The wind picks up in the afternoon around Muskowekwan Residential School in rural Saskatchewan. When late summer storms blow in across the flat, grassy plains around the deserted school building, they lash the cottonwood trees that line the road leading up to it and whip through the school’s shattered windows and peeled-paint hallways. Sometimes, funnel clouds stretch their fingers down from the sky to graze the fields below. Prairie storms are no joke.
Dr. Kisha Supernant knows this. When the archaeologist and director of the University of Alberta’s Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology spends five days in August 2021 at Muskowekwan to search the fields behind the school for unmarked burials using ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, she and her team are closely tuned to the weather. Standing in a field with radar equipment and metal stakes becomes a workplace hazard when dark clouds roll in. Yet the specter of the violent weather isn’t the most chilling element on the Muskowekwan First Nation’s land. It’s the school building itself, a hulking collection of red bricks that haunts the landscape. Birds chirp from inside, and the building’s bones rattle and creak in the breeze. It makes the hair stand up on the back of Supernant’s neck. “It has its own power,” she says.
Muskowekwan is one of 139 former residential schools across Canada. For over 160 years, the Canadian government and the Catholic church operated the schools to assimilate more than 150,000 Indigenous children. It’s estimated that 6,000 of those children died from disease, fires, drowning, suicide, and other causes. Canadian magazine Saturday Night concluded in 1907 that since the first school openings in the 1820s, “even war seldom shows as large a percentage of fatalities as does the education system we have imposed on our Indian wards.” That assessment was prophetic. It’s a statistical fact that if you were a Canadian soldier serving in World War II, you had a better chance of survival than if you were forced into a residential school. Many of these deaths were covered up and their graves went unmarked. Supernant and her team are here to find them.
After arriving on site, Supernant and her team gather over parcels of traditional medicines like sage and sweetgrass, and burn them. Supernant cups the smoke in her hands as it curls and dances, pulling it over her face and head, letting it wash over her before it slithers away on the wind. This process, called smudging and practiced by many Indigenous Nations, is cleansing. Supernant says it sets the day’s intentions in “that good way,” but it also ensures they don’t carry any evil spirits or energies into this very sensitive work. (They smudge again to wash away the day’s energies before departing.)
Then, they unpack the gear, set up a precision GPS—a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) unit—and couple it with the GPR to keep a topographical record of the survey area. The search grid is set and squared, whether it’s covering four square meters or an acre. And the GPS and GPR are calibrated for the ground.
Supernant begins the walk, pulling the radar unit, which looks like a plastic yellow tool box, along on a survey wheel. The radar’s monitor and battery are rigged on Supernant’s chest like a baby carrier. With intentional steps, she covers the first line along the grid’s 30-meter length, walks it back, and then shifts the radar 25 centimeters over for the next line. Supernant moves slowly through the yellowing grass to give the signal adequate time to bounce back up from the ground. While she walks, two team members secure lengths of rope taut across the ground to guide the rig. The GPR pack is taxing on the back and neck, so it’s swapped between team members about every 20 lengths.
The monitor tracks every inch of land, and soon Supernant and her team squint at the screen to see if the initial unprocessed data offers any clues yet—differences in density and structure within the soil. The data visualization produced by GPR looks like the snowy, electromagnetic noise of a dead TV station. A minuscule variation in the snow-like data from the radar signal’s path through the earth and back can indicate where ground has been disturbed. GPR techs call these targets: something in the earth that’s distinct from the matter around it. That could mean a tree root, a rock, or a gopher hole. Or, it could be a grave shaft.
A target in the data looks like a fuzzy glitch, a smudge in the random noise of data. One target on its own isn’t cause for concern. But as the team criss-crosses the field at Muskowekwan, towing the GPR along the grid, another target comes up two meters later. Then another. And another.
When these anomalies crop up with uniformity of orientation, size, and depth, Supernant starts to feel a sense of heaviness. The atmosphere changes, she says. She can’t yet say with certainty what they’re finding, but the data gives her reason to suspect that they’re no longer walking in an empty field.
Ground-penetrating radar made headlines in May 2021 when the Indigenous Nation Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced its use in their detection of 215 unmarked graves. And modern, affordable GPR technologies began to emerge in the 1970s. Apollo 17 brought a GPR along on its orbit of the moon in 1972. And police have used them to search for remains. But like other computers at the time, the machines were large and cumbersome.
As the radars and processing units shrunk over the next two decades, they spread into archaeological work and changed the game: With assistance from high- frequency sound waves, archaeologists had a way to divine what was in the ground without ripping it up with a shovel. In recent years, GPR has mapped out the remains of a lost Roman city and located hidden chambers in ancient Egyptian tombs—some believe they’ve found the resting place of Queen Nefertiti. A GPR operates similarly to standard radar: The GPR unit radar shoots sound waves into the ground that ricochet back to the machine. GPRs are usually tuned to 1,000 or 500 megahertz; anything much stronger becomes an electromagnetic radiation hazard to people and creatures in the vicinity. How far the waves go or don’t go, and what they hit or don’t hit, produces differences in data that indicate the composition of whatever is beneath the target surface. On dirt fields like the ones at Muskowekwan, the GPR waves indicate where the ground has been unsettled. The varying density and oxygen levels in the soil reflect the radar’s signal differently than untouched portions.
