Ideas - Her job is to find buried children at residential schools

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

When she began her line of work, Métis archeologist Kisha Supernant was sometimes called a 'grave robber.' With an eye to restorative justice, she was trying to help Indigenous communities locate the graves of children who died at residential schools. Now Supernant is called to find children's graves. She uses both traditional knowledge systems, as well as cutting-edge ground radar techniques to help families and communities begin to heal. It’s a science, she says, of the heart and head.

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Okay, now on to today's show. First, let's start with an understanding that I am engaged in work right now that is not in the business of proving how bad residential schools were. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. We know that they're terrible or that children died at residential schools and this is an established historical fact. From the 1870s until 1997, 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were forced to attend church-run and government-funded residential schools where, according to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, more than

4,000 of them died. My work is to help figure out where those children who never came home might be buried and how communities can find those locations, protect those locations, and if needed, return those children to their families. For the last six years, archaeologist Keisha Supernant has been helping Indigenous communities search for the graves of children who died at residential schools. But her help wasn't always welcome. One of the things that I've reflected a lot on is the transition I've gone through since being called a grave robber when I first started working in community to now being called to

find graves. Keisha Supernant teaches anthropology at the University of Alberta, where she directs the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology. She also chairs the Canadian Archaeological Association's Working Group on Unmarked Graves. In November 2024, she delivered a talk in Calgary called Archaeology, Indigenous Knowledge and Restorative Justice in Canada. Tansi kiya.

Good afternoon everyone. It is very nice to be here with you today on beautiful Treaty Seven territory. I just want to mention that I'm going to be discussing some difficult topics today. The issues that I will be discussing can be very impactful, very triggering, may bring up trauma. Over the past six years, I have been actively working with Indigenous communities at their request to use technology to try to locate burial sites, including those around residential schools and in other contexts. Keisha Supernod not only does archaeology, she's also transforming the way it's done. One of the ways in which I'm hoping to continue to transform the discipline of archaeology

is with a very fundamental question. So what is archaeology, but more importantly, who is it for? So I was intellectually raised in an environment where I was taught that archaeology was the systematic and scientific study of the materials of the past to understand kind of the human history broadly. But there was never any question of what gave archaeologists the right to study histories that were not their own. So the question of who it was for, it was an intellectual exercise. It was for sort of academic

purposes. We are learning because it is good to learn. But there was never any question of whose histories we were telling and whether or not those people still had their own histories to tell that wasn't in the archaeology that we were learning. So when I think about archaeology, it very much connected to that colonial history. When I first started doing archaeology in community, you come in, you're coming in to dig up the graves, grave robbing, right? This is what our legacy is as archaeologists. Because archaeology is a fundamentally colonial discipline. I mean, arguably all academic disciplines to an extent are,

but there's a very specific history toward anthropology, sort of the umbrella, and then the archaeology the specifics, that has a very distinct colonial history because it emerged out of non-indigenous people going, colonial people going into these lands and talking to the people they encountered and then telling their stories to other people like them. That's the fundamental idea behind anthropology. And it actually was very much used to justify colonization. You think about, you know, even still in a lot of intro to anthropology classes we talk about types of people, bands, tribes, chiefs, and states.

Those were very much used in a progressive way, to say people in small-scale societies were not as civilized as people in large-scale societies. And that justification of colonialism is so closely tied up to the discipline, and even still the way sometimes we teach it. Now, archaeology in particular is very extractive. We are literally extracting things from the earth. We're digging up the sites of ancestors and their belongings from around the world. And certainly in places that we now call Canada, this is Indigenous history. The vast majority of the materials that we recover as archaeologists are Indigenous. And then we take them out of the ground and we put them in museums. Right, that classic, it

belongs in a museum. Maybe it doesn't belong in a museum, maybe it belongs to the community and they get to decide what happens to it, right? But we're still taught very much in that extractive kind of way. So it's physically extractive but it's also extractive of knowledge and of stories, and always has been. Taking that material and then writing the story of these lands, overwriting those indigenous also extractive of knowledge and of stories, and always has been. Taking that material and then writing the story of these lands, overwriting those Indigenous histories. And so archaeology is very much tied up with these colonial understandings of the world. It also centres a way of knowing, which is very much grounded in Western Europe, enlightenment,

this idea that science is the only and the best way to know anything. In fact, there are many ways to know, and I'll come back to that in a moment, but this idea that the only way is through these empirical ways of weighing and measuring and analyzing the materials of the past. That's the path to the true story of the past. That's very much at the heart of what archaeology has been. And then archaeology has been primarily practiced by non-Indigenous people. And if you Google archaeology professor, there's a very specific kind of image that comes to mind, and it's not people who look like me. And so there's also these many, many voices that have been marginalized and pushed out of how archaeology has been used to tell history.

