Introduction

This article outlines the work that anthropologists, archaeologists and others are doing to identify potential unmarked graves and burial records at Indian Residential School (IRS) sites in Canada and at boarding school sites in the United States. This discussion was part of an Executive Program Roundtable entitled ‘Bringing Past into Present. Transitions, Truth, and Reckoning with Unmarked Residential School Graves,’ convened at the 2023 joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto. This session was held as a follow-up to Kisha Supernant’s keynote address, ‘Truth before transition. Reimagining anthropology as restorative justice.’ Considering the sensitive nature of the topic, during the roundtable, we responded to a selection of written questions from the audience at the end of our conversation. To capture this dialogue, we transcribed and redacted the original webcast and have included a partial segment of the question period in this article.

This conversation builds on public policy initiatives around residential and boarding school sites in North America over the past decade. In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) issued 94 calls to action implicating multiple national institutions, including religious institutions. Calls to Action 71–76 deal with missing children and IRS grave sites and include a call for private and public actors to share information about missing children and potential grave sites with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). National and global awareness of and concern regarding Indigenous children’s graves around IRS sites in Canada exploded with a 2021 announcement from the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc community that 215 potential unmarked children’s graves were found using ground penetrating radar (GPR) around the former Kamloops IRS. Supernant (Reference Supernant2024) notes that, while the news was deeply retraumatizing for Survivors and communities, it also resulted in media interest and promises of government funding that inspired communities to begin their own searches for graves (401). Building on these fact-finding initiatives in 2022, the government of Canada and the NCTR announced a National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (n.d.).

Because archaeology is a field with technical expertise and experience in locating potential graves, archaeologists are one of the groups that has been asked to support Indigenous communities in their searches (Supernant Reference Supernant2024, 401). Within a few weeks of the Kamloops announcement, the Canadian Archaeological Association (CAA) formed a working group to focus on unmarked graves (Supernant Reference Supernant2024, 401), of which Supernant and some other participants in this conversation are members (Canadian Archaeological Association [CAA] 2025). The CAA (2021) subsequently released a document to guide the process of locating unmarked graves around IRS sites, including with GPR, a technology that became central to media coverage of the topic after the announcement from Kamloops (Supernant Reference Supernant2024, 401). ‘Geophysics for Truth,’ a similar all-volunteer group in that academic field, offers ‘pro bono geophysical surveys training and expertise for Indigenous Community projects across Canada’ (Queen’s University 2024, para. 1), including GPR, for finding graves around IRS sites. To counter the impression that GPR was the primary method for finding graves, the CAA (2021) document begins with community-based work as the first step (Supernant Reference Supernant2024, 401).

Informed by the TRC and the announcement of the unmarked graves around the former Kamloops school, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland enacted the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative (US Department of the Interior [USDI] 2021). This is the first federal effort to formally recognize the harm done to Indigenous people from Indian boarding schools in the United States, which enacted a similar assimilationist agenda to Canadian residential schools. As stated by Haaland, the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative is tasked with ‘shed[ding] light on the unspoken traumas of the past’ (USDI 2021, para. 3). Haaland’s initiative builds on the advocacy work of the Native American Boarding School and Healing Coalition, including their repatriation work with the Northern Arapaho and Sicangu Lakota at Carlisle (The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition [NABS] 2023) and their 2019 United Nations Filing on Missing Children (NABS 2019).

These policy initiatives have inspired several archaeologically oriented studies of the Indian education system in the United States over the past five years, including those presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) (2023). In a SHA session organized by Nick Laluk and Jun Sunseri, entitled ‘Boarding and Residential Schools. Healing, Survivance and Indigenous Persistence,’ panelists shared a range of papers looking at the Indian education system across the United States and Canada. These case studies are currently being written into a special section in American Indian Quarterly and complement a growing body of research on the history and materiality of Indian boarding schools (e.g. Cowie et al Reference Cowie, Teeman and LeBlanc2019; Montgomery and Colwell Reference Montgomery and Colwell2019; Two Bears Reference Two Bears2021; White and Bethke Reference White, Bethke, Aikas and Sami2019).

