
By Michelle Stirling ©2025 with files from Nina Green
Most Canadians are unaware of the implications of the currently reported stories in the press – especially CBC – of the Nabigon family and their efforts to repatriate the exhumed body of Percy Nabigon from a cemetery near Woodstock, Ontario, and bring him home to their Long Lake #58 First Nation Reserve 1200 km north.
At first glance, this appears to be the ultimate act of reconciliation, doesn’t it? A family, with the help of Kimberly Murray and her final report, dig through the archives and are able to trace the tragic travels of Percy. He is said to have been an eight-year-old brother of Bertha Nabigon, the mother of the present seeker, Claire Onabigon. Bertha (who has since passed away) reportedly told Claire that Percy was forced to go to Indian Residential School, where he was for either 2 years or 2 months, depending on the version of the story. From there, the government ‘disappeared’ him, passing him on to various medical institutions where he could be treated for his epilepsy and partial paralysis. Ultimately, Percy Onobigan is said to have died at such a facility at the age of 27 and was buried near Woodstock, Ontario, 1200 km from his home. The family never saw him again.
The contract position of Kimberly Murray, the former Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves Related to Indian Residential Schools, has expired, but the ghost of Murray’s activism lives on.
Kimberly Murray’s reports about missing children and unmarked graves have an ever-increasing tone of desperation to them – largely because all of the children reported were known, as was the outcome of their illness or death.
Thus, these were not missing children.
Murray’s Final Report Exceeded Her Mandate
Kimberly Murray’s final report claims that children were ‘disappeared’ – that is to say the government took them to institutions without the family’s permission and that the Canadian government should thus treat these instances as an international human rights violation, even though such a law did not exist at the time. Well into the 1970’s, it was very common for families to turn disabled or mentally ill family members over to the government, as wards of the state, and most of these people lived out their lives in that institution. This was common to all ethnicities. If the person passed away, they were either buried in an institutional cemetery onsite, as was the case for Tanya Talaga’s great-grandmother Annie, or in a community cemetery nearby.
Thus, the Indigenous Reconciliation Shakedown movement is anxious that people see Percy Nabigon as an example of an Indigenous child who was purposefully ‘disappeared’ by the heartless Canadian government. As Murray recommends, thus reparations should be paid to descendants, repatriation should be paid for, and any Indigenous person, adult or child, who died at any such institution (i.e. Indian hospitals, mental institutes, TB sanatoriums, homes for the disabled, etc.) should also be identified from provincial coroner’s files, and repatriated according to the family’s wishes and at taxpayers’ expense.
Murray also claims that all such searches must be Indigenous-led and that there must be Indigenous data sovereignty – i.e. exclusive access to records for Indigenous people/family and restricted access for anyone else.
Percy died at age 3 ½ months. He is buried on the Long Lake #58 First Nation Reserve…somewhere.
The above death certificate indicates the Percy Nabigon died as an infant from pneumococcal meningitis and that his body was buried on his home reserve. The handwriting for the contributing cause is difficult to read, but may be “Marasmic(k)” – if so, “Marasmus is a severe form of malnutrition caused by a lack of calories and protein.”
Somehow, through Kimberly Murray’s reports and Claire Onabigon’s search for her would-be Uncle Percy, Claire believes Percy died at age 27 at an institution in southern Ontario and was buried near Woodstock. This human-interest story got the attention of CBC, especially when the federal government refused to pay for exhumation and repatriation of the southern Ontario Percy, stating that as Percy died as an adult, he did not qualify for related Indian Residential School funding. The taxpayer funded ($1.4 billion) CBC made a ruckus about it and finally the Ontario government came up with the $45,000 for exhumation and repatriation, flying several of the Onabigon family members south, presumably to this grave.
According to Kimberly Murray’s research, a Percy John Onabigan is buried near Woodstock.
However, even the spelling on the gravestone above does not match Kimberly Murray’s Death Certificate description (though misspellings are common in historical documents), and the name on the gravestone does not match the family’s contemporary name “Onabigon” (formerly “Nabigon” on school documents) – it is “Percy Onobigan.”