So I practice archaeology very differently than that. I still think there's a lot of power in the materials and belongings of the past. There's a lot of gifts that science and that way of knowing can sometimes bring to those questions. But instead of using that to answer these intellectual questions dreamed up by a non-Indigenous person, I'm much more interested in how we can use those tools in ways that serve community interests and needs. What are the ways we can take the strengths that archeology has and combine them in ethical and careful ways with Indigenous ways of knowing

and being or other voices that need to be heard to actually one, expose the history of archeology. So how do we use the tools to say, hey, look at the things that archeology has contributed to, or maybe it's a way to use those tools to show other historical injustices, right? To tell those stories in different kinds of ways. The work I do increasingly comes directly from community says,

we want to know this thing, can archaeology help? And I say, okay, well, let's figure out if archaeology can help. And if it can, let's work together to imagine what that might be. We'll use the best techniques and tools we have, and we can serve that need that you have. It's also about using archaeological knowledge to provide redress for those injustices. And this may mean return of belongings and ancestors to communities. This might also mean using the tools to find burial sites that have been erased from the

landscape for a whole variety of reasons. And it also makes more space for multiple ways of understanding and knowing the past. So for me, doing archaeology with an eye to restorative justice also means doing archaeology that starts from the heart and not necessarily the head. So Kisha, that phrase that you end with there, archaeology that starts with the heart, not the head, what does that mean for you in practice? In practice, that means instead of beginning from an intellectual perspective, beginning from the mind, we think about the role of the heart and the ways in which emotion

can provide an important pathway to understanding. In archaeology and many other academic disciplines, we are trained to think, not to feel. We are trained to begin with analysis that starts from the brain, from a place of reason and logic. But that is a very limiting perspective because it ignores the other aspects of the ways we are in the world, the other ways that as humans we experience being together, being with the earth, being in those spaces of knowledge. And I think for me, starting from the heart is not ignoring the mind, it's recognizing the power that we have when we come from a place of connection

and relation, not just of logic and reason. So coming from a place of connection, I'm wondering if you could talk about an example or a memorable experience that you've had yourself when you led with your heart. I think leading with the heart impacts a lot of my work, but it's perhaps most important when I'm being asked to come in and support Indigenous communities in the very difficult and sacred work of trying to locate unmarked graves associated with Indian residential schools. This work is deeply emotional. It is very tragic. It brings up many different traumas and experiences for

survivors, intergenerational survivors, and even the scientists who are privileged to come in and work in these spaces. To come in with a heart-centered and connected approach means recognizing the role of ceremony and protocol, the need for wraparound support for everyone who is involved, and not just coming in with sort of a clinical or scientific perspective that looks only at it as sort of data, as science, but one that looks at it as a very human question that we are bringing science to bear on. ["Energy and Science"]

Now, emotion's often a bad word if you talk about science. There's this idea that emotion somehow means that we're doing work that's biased. All science that is done by humans has bias, full stop. And when we actually recognize the role of emotion in the work that we do, we make space one to account for that. What are those emotional connections, responses we have to the work that we do? And this is true whatever discipline you study. Why do you study the topics you do? I bet you care about them. I bet they capture something about you. That's a

form of emotional response. But also it gives us an opportunity to imagine that humans are emotional. And yes, anger is an emotion. Oftentimes we forget that one. But this idea that we are emotional and we sometimes make decisions in our lives that are not necessarily based on biological fitness or certain behaviors. We do it because we have an emotional response. I don't know about all of you, but I certainly have made emotional decisions in my life, and they haven't always benefited me that well. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And the idea that people in the past were also had emotional responses. And yes, I can't know exactly

what a person, you know, five, ten thousand years ago was feeling in response to something, but I can recognize that they had feelings and that those are actually a powerful source of knowledge. And when we set them aside and do not recognize that we all have those emotional spaces, we're actually limiting our ways of knowing. In fact, emotion is a powerful way to know as well. And then also we talk about relation. Relation as a third chamber to archaeologists of the heart. And in this space it's one, recognizing the role of relations between humans,