Current academic and community-led truth-finding efforts point to the unique role that anthropology (including archaeology) can play in aiding communities who are searching for missing children and potential graves around IRS sites. In her keynote address, Supernant advocates for the role of anthropologists as helpers, a role that relies upon respectful and trusting relationships to be of service (Supernant Reference Supernant2024, 402). As she argues in a subsequent publication, the work that archaeologists do to support communities in their searches ‘is not research in a traditional sense,’ rather ‘it is using the tools of research to address a specific need as a form of service’ (Supernant Reference Supernant2024, 401). However, Supernant also points out that anthropology as a discipline has caused harm due to its historical involvement in the extraction of Indigenous knowledge, history and materials – e.g., the removal of Indigenous ancestors from gravesites. She (2024, 403) goes on to argue that the current moment represents an opportunity for anthropologists to participate in truth-telling and to heal the harm that has been done by the discipline.

Supernant (Reference Supernant2024) concludes by calling for anthropologists ‘to join [Indigenous people] in seeking redress for the harms caused by the discipline and by colonization…, [to] assist in returning the knowledge stolen and researching the hidden truths of past and present, [and] work to change the discipline’ (403-404). Building on Supernant’s arguments, the following discussion addresses the findings from Kamloops, and the wider use of GPR and similar technologies in current work on residential and Indian boarding school sites in North America. A key theme interwoven throughout this conversation was the use of archaeological methods to support the testimonies of Indigenous Survivors of residential schools and their communities, rather than as the first indication of what happened to Indigenous children at IRS sites (Supernant Reference Supernant2024, 400).

Clinton Westman (C.W.): Welcome to our conversation on the work that anthropologists and archaeologists are doing to identify potential graves at Indian Residential School (IRS) sites in Canada and at boarding school sites in the United States. This conversation is a follow-up to Kisha Supernant’s keynote address. As a member of the Executive Program Committee, I was asked to organize a roundtable discussion of the issues raised in Kisha’s talk, in a way that would also allow for moderated questions from the audience, which was not possible last night. I’m very grateful to Kisha and the other panelists who agreed to share their time.

I’ll be chairing this discussion. I am a cultural anthropologist, and most of my fieldwork has been in Cree and Métis communities of northern Alberta, more specifically at Trout Lake and Peerless Lake. While residential schools were not the main topic of my research, I did interview a number of Elders who referred to their time at schools. I’ll now ask each panelist to briefly introduce themselves before asking some questions about their work.

Andrew Martindale (A.M.): I am a member of the British Columbia Technical Working Group on Missing Children and Unmarked Burials and the Canadian Archaeological Association Working Group on Unmarked Graves, and I sit on the National Advisory Committee for Residential School Missing Children and Unmarked Burials. I work in partnership with the xʷməθkʷəýəm (Musqueam) to provide training and capacity building for search teams in IRS landscapes, and I have been called as a witness to assist the Penelakut Tribe in their work at the site of the Kuper Island Industrial School.

I began this work in 2006 at the request of spune’luxutth’ (Penelakut), who sought ways to identify the resting places of their Ancestors without disturbing the ground. Like all Indigenous communities, the xʷməθkʷəýəm have a long and rich history of scholarship and science and are especially skilled at working in complex empirical contexts with many influencing causalities through observational and evaluative logics. We (the Musqueam–UBC [University of British Columbia] partnership team) developed best practice protocols for geophysics that we shared widely. We were invited to work with neighbouring communities and in 2013 accepted an invitation to work at Kuper – work that is ongoing. The spune’luxutth’ sulxwe’en (Penelakut Elders’ Committee) has sought both to locate the children who disappeared from the Kuper IRS and to guide the use of technology for this purpose through their experience and scholarship. Much of what is now standard in this work traces back to these Indigenous leaders.

Like many at this table, it was never my intent to do this work nor to develop these technical skills. I embarked on this path both at the invitation of Survivors and because of the importance of this work. I want to observe two things. First, the current model of ad hoc technical support that relies on academics such as myself is inadequate for the necessary minimum work ahead. The country needs a better resourced, Indigenous-led capacity to assist communities conducting searches with scholarship, training, equipment, management and support. Second, non-Indigenous Canada in the form of its governments has consistently sought to indemnify itself from the responsibilities for and consequences of colonialism. While finding missing children is an essential and sacred task, the larger task is to confront colonialism itself and to seek the kind of country that might have existed had it not been for colonization and the institutional violence of programs like residential schools. No amount of technical sophistication will take us to this destination.

Scott Hamilton (S.H.): My involvement in IRS research began in about 2013, when I was asked by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to synthesize information to identify burial places of children who died while attending the schools. It turned out to be a considerably more daunting task than I had initially thought, in large measure because of the information void that existed at that time. I was reduced to looking at remote sensing information. I used Google Earth: first to identify where these sites were, and then to search the surrounding area for any indication in the satellite imagery where the grave places might be. This transformed after 2021 with the news of the Kamloops Residential School investigations. That led to a number of communities across Canada deliberating what they wanted to do and how they wanted to address the question of their missing children. Since then, I have been engaged in writing technical briefings and making presentations about the technology being used in the searches, and its strengths and weaknesses. This also includes discussion of the investigation workflows that could be effective under various circumstances.

