AIA Archaeology Hour | “Finding the Children” with Kisha Supernant
On March 27, 2024 at 8:00 p.m., I attended the webinar AIA Archaeology hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America. Kisha Supernant, the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology, professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, and a citizen of the Metis Nation of Alberta, led the talk entitled, “Finding the Children: Using Archaeology to Search for Unmarked Graves at Indian Residential School Sites in Canada”. Supernant began this work in 2018 and is dedicated to making sure her work meets the needs of the community. She opened by acknowledging that archaeology is often viewed in a colonial context, where archaeologists extract the belongings and knowledge of Indigenous descendant communities and excluded them from conversations about how their culture will be represented.
Supernant collaborated with three other scholars to edit the book Archaeologies of the Heart, which advocates for a different approach to the discipline. She advocates for showing more care for one’s self, other communities, and belongings of the past, along with building relationships with the community members. Archaeologists should accept their emotion has a part of being human that will allow them to better understand the past. Finally, archaeologists should acknowledge that “every knowledge system has internal rigor”, whether this is the Western scientific method or systems of Indigenous knowledge.
Supernant then summarized the history of the residential schools policy in Canada, which began in 1880. A report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada described the system as “Breeding out the indigenousness of those children [based on ] racist assumption that European civilization and Christian religions were superior to Aboriginal culture”. Parents were arrested for not sending children to residential schools, and many children did not survive. While residential schools transitioned into day schools during the 1970s and 1980s, the system did not end until 1996. Around 150,000 children were forced to attended, and about 25% were expected to die at the school, with cemeteries included in the initial building plans. Many families were neither notified when their child died nor told their place of burial. These schools were funded by the government of Canada and run by churches, especially Catholic and Anglican churches.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was founded after a class action lawsuit in 2007. Its 2015 report included ninety-four calls to action, including finding the locations of the missing children. The issue rose to prominence in 2021 when Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc First Nation announced that the remains of 215 children were found at a residential school in British Columbia. While the mass media inaccurately reported the facts surrounding the tragedy, Supernant used the opportunity to raise awareness around the issue. She gave about 180 media interviews for the next year and a half after this announcement, including an interview by Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes. The field has seen huge growth since this time, with archaeologists being viewed not as grave robbers but grave finders.
Finding burial sites is incredibly difficult. Some residentials schools have 600 acres of land, and many cemeteries have been leveled. Archaeologists must determine the most plausible sites of burial based on records, the testimonies of survivors, and logic. Multiple technologies for analyzing the ground are available. Drones equipped with aerial-based remote sensing or UAV photogrammetry can detect surface indications of burials if the area has never been leveled. Historical aerial photographs coupled with GIS show building footprints and changes to the landscape over the past eighty to one hundred years. Lidar is useful in forested areas that have not been leveled, while ground-penetrating radar (GPR) scans the ground to find subsurface anomalies, similar to an ultrasound. Archaeologists are still learning what traits in data can clearly be associated with a known burial context. The process is still very new, and other methods are being investigated.
Supernant closed her talk by explaining the difficulties of her work from a numbers perspective. Although extensive resources, including short videos and documentation, are available online, few people are trained in the field. She belongs to a fifteen-member working group that serves 600 First Nations whose children were sent to 140 residential schools. These schools kept children from multiple nations, and the children are frequently buried in various places on the grounds. Additionally, no one has been held accountable for the children who never came home, and the work will likely end up pinpointing which individuals were responsible.
During the Q&A, Supernant reminded viewers than Canada has no federal umbrella for this type of work, instead relying on provincial or territorial law. Those interested in learning more about the legal aspect of the process should watch for a report by Mohawk lawyer Kimberly Murray, which is scheduled to be published in June 2024. The United States also had boarding schools, and a new focus on this institutions has come from the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. Records in Canada tend to be available to the broader public, while records in the United States are limited to individual institutions. Even with this enormous body of evidence, Supernant still encounters denialism “on a weekly basis”. Incorrect facts reported by the mass media lead denialists to discount the scope and scale of the harm done to Indigenous communities, undermining the survivors and their testimony.
Supernant’s presentation had high energy and positivity while covering a sobering topic. She thoroughly described how archaeologists seek to change the perception of their field from one that takes to one that gives. Because of this talk, I feel optimistic that the field will continue to improve both as an academic discipline and as a resource for all people seeking to learn more about their past and receive closure on what happened to members of their community.