but also with other than humans. And I will show you some examples of this in my own work later on. But that in fact, when we're talking about working in a more ethical way in archaeology, that we actually need to center relations first, building strong and good relations with living ancestors and other folks first. And then we also need to do that in a way that's respectful and recognizes the boundaries

of those relationships. So sometimes in archaeology, again, those boundaries can get blurred between professors and students and these sorts of things. So also respecting the responsibilities that come with those relations, but also recognizing the relation to spirit and that there is a role for spirit in the practice that we have. And then our fourth chamber is rigor

because we often get said, wow, you're not really doing science. And I say, well, first of all, yes I am because actually I do better science and I'm much more rigorous in my science because I know how much it matters and because I care very deeply for it. I am not going to go into a nation and tell a community that I've found something that I haven't. It is essential for me to be able to be true to what the science can and cannot

know and I'm actually better at that because I recognize how much I care about it. The other part of rigor for us is every knowledge system has internal rigor. So rigor is not just a scientific thing. I mean you can talk to any indigenous knowledge holder. You can't just say anything when you're in ceremony. You can't just make something up. There are very rigorous ways where you're taught that knowledge where you're brought into those spaces where you're educated And not everybody gets to get educated in all those pieces. You have different roles We even saw that shared with the serpents, right?

That's not your space until these other folks come in and do what they need to do So every knowledge system has its own rigor what they need to do. So every knowledge system has its own rigor internally and so we can't be like it's it's either true science or it's made up because everything that's quote-unquote made up comes from a knowledge system that has internal rigor. So we need to recognize that and not use science to validate or invalidate other knowledge systems. We need to understand its role, its power, but also its limitations, and recognize that other knowledge systems have absolutely have rigor.

So this is our invitation with Archaeologists of the Heart that any archaeologist with a heart can practice in this way. And there's many examples from around the world across time and space in this book that show you what's possible in this space. And it really informs everything that I do as an instructor, as a teacher, as a mentor, as a researcher, as a relation that is very much grounded in the heart.

And I think we do much better archeology when we start from the heart and not the head. When we think back to archeological frameworks and how, at least I was trained as an archeologist, it was really about breaking apart everything into smaller and smaller categories of things. So we do an excavation, we're digging in a unit, we're finding materials and we're sort of ordering them in sets of boxes. This far down below the surface, this type of material, we take them back, we put them into catalogs where we, you know,

weigh and measure and put all these fields in. But it's all about that separation between those individual belongings. And this is the history of sort of a lot of Western thought. Think about biology and the taxonomies of biology. They're all these branching, right? These hierarchies. They're not about the interconnections and they're interweavings between these things. And then it also creates this objectification. So the materials that are being found are artifacts and objects to be weighed and to be studied and they're specimens, right? And specimens, you know, is something that we see in anthropology more broadly.

But when you call something a specimen, you remove it from its relational space. And then you make it something static. And that, and then that also means you put it into a museum, and you put it into a warehouse, and it sits in that space, and is not part of of relations. And so part of what I saw in meteor archaeology was this way of thinking. Because in order to focus on something mixed, you have to have something pure. So it's this sort of idea of racial purity that there is, you know, First Nations and there's European, and then you put them together and you get Métis, is all based on these logics, right,

of separation and categorization. And this was not, again, reflective of what I was learning from my relatives. And so how then do we imagine a different approach to understanding with Métis archaeology? And this is what really led me to starting the Amita Project. So this is the Exploring Métis Identity Through Archaeology Project. I've been involved in this since 2012. I started by going to Métis organizations, governments, and said, hey, I'm an archaeologist, are there things you're interested in knowing more about? And they were like, yes, show where our people were. Help us establish what that material culture looks like and help us also be engaged when people are disturbing it. Because all of our material as Métis people is in the historic period,

there's a very strong divide in Canada between pre-contact and historic. And pre-contact is seen as indigenous history and historic is seen as European colonial history, which is just wrong in many ways. But what it has done is it's put all of Metis material culture into this box with European culture and therefore there's no consultation when development is happening and they're destroying our sites. Because it's just historic, just like someone's homestead, nobody cares, right? No, those are our stories and our

materials and our belongings. So in your talk, you say, quote, those are our stories. But sometimes those stories are known to families, to the families in question, and sometimes they're not. How much did you know about your own family's history growing up? I knew very little. My father was raised in foster care. His mother, who was Metis, gave birth to him in Edmonton.

