Finding the Children: Searching for Unmarked Graves at Indian Residential School Sites in Canada

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boarding And Residential Schools: Healing, Survivance And Indigenous Persistence", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, announced that 215 potential unmarked graves were located near the Kamloops Indian Residential School using ground-penetrating radar conducted by archaeologists. While this was not the first announcement of unmarked graves associated with Indian Residential Schools, it garnered national and international attention. The subsequent months saw significant commitments of funding from the government to support Indigenous communities to conduct their own searches. Many Indigenous communities turned to archaeologists to assist them in finding potential unmarked graves of their relatives and pursue justice for their lost children. In this paper, I reivew how archaeologists have been working with Indigenous communities in Canada to locate potential grave sites and discuss the opportunities and challenges in this highly sensitive, deeply emotional work. I explore how Indigenous Nations see this as an opprotunity to heal and build stronger futures for their communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Boarding And Residential Schools: Healing, Survivance And Indigenous Persistence   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow