First Nations search for thousands of child graves

The 1993 Hollywood thriller Jurassic Park, Professor Alexander Braun of Queen’s University in Canada told me, gives a false impression of ground penetrating radar (GPR). First, GPR units like the one Braun and other professors are using to help First Nations find children’s unmarked graves, do not fire shotgun shells into the ground to produce sound waves that in the film were picked up by the ‘Fossil Finder’; rather, the large lawn-mower sized GPR unit both directs radar waves into the ground and receives them.

Second: “They saw a dinosaur skeleton bone by bone on their radar gram. This is not possible because we cannot resolve bones; they are too small,” said the professor of geophysics who, like other professors across Canada with this specialised knowledge, have volunteered to help First Nations since the news broke last May that more than 1,000 unmarked graves had been found on the grounds of former residential schools.

The announcement that 215 unmarked graves had been found within a few hundred metres from what had been the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia at the end of May, was followed on 23 June by the announcement that 751 unmarked graves had been found at the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. A week later, the Lower Kootenay First Nation reported that 182 unmarked graves had been found at the residential school in Cranbrook in British Columbia.

In 2015, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report estimated that the number of indigenous children who died in the residential schools was between 5,000 and 10,000. Over the course of 113 years ending in 1996, 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to residential schools, 60% of which were run by the Roman Catholic Church while the Anglican Church, United Church of Canada and Presbyterians ran the rest.

The purpose of the residential schools was to “take the Indian from the child”, said Sir John A Macdonald, the country’s first prime minister, whose government brought in the Indian Act under which the residential schools functioned.

In 1907, noting high numbers of children who died (mainly from tuberculosis) in the residential schools, the early Canadian poet Duncan Campbell Scott, who was a senior civil servant in the Department of Indian Affairs, wrote, chillingly, that the policy of the department was “geared toward the final solution of our Indian problem”.

Braun and the other professors who have volunteered their time, equipment and expertise emphasised that they see their work with First Nations as a moral imperative. “We have the skills, we get paid because we have the skills and we have to give them back to the community no matter what the level is, national, provincial, community or on your street,” says Braun.

Archaeological investigation

In some respects, searching for unmarked graves on the more than 5,000 sites where there were residential schools resembles any other archaeological investigation.

“We’ve been getting a lot of calls from First Nations asking: ‘When can you come out and scan the school’,” says Professor Kisha Supernant, who teaches archaeology at the University of Alberta. “Well, that’s not the first step.”

Each site will require its own unique plan that can take years to develop. The plans will bring together archival information about the school, enrolment records, information about the land and the history of its use, both while the school operated and since, testimony from community members who may not have attended the residential schools but worked there and, especially, oral history about the school and children who never came home held by indigenous knowledge keepers. (In 1997, in a decision about an aboriginal land claim, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that indigenous oral history traditions have “an equal footing with the types of historical evidence that courts are familiar with”.)

In her work demarcating the graves of people who committed suicide and, thus, were buried outside the consecrated ground of the cemetery in the small town of Nain on the coast of Labrador, Professor of Archaeology Lisa Rankin of Memorial University of Newfoundland had a pretty good idea of where to look.

However, the grounds of the residential schools are much larger. Accordingly, she says: “Out west, they have also been using drone footage and they get a sense of the undulations of the ground that might mark individual burial areas.”

An important clue that a patch of ground might contain a grave is whether the vegetation differs from the adjacent areas. “If you disturb the soil, even if you put it back, you have changed the porosity. You can never fill in a pit with the material dug out because you have to compress it so much to get it back in, and often that is not possible,” says Braun.

The vegetation growing on less dense soil will be different, either because the disturbed soil holds more water or because water percolates down faster, leaving it drier. In either case, says Braun, the grass or other vegetation grows differently from the surrounding areas. Further, while an organically rich area suggests the presence of more organic matter, such as from a decomposed body, it could also be evidence of a refuse pit.

Unlike, say, a medical ultrasound which, because the technician can move the transceiver around a body, produces radiographs that computers combine to produce three dimensions, “the GPR unit is stuck on the surface”, says Braun.

“We are always looking from the top down and there is a tremendous reduction in resolvability [clarity] because we now have so many target locations” because of the layers. Soil, rocks, tree roots, dead vegetation, water and decayed human remains all reflect radar waves back differently. With a 500 MHz antenna, Braun told University World News, “we get about three centimetres of wavelength, which means we can see a three-centimetre piece of metal but not a three millimetre piece”.

Instead of Jurassic Park palaeontologist Dr Alan Grant seeing the bones of a Velociraptor, the eureka for the researchers at, for example, the Saskatchewan site Supernant examined in 2018, occurs when their GPR screen shows enough differences in the electro permittivity of the ground that they see a roughly metre wide by two metres long shape. “This is what we are looking for,” says Braun, “we cannot resolve anything beyond that.”

A respectful approach

For Supernant, who has spent 15 years as an archaeologist and is the director of the University of Alberta’s Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology, the investigation of residential school sites is “not archaeology”. In searching for unmarked graves of indigenous children, she says, “we are really using techniques we have learned [in the field of archaeology] and applying them to very specific and pressing needs for indigenous communities”.

Supernant, Rankin and Braun are careful not to impose their skills or views on First Nations. Thus, they differ from how archaeologists have historically treated indigenous peoples.

For more than a century, researchers and archaeologists did more than exclude indigenous people from planning digs. They disregarded cultural practices, appropriated important cultural items, such as wampum belts, and, most egregiously, stole the bones of ancestors.

“When the residential schools information became so prominent earlier this year, I knew there would be a place for my skills,” says Rankin, who has conducted numerous archaeological searches at the behest of indigenous communities in Labrador.