She was unmarried. He ended up in an orphanage and then in the foster care system his whole life. So I knew very little about who we were, where we came from, what our family and community was growing up. I have been on a lifelong journey of coming home to my Metis family. And it has been really important for me to learn the stories of my ancestors from the work that I do as an archaeologist, but it's also been very important for me to reconnect with my living relatives. And it has been, in fact, my scholarly journey, which has in many ways

taken me home because it brought me to Edmonton, where my father was born, where a huge number of my Metis family live today in this area, and brought me into community in a way that has been very important to hear those family stories and to understand the diverse experiences of Métis people and how my own story of coming home and reconnecting is not unique, but provides a pathway that others are also looking for. How much of that process have you, I guess, for lack of a better description, conducting kind of an archaeology of your own family, how much did that play a role in you choosing this or having this field choose you as you described it?

Yes. My journey to understand myself and my family has played a very large role in the choices I've made in the archaeology that I do. When I moved to Edmonton, I had been finishing up my PhD, which worked collaboratively with First Nations in British Columbia. And it was a difficult experience for a variety of reasons. I was looking for new research opportunities and I went to a talk about Métis history. I was in the process of doing a lot of that archaeology of my own family, looking at the genealogy, trying to understand exactly how we were connected in at the time. And I remember sitting in that room and listening to the discussion about Métis history. And it kind of dawned on me, one of those moments, those aha moments

in life, where I thought, I wonder if anyone does Métis archaeology. Turns out not really. And at the time there had been not very much done. And so when I started to look into that, I thought, what an amazing way for me to bring together my own family stories and experiences and journey into my archaeological work. Also, Métis archaeology is very interesting just from an archaeological perspective, not only from a personal perspective. So those things really came together for me and I started to build the Exploring Meti Identity Through Archaeology project at that time. How incredible to be able to bring those parts of you together.

And I'm curious how that story, that history, your father's story, not only maybe helped determine what you were doing, but how you do it. It does definitely impact the how as much as the why. In part because a lot of the Métis archaeology that had been done prior to me starting the project had been done very much through a lens of looking at us as mixed. And this is a very common misconception even today about Métis people is that what defines us is being of mixed indigenous and non-indigenous heritage. Of course, we are much more than that. We have a culture and communities and family systems and landscapes that we're connected with. And I was really

frustrated by the ways in which previous archaeologists had really tried to focus only on a combination of say, First Nations and European material culture at our sites. I wanted to move away from that kind of mixed understanding or, and really it's based in a very, I would say racialized understanding of purity and mixedness as being somehow these separate things. And I wanted to focus on a very different approach to Métis archaeology and frankly to archaeology in general, which focused instead on connection and relation

rather than these categories and separations and mixedness. So my own journey of understanding who we were as Métis people also really strongly impacted the way I started to think about the belongings of Métis ancestors at the places where the Métis ancestors lived. I also really wanted to use less invasive methods, less extractive methods. So how can we use technology to map and understand these places?

And I've always been very much someone who likes the landscape approach, not about the individual thing or the individual site, but about the relation with the land. And so these types of methods often give you that broader perspective. And then moving from archaeology of the Métis to Métis archaeology. And then moving from archaeology of the Métis to Métis

archaeology. And this is an important distinction that my grad student Dawn Wambold has really articulated alongside of me. So archaeology of the Métis is doing archaeology of Métis sites. Métis archaeology is doing archaeology from a Métis perspective. So then how does that work when we actually hit the ground as archaeologists? Because we still look at the materiality of the past. That is one of the things that we do in our practice. And for me when I was starting out in Emida, I wanted to look at places that were very distinctly and unequivocally Metis places. And one of those are Hivernont or overwintering sites. So Metis overwintering was a practice that emerged in about the 1830s and 40s,

as bison populations near major settlements began to decrease. And so families, bison brigades, were having to go out further and further from those places to find bison. And what was happening is that they started building winter settlements in places near where bison would winter. So there could be winter bison hunting that could be ongoing. And these became communities, sometimes for three, five, 10 years, but they were then moved to another place as the bison again population changed and decreased. But these were places that were Metis. So people who would have understood themselves

as Metis at the time were part of a specific kind of way of life and a set of interconnected kinship because we're all about sort of the kinship and that's how we connect to other Metis folks. And they would have built these cabins out on the park lands and the prairies to spend the winter together. So what have your excavations at Metis wintering sites revealed that you did not expect? One of the things that emerged pretty early on when I started working at wintering sites revealed that you did not expect? One of the things that emerged pretty early on

