DRAFT LETTER TO THE CBC RE HARRASSMENT OF THE FAMILY OF

RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL VICTIM PERCY ONABIGON

Ms. Maxime Bertrand

CBC Ombudsman
P.O. Box 500 Station A
Toronto ON M5W 1E6                                                                                                           

July ?, 2025

Dear Ms. Bertrand,

We are a group of non-Indigenous Canadians committed to acknowledging the responsibility that our country bears for the legacy of residential schools. Through our Remembering Project, we work closely with survivors of several former schools in Northern Ontario to support them in their search for the truth about what happened to students who attended their school.

This work has exposed us to the meticulous, professional, and trauma-informed manner in which Indigenous communities across Canada are conducting the search for children who died while attending residential schools. The work has been going on for years and will likely continue for decades to come, given the large number of residential schools, the disproportionately high number of students who died while attending many of them, the extensive areas where students may have been buried, and the poor state of record-keeping by the institutions that ran these schools.

We are writing today to ask that the CBC devote the same standards of meticulous, professional and trauma-informed research to its coverage of residential school deaths. Your office did not live up to those standards in its investigation into complaints about a May 3, 2025, story about the repatriation of Percy Onabigon’s remains.

In particular, your office’s decision to contact Mr. Onabigon’s family directly to request evidence caused unnecessary harm.  The painstaking research that went into identifying his final resting place was conducted by a number of organizations, all working in collaboration. It does not require deep expertise in trauma to recognize that relatives of the victim continue to experience the impact of the disappearance of their loved one and the denigration of the community to which he belonged.

Furthermore, the very act of catering to the requests of a denialist is in itself an affront to the justice Canada owes to victims of residential schools. The National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation established conclusively that these schools were instruments of genocide, and Parliament acknowledged this finding in a unanimous vote.  Genocide often involves not only a deliberate attempt to eliminate entire nations, but also an effort to manipulate and conceal the historical record. In this sense, denialists contribute to the intent of the genocide even after the destruction of families and communities has ended.

As non-Indigenous Canadians engaging in the difficult work of confronting Canada’s past, we pursue training to equip ourselves to avoid causing further damage to the communities our society harmed. We urge the CBC to ensure that any employee working on residential school issues receives similar training.

The pursuit of truth about genocide carries responsibilities to acknowledge the contemporary impact on the communities that survive our country’s attempt to erase them. We ask the CBC to assume the responsibilities it bears as our national broadcaster.

Sincerely,

Volunteers of the Remembering Project