Stories and searches: How archeologists find unmarked graves

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The search for unmarked graves at the former sites of residential schools doesn’t begin with ground-penetrating radar. Or soil spectroscopy. Or electrical resistivity measurements. Or specially-trained cadaver dogs.

All those methods come later, to test and confirm each other’s evidence of what happened on — and under — this piece of land, decades ago.

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But the search itself begins with residential school survivors’ stories.

They know first-hand how their young classmates died, and what happened afterwards.

“Survivors will tell us where to begin to look,” said Micaela Champagne, a master’s student in archeology at the University of Saskatchewan and a member of the Canadian Archeological Association Working Group on Unmarked Graves. 

“They’ll say, ‘You should look in this area, where there’s tons of trees’; ‘I remember, as a young child, this is where I had to bury a classmate.’ They’ll point us in the direction.

“The most important tool we have is survivor knowledge, and that is something that is very rapidly disappearing with the death of survivors, as they’re aging.”

Champagne grew up with stories about residential schools from many of her relatives: Most memorably from her kohkum, Monique McKay, a survivor of the Île-à-la-Crosse residential school.

“It was something that was mostly kept within our families, because not many people listened to my relatives — or my kin across every nation on Turtle Island — about their experiences,” Champagne recalled. “It was either that they didn’t want to listen, or they didn’t believe them, or it just wasn’t time for them to be heard. …

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“But something happened to them. Something happened to their fellow survivors. Something happened to the children who were force-disappeared; murdered; missing.”

For Champagne, the decision to join the search for unmarked graves after more than 200 possible burial sites were identified at a former residential school at Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation in 2021 was not a question, but a certainty: She knew, as an Indigenous archeologist, this was where she had to be.

“It was the best decision I’ve ever made — in my life, not just my academic career,” she said. “This is something I can contribute to my people and my culture.”

Champagne wrestles with the history of archeology and Indigenous people. As a discipline, archeology has a history of studying Indigenous people, communities and traditions without invitation or informed consent, and Indigenous scholars are still underrepresented in the field.

But that’s not the only way this work can be done.

Archeologists can share knowledge with the communities they’re working on, participate in ceremonies and prioritize mental and spiritual well-being for everyone involved.

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“It’s making sure that we’re doing the work through a trauma-informed lens — that’s the Western way of saying it,” Champagne said. “For us, it’s just the Indigenous way of being and taking care of our relatives.”

In every community where she has worked the residential school survivors have made a point of taking care of the archeologists, too, she noted.

“Survivors — some of them refer to themselves as ‘warriors,’ which is absolutely true — come up to us in the field when we’re doing GPR scanning,” she said. “They’ll make sure we’re OK before anything else.”

It is hard, heavy, highly-technical work.

Champagne said she and her colleagues rely on “a very strict set of methods to keep that standard and to protect communities.” Everything is precisely measured, carefully recorded and repeatedly verified. Anything less would do more harm than good.

“Once we start doing any type of remote sensing, we’re bringing up trauma,” she said. “We don’t want to go into a community and do it incorrectly, because that could have a devastating impact.”

Any discrepancy or perceived discrepancy in the results also risks fuelling denialism.

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For example, scientists — in archeology, as in any discipline — tend to be extremely wary of saying they are ‘certain’ of their results, Champagne noted. 

Even when she and her colleagues have every reason to believe someone was buried in a particular spot, and no reason to believe otherwise, she’ll still call it an ‘anomaly of concern’ rather than a ‘burial.’

“You need to understand that, unless you are excavating an area of concern, you can never 100 per cent confirm what is there; that’s just the scientific method,” she said. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

Over the past few years, as Champagne and her colleagues have worked on residential school sites, they have sometimes needed RCMP or other security personnel to keep them safe from angry protests by residential school deniers.

Still, there is no large-scale plan to excavate the sites or exhume any of the bodies, she said.

“There are many different reasons why excavation is something that, as researchers, we don’t think would be possible very soon.

“First, if we begin to excavate, there are so many different steps required — even to make sure we’re not bringing up any live viruses and creating a danger for the community or the researchers.

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“In Canada, we currently don’t have enough forensic anthropologists to properly do these excavations; and then, there’s the storage of these remains. Where should the remains go? Many residential schools had kids that were sent to them from across the country.

“(And) the most important thing is that the nations and communities that we’ve worked with don’t want to disturb these children.”

Instead, the archeologists use noninvasive search methods to get as close as they can to certainty.

First, they bring in cadaver dogs trained to detect historic human remains.

“A cadaver dog will only identify human remains,” Champagne explained. “It will not identify any other kind of remains, even mammalian remains. …

“Cadaver dogs are very intelligent and very accurate; without fully digging it up, this is as certain as we can be that there are human remains in that area.”

Then, ground-penetrating radar will show where the ground was once disturbed.

“Early on, there was a misconception that unfortunately took hold, that GPR could see the bodies, that it could see bones,” Champagne said. “Unfortunately, it cannot do that. But what it can show is any type of pit that has been dug. When we’re looking for these pits, we’re looking for certain sizes, depths and orientations.”

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Finally, researchers bring in soil spectroscopy equipment, which uses specific wavelengths of light to detect mammalian fatty tissues in the ground.

“Humans have higher concentrations of adipocere within our brains, because our brains are full of fatty acids and fatty tissues,” Champagne said. “So what we can see after soil spectroscopy is a mapped-out area of where these fatty acids, which do not dissolve with rain or groundwater, have been left in place within the soil.

“Finding those small areas of fatty acids, in a place where the cadaver dog has indicated that there are human remains and GPR shows that a pit has been dug, gives us as close to 100 per cent confirmation as we can get without excavating.”

Every time she finds and marks one of these places, she thinks about putting a child’s spirit to rest, and bringing some measure of piece and comfort to their friends and families, she said.

She can keep their memory and their history alive, validate and honour the survivors she knows and loves, and carry their stories forward into a new generation.

“What these institutions were and what they did was an attempt to eradicate Indigenous people; to break our bodies; to break our spirit,” she said.

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“Obviously, they weren’t successful. I’m sitting right here. My kohkum is still here. And so are many of my other relatives.”

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