when I started working at wintering sites was how many beads there are in those sites. Thousands upon thousands of tiny glass seed beads. This was unexpected, not because we didn't think that Metis beaded, we know that our ancestors were beading. It's more so that they are difficult to find archaeologically unless you are looking for them. Because the size of the beads often means they are missed in typical archaeological

methods. And you weren't looking for them? We weren't specifically looking for them. We knew they were likely to be present. But as the time passed, as I started working more and more at wintering sites, I realized that I had to do a better job of looking for them because we were likely missing some. Any time that we, for example, use different techniques to sift through the dirt that we were finding, we just kept finding increasingly large numbers of drawn glass seed beads.

And I then realized, okay, everything that we excavate has to go through very fine screens so that we can recover these very important belongings because they're everywhere at Métis wintering sites. How does learning about these sites, these Métis wintering sites, help us understand ourselves as Canadians? I think looking at Métis archaeological sites helps to tell the story of the diversity of

the Métis experience and also the role that these places played in the formation of what we understand to be the nation of Canada today. A lot of Métis history tends to focus on big political events, the resistances, Louis Riel, Gabriel de Montt, the formation of Manitoba. And those of course are extremely important moments in Métis history. But we miss that rhythm of daily life that I think archaeology can do a wonderful job of illuminating. It's not just those political moments that defined us. It was those aspects of day-to-day life and living that were a key part of why

there was that collective sense of identity that Louis Riel and Gabriel de Montt and others were defending against the Dominion of Canada. So that sort of intimacy that we find in a Metis wintering cabin is an essential part of the story of the lands we now call Canada because it was in those places that that collective sense of Metis-ness and Metis identity emerges and then plays out on that national stage. In an ideal world, where would you, at what point in our learning journey would you want children of this land to learn about all this? I would love for people to learn at all levels of education.

I had a really wonderful experience a couple of years ago doing an archaeological excavation with on a Metisite in St. Albert near Edmonton. And we had school programming as part of the site that we were excavating. And we had different school groups coming in. And that happened to include my daughter's second grade class, who got to come out to a Metis Riverlot site where we were actively excavating the archaeological material of Metis ancestors. And I got to share with them what we were doing in a way that they understood. And my daughter, who was eight at the time, was learning about our history,

history that I did not get to learn until my thirties. And for me, that is reconciliation, that is healing, that is resurgence, because she knows who she is. She is part of a Métis community today in a way that was taken from me and from my father. So for me, there's so much value in learning about this history all along an educational journey from elementary school all the way up through post-secondary and beyond. How extraordinary. How old's your daughter now?

She's 10. Wow. How would you feel if she said to you one day that, Mom, I want to become an archaeologist like you? I would, of course, be delighted. I think archaeology is really an interesting discipline. It's really fun in a lot of ways, getting to explore and understand. She has said that to me at various times, it tends to come and go because she's 10. And at the same time, she really enjoyed being on the site. She's been on sites with me a few times, and you know, learn holding those

belongings and learning about them I think is really valuable. So I would hope that if she wanted to take that journey that when she went to do her studies and if she wanted to go to university that she would have a very different experience than I did about what archaeology is and can be. can be. You're listening to Ideas and to archaeologist Keisha Supernant on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know, it was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.

Keisha Supernant directs the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology at the University of Alberta, where she also teaches anthropology. She delivered a talk in November 2024 in Calgary called Archaeology, Indigenous Knowledge and Restorative Justice in Canada. First, let's start with an understanding that I am engaged in work right now that is not in the business of proving how bad residential schools were. We know that they're terrible or that children died at residential schools and this is an established historical fact. We have an extensive amount of evidence about this from archival records but more importantly from survivors. We know from survivors and families that children were taken and did not come home and the whole system was designed to take children away and to quote-unquote kill the Indian and the child. So my work right

now is not to prove that. My work is to help figure out where those children who never came home might be buried and how communities can find those locations, protect those locations, and if needed return those children to their families. So we know at least 150,000 Indigenous children were taken, probably many more, but we know at least that many, and thousands never came home. As I mentioned, there's extensive archival records about this, there's records from the church, there's records from the government.

