St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School Survivors gathering brings together Survivors and support
By Rick Garrick
THUNDER BAY — A Bringing Percy Home presentation was featured at the Rise Above St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School Survivors gathering, held March 4-6 at the Best Western Plus NorWester Hotel and Conference Centre in Thunder Bay. The presentation about a family’s journey to bring home the remains of Percy Onabigon was delivered by Claire Onabigon, a Long Lake #58 citizen and a niece of Percy, and Kelsey Anger, reconciliation manager at the Anishinabek Nation.
“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.”
Claire says Percy was never seen again by a family member after he was sent away from McKellar Hospital to the institutions in southern Ontario.
“So, we are now at the point where we will be bringing Percy home on May 1,” Claire says. “It will be 59 years ago that he died.”
Anger says Claire connected with her in 2022 about Percy’s story.
“At that point, the family knew where Percy was buried and they knew that he went to Residential School, but everything in between was pretty much unknown,” Anger says. “So working with Claire, I was able to access medical records, admission and discharge records, and we determined where he went. He was only at Residential School for two months, they sent him to McKellar Hospital and then down to Orillia and [he was] bounced back and forth between Woodstock and Orillia Hospital and then died in Woodstock. We were able to access his death certificate, which the family never had.”
Fort William First Nation Chief Michele Solomon stressed the importance of looking into stories such as Percy’s.
“Listening to Percy’s story, it really speaks in a real way to the tragedy that has happened to so many of our children,” Chief Solomon says. “To see where he went and how he was transferred from institution to institution to institution and then eventually dying there and never being able to go back home, being taken when he was eight-years-old, I can’t even imagine what that must have been like for him and for his family — it really is criminal.”
Chief Solomon also acknowledged the Survivors of the St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School, the work that has been undertaken by the St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School Survivors Council, and the commitment made by some of the leadership of Fort William First Nation “to walk this journey” with the Survivors.
“It is important that this journey is walked together, that the stories are shared and passed down because that is the way that we teach, that is the way we have learned historically when we talk about our ways,” Chief Solomon says. “This is true to who we are as a people, telling stories and sharing stories.”
Shirley Stevens, a Red Rock Indian Band citizen who delivered a presentation on cradleboards and had a display of cradleboards up at the gathering, says cradleboards are perfect for caring for children and keeping them safe and healthy.
“They are a marvel of engineering, people used whatever they had in their environment to make them,” Stevens says, noting that one participant from the James Bay-Albany River area spoke about cradleboards in Anishininiimowin (Oji-Cree) during her presentation. “When the woman offered to translate, the best line was, ‘The cradle is life.’ I don’t think you can top that.”