If this sounds a bit imprecise, well, it is. Supernant says this isn’t The Curse of Oak Island, where treasure hunters detect long-buried riches. And GPR isn’t an x-ray. It doesn’t show bodies, or even coffins, if they’re present. What it shows is much more ambiguous and mysterious, a puzzle that needs decoding. Some of that decoding can be done on the fly, like watching for clear targets. But it needs further scrutiny to discern its true meaning.
After Supernant and her team leave Muskowekwan for the day, they shower, find dinner, and port the day’s data onto laptops for finer analysis. They use an array of cloud-based programs which interpret the data and produce visualizations. The data comes in as thousands of slices—individual visualizations of a length of the ground approximated by the GPR’s signal entering the soil and rebounding.
The programs apply different filters that paint a more precise picture. Sometimes the standard grayscale filter depicts clear disturbances. Other times, the visual representations of in-ground variations will be so granular that multicolor or infrared filters help the human eye to see them. Supernant is looking for visuals like a blurry rendering of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch: hyperbolas in the visualizations that indicate where the signal from the GPR has encountered a change in the ground. To narrow down their predictions, they analyze the slices and cross-reference with other slices from nearby ground. The signal is only measured in time, not distance. But that can be approximated with a measurement called the dialectic constant, which accounts for the electrical resistance of the ground and how quickly electrons rebound off a signal. Then, they can rule out certain targets. If one appears two inches below the surface, it probably isn’t a serious target. If one appears two feet down, that grabs their attention.
Huddled around laptop screens on a kitchen table, the crew starts interpreting what they’re seeing. A top-down GNSS view of the ground covered starts to paint a picture. There are distinct patches of fuzzy, blue-orange color-graded areas on the field. They’re clustered together, and roughly the same size. A knot forms in Supernant’s stomach, but she reiterates that nothing is certain yet. “We’re making educated guesses,” she says. But without ground truthing—digging into the dirt—there’s no way to be sure.
Supernant and her team, along with other Indigenous communities and archaeologists, are part of a movement to find the remains of the thousands of young victims of the residential and boarding school systems across North America. In the United States, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland is beginning similar motions to investigate what happened at more than 350 government-funded Indian boarding schools, where similar abuse and death is reported to have happened.
The movement has placed archaeology, and the field’s contemporary tools like ground-penetrating radar, at the center of a long-overdue international process of reckoning. It is also a turning point for archaeology and its relationship with Indigenous communities. Archaeologists, usually trained in Eurocentric theory and practice, have exoticized and plundered Indigenous cultures since the field’s formal inception in the early 1900s. In instances like the searches for unmarked graves of Indigenous children, Indigenous archaeologists’ expertise—both in archaeology and in their own traditions—makes them ideally equipped for the work. Supernant has strong family connections in Grouard, Alberta, so when she and her team were called to the community for six days in October 2021 to search for unmarked burials, she knew she could be finding the graves of long-lost relatives.
“I do better science because I care,” says Supernant. “I do not want to give a community false information about where their children might be, so I’m determined to do the best science I can.”
Supernant has always had a fascination with “what came before.” She was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and grew up along Canada’s West Coast. She knew her father was Indigenous, but since he had been taken from his family at birth and raised in foster care, they had no knowledge of their own culture or community. That created a “constant seeking, of wanting to know where we came from,” says Supernant. Archaeology, she says, was a pathway to her past.
While pursuing her undergraduate degree at University of British Columbia, Supernant worked at a field school involving archaeological research and excavation in partnership with Scowlitz First Nation, a nation of Coast Salish Indigenous People. Working with the community crystallized for Supernant the importance of archaeology for Indigenous Peoples. “This is a place where they’ve been for thousands of years, and this was their opportunity to connect with their ancestors,” says Supernant. During the field school, they were guided by and adhered to not just archaeological best practices, but also the community’s traditional protocols and ceremonies.
When her work took her back to Edmonton, where her dad was born, Supernant began to meet family and learn about her own connections to the place. She started a research project into her own history, which led her to think about how to engage in archaeological practice beyond the systems taught in academia. In 2018, she used GPR to look for unmarked burials for the first time in her career. Archaeology quickly became not just about investigating the past, but excavating the present.
“Archaeology has powerful means to tell stories about the past, and the scientific methods that we rely on provide really important and interesting information, but it doesn’t necessarily supersede Indigenous understandings of the past,” says Supernant.
Some Indigenous practitioners describe this as two-eyed seeing or walking on two legs: the idea of employing contemporary methods and technologies alongside Traditional Knowledge. Supernant doesn’t like those phrasings. “I can’t be an Indigenous person over here and an archaeologist over here,” she says. “I’m an Indigenous archaeologist.”
Straddling these worlds means carrying the weight of knowledge from both. Months before GPR rolls across a field, the process of finding burials begins in family rooms and community halls, in impromptu conversations or on camera, via conversations with Survivors, Elders, and Knowledge Keepers from communities who lost children to the schools.