We know this is the case. And then we know from survivors and families as well. Even when there is a record of a child dying, most of the time parents were not notified. And there's certainly, those children were not returned to the families to be buried in the ways that meant they were meant to be buried in community. And the graves if they were marked are most of the time no longer marked. So even if there had been a wooden cross or something like that those no longer

exist and in many cases the actual entire grave site has been erased from the landscape. Because when they were building residential schools and they included cemeteries on the plans in many cases because they knew children were going to die. And you can look at those plans and see where the graveyards were, they are no longer visible on the landscape in some places I've been. They're just empty fields, but there may be hundreds of Indigenous people buried there. So the search is now underway to try to find these places, to try to figure out what we can learn about them from science, but also to connect those places with community so they can bring their knowledge to where their children might be and what they need to

do to bring those home. And this is actually a very complicated process. To understand this is needlessly complicated, in part because the records are spotty, some have been destroyed, and the science can only get you so far in what we can actually do with the technologies. This work has actually been ongoing for quite a long time. I have colleagues who started doing this work in 2007, 2008, or have been working for the past decade with communities, but it's been difficult to find funding for it, and it's been difficult to do this work. So when Tkamloopsu-Shweepmack made their announcement of what they had found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, there of course was a huge amount of outcry and attention and there was an

investment of funding from the government to do the difficult work of trying to locate missing children. And searches began at many schools and that has been the majority of my work since that announcement. My phone started ringing off the hook because I first did a survey of a residential school in 2018, but at the time it didn't get the kind of attention that I think the community was hoping for, but people knew and community knew that I could do this and have been helping. The other aspect of the announcement from Tocomloops has been a real focus on ground penetrating radar,

and a focus specifically on technology as like the answer to this question. And I wanna say it's not the answer to this question. It is a part of how we build knowledge, but there's many other sources of information that are essential, right? Community and survivor knowledge, archival knowledge, technology is one part of a much larger puzzle. But of course, the way that the reporting came out of to come loops, you know, the way it

hit the national and international news brought up so much trauma for survivors. And I want to acknowledge survivors and intergenerational survivors who are here in the room and how, you know, especially the last several years have brought a lot of this to the surface for many and I've seen this in community a lot but I'm also hoping that we can do this in a way that's not going to cause more harm that's going to lead to justice and accountability and healing because that's what's needed at this time. In your talk, you say that we need the kind of forensic archaeology or practice to help bring about justice and accountability.

When have you come closest, do you think, to achieving anything resembling those two things, justice and accountability. When have you come closest, do you think, to achieving anything resembling those two things, justice and accountability? I don't know if there's any example yet where we have come anywhere close to justice and accountability for what happened to Indigenous children at residential schools. It is very difficult to imagine what that looks like. And I think there's also a little bit of a danger of a trap around evidence and what constitutes evidence. A lot of the work that I'm doing right now is trying to help communities figure out where

children might have been buried. And I'm not often able to figure out exactly who is buried where with the technologies that I use, but I can find that intermediate, which is we know children died, where might they possibly be buried? The challenge that I think many communities are grappling with right now is what is enough evidence to be able to advance those questions of justice and accountability. In my ideal world, testimonies of survivors would be sufficient. The combination of testimonies of survivors with the extensive archival evidence would be more than sufficient. But many communities are feeling like they need to prove this, that they need to show that there are bodies of children in unmarked graves,

when in fact I think that is already well established. I worry that justice is a very high bar if we're searching for that kind of evidence over a 130-year period. And in fact, we need to think about what justice means in this space in a different kind of way, and maybe come up with alternative pathways outside of the existing structures that might provide that sense of justice and accountability for communities. And that's not just from the Canadian government, that's also from the churches. And there has been a lot more that the federal government in Canada has done to support communities in this work than churches have done. And for me, that remains a pretty significant gap on that pathway toward

justice. How many of these searches at former residential school sites have you been part of now? I have been involved at searches at 14 school locations, meaning I'm on the ground doing some aspect of the search process. And I've probably spoken to an additional 40 to 50 search teams at other locations around the country, trying to provide some advice about how they might approach a ground search. I cannot imagine how difficult such work would be. And I wonder if you could talk a bit about what it was like for you the first time that you were involved in such a search.

Yeah, the first time that I was involved was in 2018 at the Muskaugan Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. I remember it very distinctly because we had been doing a ground penetrating radar survey in an area behind the school where the community was pretty sure there were unmarked graves. And we had done a couple of areas and we were looking at the data, but then we went to this one part

and it felt very different. It was much heavier, it was much more difficult in that area, not because it was more difficult from a technical perspective, but it felt much more emotionally heavy. And then when we went back, because we have to take the information back from the field and process it and look through it, that was the area that had the most evidence in the ground penetrating radar of potential unmarked graves.