These activities have taken over my personal research program as more communities become directly engaged in this process and begin to address the significant challenges of building internal technical capacity, identifying how they want to do the investigations and who they want to work with. This, I suspect, will go on for more time than I have left in my career and will probably continue for several decades into the future.

Lindsay Martel Montgomery (L.M.M.): I work primarily with Indigenous communities in the American West. I first got into research on Indigenous boarding schools in 2015 through a postdoctoral research project with Chip Colwell at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. That project looked at a collection created by Jesse H. Bratley, an Indian school teacher on reservations in Washington, Oklahoma, New Mexico and South Dakota. One of the goals of this project was to incorporate Indigenous voices into the interpretation of Bratley’s collection, which was created during a very dynamic period in Native history – a violent period, but also a period of Indigenous adaptation and resilience in the face of assimilation. We used this opportunity to reach out to descendants of the communities where Bratley had worked and begin a dialogue with them about their experiences in government-funded schools.

Day schools are a facet of this research that has not been explored to the same degree as residential schools. Day schools were on-reservation schools, sponsored by the United States government, that had the same assimilationist programming and curriculum as residential schools, but operated only 10 months of the year, from 8 to 4 p.m., and allowed students to return to their families. So, there is a different dynamic within these schools. However, they also contributed heavily to the assimilationist mission of the federal government. These are spaces that, like residential schools, also have deaths associated with enrolled students and potentially unmarked graves.

Terry Clark (T.C.): I’ve been working closely with Coast Salish communities since the mid-1990s. At Kisha’s talk last night, she mentioned the idea of a helper as someone who can be part of the process and help Indigenous issues move forward. I’m happy that the work that I’ve done with the shíshálh Nation in British Columbia has been fundamental in their suing the government, and in charges being brought against developers who have destroyed sacred cemetery sites. It was that sort of community-based work that got me involved with residential schools.

I was asked by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to do some survey work at Muscowequan Residential School in Saskatchewan. I reached out to Kisha, and we worked on the project together. This was in 2018, I believe. Since then, I’ve been working with the NCTR and with Crown–Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. I’m also a founding member of the Canadian Archeological Association Working Group. Currently we are working with more than a dozen Survivor communities, and there are at least that many more on the waitlist to work with us. We’re all using GPR and other technologies that can create a certain level of confidence that what you’re finding – the anomalies – are in fact burials, but there is no way to confirm them presently. One thing that we’re doing to advance this cause is to work with a company called S4 Mobile Labs to use soil spectroscopy, a minimally invasive technology that characterizes the presence of human remains even after complete decomposition in the soils. This is something that we and many communities are excited about. The list of communities that want this technology is rapidly growing, and I think it will be a huge part of the next 10 years, as communities may not want to excavate, even while they want certainty. Communities may want to leave the children in the ground, as they’ve been disturbed enough, but they still want to know for sure that these, in fact, are their children.

Micaela Champagne (M.C.): I am a Cree and Métis woman. I’m a registered Member of Canoe Lake First Nation in northern Saskatchewan but raised in Saskatoon. I’m currently a graduate student, and Dr. Clark is one of my supervisors. After the truths from Tk’emlúps were announced, it became important to me to work with Terry on some of his Indigenous archaeology projects. In addition to that work, I also work with the Office of the Special Interlocutor as a policy analyst. This is one of the offices appointed within the federal government to investigate unmarked graves associated with residential schools as well as other sites, such as sanatoriums, tuberculosis hospitals and unrecognized schools.

Another part of my background is that, with this work, I’m honouring Survivors and their truths: carrying some of the weight that they have been holding and sharing their truths with our families. Our families have been waiting so long to be told and to be listened to. My kookum (grandmother) is a Survivor of the Ⓘle-à-la-Crosse Residential School in northern Saskatchewan. That school is not currently recognized federally, as it taught Métis, as well as non-status and status First Nation students. Unlike Survivors of federally recognized residential schools within Canada, my kookum does not get the same level of support or recognition for her suffering, although it was the same as at any other residential school. By doing this work, I hope that one day, schools like hers will finally be properly recognized, and these Survivors will be supported and held before it’s too late. Many of our Survivors are passing away and beginning their journey into the spirit world.

