Chief asks for help finding jacket lost at Montreal airport adorned with honours, family history

Stephen Augustine, a hereditary chief from the Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq First Nations, and Mi'kmaq Nation Grand Chief, Ben Sylliboy, right, display a wampum belt as native leaders from across Canada attend the Assembly of First Nations' 35th annual general meeting in Halifax on Tuesday, July 15, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

OTTAWA — A Mi’kmaw hereditary chief is pleading for help from the public to return his chiefs jacket he lost in the Montreal airport last week.

Adorned with a medal presented to him for the Order of Canada, along with the King Charles III Coronation Medal and the Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee Medal, Chief Stephen Augustine’s jacket also features a rich representation of his family’s story.

The jacket is a replica of the regalia gifted to British army Capt. Henry Dunn O’Halloran by the Mi’kmaq in the 1840s, and was created by his late ancestor.

But he lost it somewhere in the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal sometime on Nov. 10, and has not been able to track it down.

“It’s a treasure. It’s a very personal, ceremonial item for me as a hereditary chief,” he said, saying he filled out a lost item form for the airport where he valued it as $5,000.

“I will cry when I receive it back … I have not been myself ever since I lost it.”

Augustine said the loss of his jacket feels akin to losing a family member, as the jacket features his family’s traditional designs but is also integral to him as a ceremonial item.

He is asking for the public to help locate his missing jacket, asking anyone who may know of its whereabouts to come forward so it can return to where it belongs.

It was placed in a black, vinyl suit bag, and he remembers taking it through customs to enter Canada. He believes it was left somewhere in the Montreal airport.

He flew into the Montreal airport from Munich, on his journey home from Spain after attending the launch of a replica whaling ship that belonged to the Basque, which sank at Red Bay in Labrador in 1565.

The replica, a collaboration between Spain and Canada, was built using similar techniques to the original, and is expected to sail to this country in the coming years.

The San Juan shipwreck was missing for centuries until it was found in the late 1970s in Canadian waters.

The irony of losing his jacket on his way home from that ceremony isn’t lost on Augustine.

“Although it’s a replica like the Basque ship there — the San Juan — it’s still valuable to me,” Augustine said.

“I just hope it gets found.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 16, 2025.

Alessia Passafiume, The Canadian Press