And that's what I realized that I wasn't just, you know, doing this technical process that I was also feeling and connecting to what was happening. And that reminded me of the importance also of ceremony. Right as we were doing that area of the site, some of the community members had come to visit with us. And I had had some medicines with me to do some smudge, which is part of my practice, but I couldn't find my matches, so I couldn't light it. And this person comes up and they have medicines and they have a lighter and they like got

the smudge going for us. So it was as if they had come there because they knew we needed that support without even knowing that we were having, we were struggling. And that has been my experience in community ever since is it is so hard to do this work. It is hard from just a scientific perspective. It is hard from an emotional perspective, walking over the potential graves of children for months on end, it takes

its toll. And it is really hard also because survivors, many of them are sharing their experiences and their knowledge for the first time, as much as many testimonies were shared during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. There are many survivors who didn't participate in that, and now this is all coming up. And we're often there to witness. So in addition to having to do this difficult technical work, we're also there to hear and to witness and to listen to those testimonies. And those things combined just really weigh very heavy on the heart. Yeah. You were given a name, an indigenous name.

She brings the children home. Can you tell the story of how that came about? Yes, I can. I got to know Elder Gilman Cardinal, who was from Big Stone Cree Nation. He worked with me actually in another capacity at the University of Alberta, and he knew the heaviness of the burden that I was carrying. So in January of 2023, I went to his home, and he gifted me an eagle feather,

which is a very great honour in my community, and he gave me the name Awasa Kapikuita Hutt. She brings the children home. To receive such a gift was an unbelievable experience, a life-altering experience for me, but it also reinforced that sense of responsibility because when you carry a name like that, you have to live up to it. So as an archeologist, one of the things that I've reflected a lot on is the transition I've gone through since being called a grave robber

when I first started working in community to now being called to find graves. And this I think demonstrates a couple of things. One, archaeology is not perfect, got a lot of work to do, but we have done a fair bit of work over the last 20 years especially to try to rebuild that trust, to try to not be as extractive, to try to figure out what it means to be a good relation. And so there are archaeologists that I work with, non-Indigenous archaeologists, who are very trusted by the communities they work with, and take that trust and treat it with great care.

And so because archaeologists have been helping in this way and have been learning to be better relations, we're being called upon to use our knowledge to help advance this really important question. We start with knowledge that the community has, and this is survivor knowledge. This is also knowledge for people who might have done, say, infrastructure projects on the reserve and have found something of concern, encountered bones or encountered burials. We need to know that so we can provide the best advice to the community.

A couple of things to remember about ground penetrating radar. It is looking for shapes in the ground, but we don't see bones and we don't see bodies. It's not an x-ray. It's much more like an ultrasound. So you see shapes and then you interpret what those shapes are. Now there are certain types of traits. So sending a signal, a wave down and the wave is reflecting back. There's certain reflections that are much more likely to be associated with graves than others, and we know what lots of other things look like. We know what a tree root is, we know what a gopher hole is, we know what a pipeline is. You know, anyone who knows how to use GPR properly knows what those

look like. It's those other kinds of shapes we're trying to make sense of. So we're looking at the size, the depth, the kind of general shape, they tend to be kind of oval in shape. The other thing about GPR in particular is it doesn't work the same everywhere. So certain soil conditions are better. Sand, fabulous. Clay, not so good. And I work a lot in Alberta, there's a lot of clay. And so there's some places where I'm literally in a cemetery and the GPR is not seeing the graves we know are there, which tells me that it's not the right technology for that place. There are other options. We can work with magnetic techniques,

magnetic radiometry, electromagnetic conductivity, resistivity, all which deal with different physical properties of the ground, and all of which are, again, looking for shapes, right? We don't yet have well-established methods for confirming the presence of a grave from the surface without exhumation. We're still not at that point. So I will never say I've found a grave, but I can say these are potential unmarked graves. These are more likely, these are less likely. And then you need to take those next steps, right?

Again, this is about that being attentive to the science. What can we actually know? Even if I were to tell you, I'm pretty sure there's a grave here, I certainly can't tell you who's in it, right? That's not the level of answers I can bring with the technologies that I use. And yet communities deserve those answers,

but I can't always provide them. You're very clear in your lecture and elsewhere on what you can and cannot do with the tools that you have and that you're using. Why is defining that boundary important? I think over the past several years since Tkhamun Sushrep made their announcement, there has been perhaps a misunderstanding about what technology is actually doing in this process.