Furthermore, there is NO record of a Percy Nabigon ever registered at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School, though there are records for his siblings, Bertha, Kenneth, George, Rachel and Genevieve. Claire Onabigon claims that her mother Bertha told her that all of the children were forced to go to Indian Residential School at the same time, and that Percy went with them. But Percy died when he was 3 ½ months old; there is no record of any other “Percy” in the school records, while there are records of the other Nabigon children.
Furthermore, though Claire claims that her mother said the children were forced to go to Indian Residential School, implying they were taken by force, there was a day school on reserve and the Department of Indian Affairs preferred that children go to day school if both parents were alive and well, as the children then went home to family life in the evening, as any other school child did in Canada.
The records show that the Nabigon children were at the Indian Residential School in some years, and in other years they were at the day school. Thus, the claim of being forced to go seems specious. Furthermore, at one point, the father, Duncan Nabigon, was in a Tuberculosis sanitorium and thus the family was able to ensure that the children were cared for in the Indian Residential School while he recovered.
The point is that Percy Nabigon was not ‘disappeared’ by the government of Canada some 79 years ago, and someone else’s body has been exhumed in southern Ontario. The Onabigon family should return the repatriation funds, and the Long Lake #58 First Nation should find out where the infant Percy is buried on their reserve. Did they even keep records? And if not, why should today’s taxpayers be on the hook for this ‘disappeared’ drama?
These details were ferreted out of historical archives by non-Indigenous researchers – principally Nina Green – demonstrating exactly why all historical documents must remain in the public domain. Her detailed letter to the Chief Coroner and Chief Forensic Pathologist of Ontario is here.
This also reveals the problem with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which has a mandate under the Trust Deed signed by the University of Manitoba, to make all of the records it has gathered available to the public. The NCTR has not done that and appears to be engaged in creating some elaborate form of Indigenous-only Ancestry.com, contrary to their tax-funded mandate to serve the general public and make all documents public for all researchers.
Kimberly Murray overstepped her mandate several times while in her position as “Special Interlocutor” where she was supposed to report to the Minister of Justice. Unbeknownst to most Canadians, she filed lurid, unvetted reports with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People as well as with the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People, in these reports making unsubstantiated criminal accusations that violate Articles 10 and 11 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Murray, a lawyer, continues to defame and slander Canada with accusations of ‘genocide’ in her subsequent reports and public comments, despite the fact that no one in Canada has ever been charged or convicted of this heinous crime. Murray has tried to paint Canadian Indigenous-Canadian relations as if similar to that of the murderous juntas of Guatemala and Argentina who did disappear disfavored political activists. That never happened in Canada. She now quotes the responses to said reports from José Francisco Calí Tzay, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People, to justify the 48 recommendations she made, and her reparations framework, which, if implemented, will bankrupt Canada in a wild ghost-chase for the phantom ‘desaparecidos.’
https://osi-bis.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/OSI-Handout-placemat-11x17-EN-15OctKH.pdf
Another focus of Kimberly Murray’s report is a demand to criminalize so-called residential school ‘denialism’ – like the material you are reading now. This would mean that I could go to jail for having reported these evidence-based historical facts to you, that debunk the burgeoning Reconciliation Shakedown. I am trying to protect the rights of researchers and historians to examine historical evidence; I am trying to prevent a further unwarranted multi-billion dollar financial shakedown of Canadians.
Our nation’s collective shock and grief over the claims of 215 human remains of children found in the Kamloops Orchard on May 27, 2021, has clouded all common sense and rational debate. We now know that only Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) ‘anomalies’ were found, not human remains or bodies. These ‘anomalies’ (ground disturbances) happen to overlay a region where 2000 feet of septic trenches were dug in the 1920’s. No one did any previous land use research before issuing their shocking statements – and journalists from far and wide jumped on the '“mass graves” story – generating thousands of lurid headlines that are simply not true. The country was emotionally and financially gutted by these unsupported claims; no news outlet has made public corrections to its stories.