“However, I’m not going to impose my skills or those of my students on communities. I’ve made it clear to the communities that should they want to talk about information or have us do some work, we are here. But it’s really up to the communities that have to negotiate their way through these very traumatic events and decide if they want archaeologists involved at all.”

Searching for unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools differs greatly from searching for Richard III’s body, which was found under a car park in Leicester in 2012.

As Supernant, who is part Métis and Papaschase (Cree), explained, the different conceptions of time held by archaeologists and indigenous peoples have real world theological impact.

Archaeologists think of time as linear; the past is back there and we are here. “Archaeologists consider the bones of ancient humans of a place to be remains, not animate, something you study, they are not part of the current world.”

For indigenous peoples, time is not necessarily linear. “Things are more collapsed, with the past, present and future all existing together,” she told University World News. For First Nations, bones are more than just tangible links to ancestral memory. “While their bodies may have decayed, their presence is still here. So, there is a real sense that they are connected to the spirit as opposed to the corporeal form.” In other words, the ancestors are not just in the past; they are part of the present.

On a practical level, this different conception of time and the presence of ancestors means that archaeological work, even work with GPR – which does not disturb the graves that may be there – must be preceded by specific cleansing rituals.

On the Canadian plains, one cleansing ritual is called ‘Smudging’. Sage and sweetgrass are burned and the smoke wafts over the person to cleanse him or her. “Before you go do investigations of these sites,” says Supernant, “you have to be cleansed so that the ancestors know you are there for a good purpose.”

Because they were buried in unmarked graves and because the internments occurred under Christian frameworks – not under the beliefs of the communities they came from – the children, today’s First Nations’ ancestors, are in a state of “spiritual unrest”, Supernant told me.

A further difference between helping First Nations find unmarked graves on residential school sites and an archaeological dig at the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, on Newfoundland’s northeastern-most point, is the emotional impact on present day and intergenerational survivors of the residential school system.

“The residential school system tore apart all social institutions – namely family and kin relations – as a means to ensure the destruction of indigenous cultural, economic and political institutions,” says Professor Veldon Coburn of the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies, himself citizen of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation located near Ottawa in Ontario.

“It did this by destroying the lives of indigenous children and we can observe the after-effects of this pernicious system in the dire and impoverished underdevelopment of indigenous societies.”

Accordingly, Supernant says: “We are bringing our experience not only in the application of certain scientific techniques to the study, but also in the relationship we need in order for this work to be done in a way that supports communities and is not doing any additional harm.”

Legal issues

While the Vancouver-based lawyer Michal Jaworski, who is an expert in law relating to universities, and Saul Joseph, an expert in indigenous law and a citizen of Squamish First Nation, recognise that because of the huge number of sites that will need to be investigated, professors across the country will want to help First Nations, they both flagged areas of potential legal difficulties.

Outside of medicine and engineering, most faculties do not have policies and procedures in place to deal with conflict of interest and conflict of commitment. Even professors who volunteer to help First Nations fall under the same legal rubric that contractors providing a service do. This could raise a reputational issue for the university if a professor fails “to deliver on their promises”, says Jaworski.

Unless the contractual framework is clear, Jaworski is also concerned about the disjunction between professors, who undertake research projects for the advancement of knowledge with the expectation that this research will become public via journal articles or the like, and the expectations of First Nations vis-à-vis information professors learn. If there is a miscue between what the First Nation thinks they are getting and a professor who thinks he or she is “getting fodder for a journal article, that can lead to some really unfortunate results”.

Another concern, which Jaworski admits is “mundane and gets in the way of doing really good things”, concerns equipment. “If you are a university and a professor who has equipment that has been purchased for the purpose of research, do you have authority to go out and use it for volunteer purposes?”

The legal language around grants can also create problems: “Good intentions notwithstanding, if the research grant you’ve gotten to purchase this equipment says you have to use this for this project and now you are going to use it for some other project, are you offside [on] your grant?”

Jaworski’s point, he underscored, is not that professors should not help First Nations in the future or that those who have been part of investigations that have been made public have overstepped any bounds. Rather, he told University World News, he wants professors to be aware of the legal issues that must be taken into account to ensure that “good intentions do not lead to bad results”.

After noting that he agreed with everything Jaworski said, Joseph turned to explaining the role that professors who do not have technical expertise can play. “There’s going to be lots of socio-cultural aspects to this that will inform policy-making and how these discoveries are dealt with in the long term, beyond just discovery.”

The central issue will be identification of remains, which has not yet begun. Researchers involved in this will be operating, Joseph says, under several legal frameworks at once. “In addition to Western legal frameworks [that is, Canadian relevant provincial law and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples], there’s also indigenous legal governance and ways of handling these things and bringing family members back into community.”

Some denialism

At the end of our interview, I asked Supernant if she has received any negative responses to efforts to find unmarked graves, which have been widely reported across the country. She told me of a number of e-mails that have sought to undermine her work, some seizing on the fact that the images produced by GPR are difficult to read.

“Well, those anomalies, how do you know they are graves?” Others ask: “How do you know the work’s good?” At least one said that the disturbed area was too shallow to be a grave, an irrelevant point, since even in the Christian tradition graves are often not six feet down – especially in Canada because of its winter.

Far from being legitimate technical or scientific objection, these e-mails are acts of denialism. Does every shaft identified in Kamloops, for example, contain human remains? We’re not sure, Supernant says – none have been excavated.

“But those of us who have seen a lot of graves with GPR know there are definitely graves there.” A few moments later, she adds: “To say this is actually not true is also trying to deny the horrible impact of residential schools in this country.”