So one of the earliest things that myself and other colleagues who work in this area wanted to do was try to clarify what it is that we see with ground penetrating radar and the other technologies we're using because it both had an impression that we could find the children through just using ground penetrating radar for community who then were seeking these answers. But it also has fed into denialist narratives to say, well, you're not actually finding the graves of children.

And the reality is somewhere in between those things, right? We are finding useful information about potential unmarked graves. We do know how to use a technology to narrow down what is more or less likely to be an unmarked grave, but we can't say this is a grave of a residential school child unless there are other pieces of information that support that interpretation. Yes. So how do you then, how do you have that conversation when you go to a community? What do you need to say, do you think, to prepare them for the ambiguity that you might be facing?

I do my best to try to explain the technology and how it works in ways that the average person will understand. These are quite complex geophysical techniques, but I can try to find connections between something that people might be more familiar with, like sonar or radar or fish finders. Many fishing communities will use those and try to describe what it is that we're actually looking for. And I also sometimes have to really share the difficult reality that the technologies that are being applied right now are not going to find the locations of all the children, that some children are likely lost to us forever.

That science itself is not always the answer to all of their questions, and they might need to look at other ways and methods to find that knowledge. Yeah, that's got to be really hard. Oh, it's so hard. How do you deal? So there's that, which is a challenge on the spot, but I wonder how you do deal with the criticism that you mentioned earlier. People who say that they've tried to discredit the use of ground penetrating radar as a way to find evidence or proof of what happened to children at residential schools. The biggest way I deal with that narrative is to say we're not looking for proof. We already have proof.

We have extensive proof. And if someone is not aware of the extensive records that already exist, then they're not paying attention. And also that the role of the ground penetrating radar is really in the where, not the if or the what. So it really helps to just narrow down parts of the landscape. And I'm not making claims that we're finding every grave of every residential school child with this technology. At the same time, I think there's a trap around evidence again,

as I mentioned earlier. And this one is that it doesn't matter the level of evidence you would provide people who don't want to believe that residential schools did this harm, it will never be enough for them. I could literally put the bones of a child in front of them that we knew died at a residential school, and they would say, oh, they died of natural causes. Oh, this, oh, that.

It's always in explaining a way of the reality of that truth because they don't want to hear that truth. So I never want the motivation to find the evidence to be to prove deniers wrong, because that will never work. What we need to instead do is remind everyone else who might be listening to those denialist narratives that there have one, been bodies found, and two, there are extensive archival records, survivor testimonies. We know way more children than are on the

residential school memorial list of the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, way more children than that died. That I think will become more and more clear as we continue to do this work. We're not out to prove that. That's already known. We're just trying to figure out where and maybe who so that families can bring them home and families can know what happened to their children. Kisha Suparnath, it's been an honor learning from you.

Thank you for what you do. Thank you for speaking with me. I came into archaeology because I was captured in the romantic idea of going off to ancient civilizations and learning of the Indiana Jones phenomenon. But I stayed in archaeology because I realized how much it could be better than it was and how much it could matter to indigenous communities, descendant communities, and to just generally how we tell the truth of the past. Archaeology has some powerful tools

of exposing those histories. Let's build better systems that are more respectful and more ethical. Let's recognize that Indigenous peoples, we have the right to our own stories and the belongings of our ancestors and the lands of our ancestors. Those are our rights,

and they need to be recognized and upheld. And then we can work to tell those stories and recognize what needs to be done to care for those belongings, those ancestors. And we can do that from the heart to lead toward restorative justice. Hi, hi, kynna skumtun. and I'm going to give you a round of applause for the wonderful work of the University of Alberta, and I'm going to give you a round of applause for the

wonderful work of the University of Alberta, and I'm going to give you a round of applause for the wonderful work of the University of Alberta, and I'm going to give you a round of applause for the wonderful work of the University of Alberta, and I'm going to give you a round of applause for the wonderful work of the University of Alberta, and I'm going to give you a round of applause for the

wonderful work of the University of Alberta, and I in November 2024 at Mount Royal University in Calgary. A National Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for former students and those affected. People can access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour National Crisis Line 1-866-925-4419. That's 1-866-925-4419. We'll also have this information on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Special thanks to Kenna Olson and Peter Glenn at Mount Royal University. This episode was produced by Alison Dempster in Calgary.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Nikola Lukcic is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.