If implemented, Murray’s 48 reparation recommendations will cost Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars, will create decades-long property battles, and most of these issues, like this case of Percy, will be based on misrepresentations and misinterpretations of the tangled webs of history backed by claims to rights or reparations for violations of laws that were not extant at that time, and for which there is no mandate to make them retroactive. In fact, to do so would contravene Articles 10 and 11 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Percy Nabigon is the Reconciliation Shakedown test case to “prove” that Canada disappeared children, with intent to harm and cover up their deaths.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I wonder when CBC’s Fifth Estate will take a run at the Nabigon ‘desaparecidos’ drama with the same vigor and investigative skill they used to utterly decimate the reputation of Buffy Ste. Marie.
To stand up to these emotional accusations, Canadians must be Sorry No More.
Ontario gave $45,000 to an indigenous family to bring home the body of a “disappeared” family member who had been sent to residential school and later to an institution where he perished at age 27.
Except he died at age 3 and was buried on the reserve.
They “repatriated” the wrong body.
The “Indigenous Shake-Down Industry” is sadly comical.
My reading of the (3-month-old) Percy Nabigon death certificate is that it definitely says cause of death was pneumococcal meningitis due to marasmus (severe undernutrition, as Michelle explains).
A couple of other points readers here should be aware of.
Percy was one of a pair of twins born in 1938, the other being a boy named Harold. Close examination of an archival photo shown in the VIDEO in the May 3 CBC article reveals a computer filename on the side of the photo of the mother with her twin babies. The filename reads, “Goggy, Percy, Harold and Uncle George.jpg”, suggesting that Claire had identified the photo with that descriptor on her computer (or another family member had). “Goggy” is probably a nickname for the babies’ mother, Mary Ann, or a term of endearment meaning “grandma.” To Claire and her siblings, Mary Ann was grandma.
The Onabigon family has confirmed elsewhere that the infant Harold died at the age of 3 months in 1938.
One of the twins died in October 1938 after spending two weeks in hospital in Fort William. If that twin, at 2.5 months old, was sent (likely by train) to hospital suffering from meningitis and severe malnutrition, it’s very likely the other was also at risk, and would have been sent for care at the same time. Babies born on the Long Lake reserve would not have ID bracelets like hospital newborns get. If the twins were sent off with their names pinned to their bunting bags, and those garments were removed – which twin was which?
The infant that died and was sent home to Long Lake for burial was likely Harold. Percy’s name might be (is) on the death certificate (which the parents maybe never saw, so they never realized the error had been made), but Percy returned home to Long Lake eventually and many people, including extended family, knew him during his childhood. Percy lived. The family is not mistaken on this point.
It appears that Kimberly Murray used research done not by herself or by her office, but by Kelsey Anger of Anishinabek Nation for the Onabigon family. https://anishinabeknews.ca/2025/03/24/st-josephs-indian-residential-school-survivors-gathering-brings-together-survivors-and-support/ March 24, 2025 (this names Kelsey Anger as the person who helped research the investigation into Percy’s history.) It’s also right there in the footnotes Michelle shares above, from Murray’s report. Records were “provided by the family of Percy Onabigon and the Anishinabek Nation, received April 30, 2024,” INCLUDING: “Ontario Death Certificate for Percy John Onabigon, May 1, 1966, provided by the family of Percy Onabigon and the Anishinabek Nation, received April 30, 2024.”
Percy, I firmly believe, was the twin who survived. Or if not, the family believed the child who came home alive was Percy, and he was known by that name for the rest of his life. And was buried with a spelling error on his gravestone (but it should be noted that the correct spelling, Onabigon, is just the most commonly used variant TODAY of the family surname, formerly spelled Nabigon).
I do feel there is a dangerous precedent being set by this repatriation, and CBC is aiding and abetting. Kimberly Murray is rubbing her hands in glee, having found an actual “disappeared” child, as Michelle says.
EDIT: "3-year-old" corrected to read "3-month-old"