With another analyst at the University of Saskatchewan, we use GPR, and we carefully analyse all data. We call it data even though we know that much of what we pick up and scan are likely children. But there’s also a level of separation to make sure that we, as scientists and researchers, don’t totally lose our minds, because this is very heavy work that we do.

Kisha Supernant (K.S.): I am a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta. I chair the Canadian Archaeological Association Working Group on Unmarked Graves and sit on the National Advisory Committee for Residential School Missing Children and Unmarked Burials. I’ve spent my career working with communities in a variety of different ways. I specialized in spatial analysis, GIS [Geographic Information System] and mapping landscape approaches to archaeology: using a lot of technology to explore the past. I was always the one hauling electronic stuff out into the field. As a relatively early adopter of new technologies, I had the sort of skill set that could help provide information to answer questions communities had about finding ancestors.

I had never intended, coming into archaeology, to do work with ancestors – in fact, I actively avoided it because I found it too difficult. However, communities kept asking if I could find their relatives, and as you know, when communities ask, we do our best as helpers to find ways to help. In 2018, Terry reached out about becoming involved with the work at Muscowequan Indian Residential School, working with the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation to imagine how we might build a program to support ground searches for missing children. William (Liam) Wadsworth also joined my team that year. Liam had a background in geophysical techniques from the University of Toronto and joined the graduate program. We were therefore able to start geophysical survey work at the request of the Muskowekwan First Nation in the summer of 2018. I had expected, after that point, that we might get more contact from communities about doing residential school work. We did hear from communities, but they were interested instead in locating burial grounds, historic cemeteries or other places where they knew there may be unmarked graves not directly connected to IRS. Therefore, between 2018 and the announcement from Tk’emlúps in 2021, we did a number of projects for communities who were concerned about other forms of burial places, and then Tk’emlúps…

At that point, with those truths being shared, the amount of attention that was being paid, and the amount of funding that was being announced, it was clear that there was support needed for the various Nations who were undertaking this work, often for the first time. There was also a need to counter some of the information that was circulating, including the impression that GPR could magically find bodies. That impression was of significant concern to those of us who have been trying to do this work with best scientific practice. We were careful to clarify what we could and could not know from the various technologies, and also careful that it was not being used to prove anyone’s truth. Those truths are real. They don’t need proving, but sometimes additional evidence helps with identifying where those children might be and sometimes helps to convince non-Indigenous people that those truths are real. So, since 2021, my team and I have been involved in 13 searches – primarily in Alberta, which is where, according to my family, my great-grandmother went to Grouard Indian Residential School. I’ve done work there, and then other communities in Alberta have asked me to be involved. However, I don’t have the capacity, and there are many more who would like us to work with them. Ideally, our time would be spent supporting communities to build internal capacity because in my view it would be great if every community didn’t have to rely on an outsider to do this work but could do it themselves. Unfortunately, there are significant challenges to that as well, and because of these, there is a huge variability in capacity across the country. What brings me here is a desire to help wherever I can to support communities, Survivors and families, and to learn about where their children might be, for healing and also for justice and accountability. One of the issues we’re facing is that there has been no accountability – no true accountability and justice – for the missing children or for Survivors.

As Micaela shared, and Lindsay pointed out, we have the same issue in Canada regarding day schools. There are many day school Survivors, and often they’re not part of the same process as those from residential schools. Day schools were operating into the 1990s. There is a lot more work to be done on them, and I hope that there’s continued momentum. There’s always a concern that communities won’t have the resources that they need over the long term for what is a complex, decades-long process of truth-telling and justice.

C.W.: Thank you, everyone. There were a couple of panelists who couldn’t make it to Toronto to be with us. One of them is Nick Laluk. He has asked me to read the following statement.

Nick Laluk (N.L.): The topics of Indigenous Boarding and Residential schools are a complex and tragic part of North America’s history. For me, as an Ndee (Apache) community member, the difficulties and struggles of talking about the past are a part of my everyday reality. As children, we were taught to avoid areas of the past, especially those associated with our Ancestors, due to the potential harm that can happen at individual, family and community levels if such areas are disturbed. However, here I am years later, working as an anthropologist-archaeologist. I think about my career choice often. Why do I do work that could potentially be harmful to my community? As I have heard from various Ndee Elders and cultural experts, ‘we need to be involved now more than ever.’ For me, working with former boarding school attendees/Survivors is very personal. I have various family members who attended Theodore Roosevelt Boarding School, located on White Mountain Apache Trust lands in Arizona. Some have passed, some share their stories and some choose not to. A huge motivator for my current ethnographic project was my mother. Although, when I was growing up, she would share glimpses of her stories and experiences, she often held back. I always wondered why, but never pushed, and just knew she might want to talk about such experiences with me someday. She passed about a year before the project was started. I never got to sit and chat with her or interview her, but I feel her with me on this journey: a kind of relational, heartfelt, inherently DNA-based understanding that comes to life through our family, blood, clans, kinships, reciprocal obligations and relationships to everything bestowed on us since the beginning of time.