In mid-August 2021, Saskatchewan’s treaty commissioner Mary Culbertson traveled to the northern village of Beauval to visit the site of a former residential school and listen to Survivors’ stories. The process hurts and can retraumatize, but tucked into a small, rain-battered tent on Stoney Knoll, a sacred Cree gathering spot an hour north of the province’s capital, Culbertson says that once truth-telling begins, the floodgates open: Stories of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse are shared quietly, often through tears. Memories of beatings and humiliation at the hands of school staff crop up alongside remembrances of friends who died and were buried unceremoniously in unmarked pits around the schools. Some even remember dead children being thrown into furnaces to burn the remains. Culbertson had once pledged to avoid this sort of work because of the toll it takes. Then, a colleague asked for her help with gathering testimony and stories from residential school Survivors. After that first experience, Culbertson was committed to making sure Survivors’ knowledge was listened to and protected. Without it, pieces of the past would be lost forever.
“There’s an analogy used all the time that when you lose an Elder, it’s like a library burning,” says Culbertson. “Even in non–First Nations culture, think about how many people say, ‘I wish I talked to my grandpa more.’ Oral history is the only form of knowledge transmission that we have as Indigenous Peoples. Passing on knowledge—medicines, what those grasses were, what the weather means, when it’s good to hunt—that’s all oral and it’s all practical.”
Oral histories and knowledge systems only work if there are people, empowered with their own language and traditions, to sustain them. It’s coldly ironic that Traditional Knowledge is now the keystone tool for uncovering the violence of residential schools, given that the schools were designed to dispossess Indigenous People across North America of their Traditional Knowledge. Still, the extent and impact of the loss of that knowledge in the residential and boarding school systems across the continent might never fully be grasped in statistical or written form.
Culbertson is thankful that GPR is confirming their kin’s histories and knowledge for a broader audience that has traditionally dismissed Indigenous knowledge. It’s a relief. Finally, people are listening. But the fanfare over GPR can’t exclude the knowledge system that led to its use in the first place. “You can’t have just the technology being used solely, you can’t go off of church records and combine that with GPR, because it’s not the whole story,” says Culbertson. “You have the whole story when you add the oral history, when you get the testimony of those Survivors.”
Kisha Supernant won’t get much rest over the next few months. Communities across North America are continuing to contact her for advice to find their children, and she’s already in the field most days looking for others. She stepped back from teaching at University of Alberta last fall to focus on the search for unmarked residential school graves, and in rare moments of downtime, she’s developing guidelines that communities can turn to for advice.
It’s tiring work. Every location Supernant visits, from the plains of Saskatchewan to rural northern Alberta, has a strange energy, she says, a sense of hauntedness. Not from the sight of gravestones, but from the glaring absence of them. “I’m exhausted,” says Supernant after a six-week stretch of on-site searches. “I spend my days walking over the unmarked graves of dead children.” Before leaving Muskowekwan, Supernant and her team tell the community that they have identified a number of likely burials in the field behind the rotting school. But Muskowekwan councillor Vanessa Wolfe, who was appointed as a lead on the search of the school grounds, says that last year’s GPR work was just the beginning of their journey. The search area is getting bigger, but GPR can’t easily be used while the ground is snowy and frozen, so they have to wait until spring to resume their search. They don’t know yet how many children they’ll find.
Wolfe says people from their Nation always knew there were unmarked graves. They were even in the news in the 1990s. But no one listened until last year, when GPR confirmed their knowledge. “It was just a matter of someone believing us,” says Wolfe.
Wolfe’s grandparents attended the residential school at Muskowekwan. For her, this work is vocational and searingly personal. “I’ve seen pictures of my grandparents sitting in their desks as young individuals, and I’m coming to my own understanding of these cycles of colonialism and cultural genocide,” says Wolfe. “It’s been a healing journey for me.”
Supernant knows this difficult feeling all too well. In early March 2022, she sat beside Kapawe’no First Nation Chief Sydney Halcrow and Treaty 8 First Nations Grand Chief Arthur Noskey during a press conference to announce the preliminary findings from their search of one acre of land around St. Bernard Indian Residential School in northern Alberta—the school near Grouard that her family might have had ties to. Supernant’s dark suspicion was, painfully, correct. Her relatives were in the records of children who died at the school.
“I feel the pain of loss of those who should have been my aunties and uncles,” Supernant said during the press conference. “Each of these children was a beloved part of a family, and no one has been held accountable for their deaths.” Ground-penetrating radar, added Noskey, has brought these truths to the rest of the world, “the truth we’ve always known.”
Like at Muskowekwan, the only thing they know for sure is that they don’t know the full extent of death at the school. Once the frost thaws, they can resume work. Chief Halcrow said that Survivor testimony indicates that they should search the grounds of the Anglican church nearby, and the area around the old North West Mounted Police building.
“Our little warriors,” said Halcrow, choking up, “have waited for us to find them, and now we will ensure that they rest in peace.”
Luke Ottenhof is a freelance writer in Toronto, Ontario. He's written for The Guardian, Pitchfork, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, MEL, and others.