So, what roles do anthropology and archaeology have in this work? I think this is such a case-by-case question that needs to be approached with the utmost care and respect. For me, it is about doing anything I can to help my community to try and arrive at states of Gozhoo: Beauty, Balance and Harmony. When I work with Elders, one of the main things they talk about is how the youth are not learning their culture now. How do we counter this imbalance to honour those of the past, while surviving in the present and into the future to be in a place of Gozhoo? As an Indigenous individual who continues to challenge the ongoing nature of settler colonialism and imperialism, which is grounded in ongoing harm to Indigenous people, I will leave it at that. I constantly see the ongoing effects of colonialism on my Tribe and family. Would my mother be alive today if the structural and systemic nature of civilizing Indigenous people were not experienced on an everyday basis? My words are traveling across various states and an international border to reach you at the conference. That is a vast area filled with many stories and experiences of Indigenous persistence, resilience, survivance, hurt and trauma. I like to think they are traveling to you through the memory of my mother and what our Ancestors did to allow us to endure. Be respectful and humble. Allow yourself to go outside yourself to attempt to see why it is so important for Indigenous ancestors to share their stories and why this is so critical to continue to decolonize and Indigenize the discipline. I want to continue to challenge the non-Indigenous folks doing this work to always embrace the past as the present, to collaborate to improve Indigenous lives and move towards tangible real-time benefits for Indigenous communities now and in the future.

C.W.: Also absent is Winona Wheeler, a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba. She is trained as a historian, and so she reflects more about the archival approaches to IRS research. I read from Winona’s statement here:

Winona Wheeler (W.W.): I am principal investigator of an ongoing project led by the Office of the Treaty Commissioner in Saskatchewan (OTC) to support First Nations currently engaged in GPR and oral history research on four former IRS sites. When First Nations in Saskatchewan began GPR searches on former IRS sites, they requested archival research assistance from the OTC, which has extensive archives and historical research capacity. Since the OTC is committed to not applying for any federal Missing Children funds targeted for First Nations research, it partnered with me and secured a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Engage Grant. The goal of this project is to collect and document church records relating to four IRS in the Prince Albert Catholic diocese in Saskatchewan to find any information on the missing and deceased children. The collection and review of church records will support GPR and community oral history research that is currently in process at Thunderchild First Nation (Delmas IRS), Onion Lake First Nation (St. Anthony’s IRS), Lac la Plonge in English River First Nation (Beauval IRS) and Beardy’s and Okemasis’ Cree Nation (St. Michael’s IRS, at Duck Lake). These are all in northern and central northern Saskatchewan. There are two main components to this research project. The first is the collection of archival documents relating to IRS, including church records. The second is the transcription and translation of these records, most of which were created by members of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Grey Nuns and the Sisters of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, in the Prince Albert Diocese, and written in French. Many of the Prince Albert diocese records have been transferred to the NCTR in Winnipeg – however, not all. Most of the records of the Catholic Church and its orders have been scattered across church and provincial archives throughout the country. The OTC has encountered several barriers in accessing church records relating to all four sites to date. In June 2021, Bishop Thévenot of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Prince Albert announced he would share their records. Two days later, the OTC contacted his office only to find out that he had officially retired three months earlier, and his office denied that he had agreed to share the documents. The diocese office manager stated also that some records were microfilmed and were available at the provincial archives, while others were held at St. Paul University in Ottawa. St. Paul University denied having any such records, and the provincial archives required us to get written permission from the diocese to access the restricted microfilm collection. What followed was a series of additional blocks to our access and ability to copy the documents until we finally received digital copies at the end of August 2022, over a year later. Accessing the Beauval IRS records was even more of a wild goose chase that took us from the Prince Albert Catholic diocese to the Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas archives in The Pas, Manitoba, the Centre du Patrimoine in St. Boniface, Manitoba, the Provincial Archives of Alberta and the Soeurs de St.-Joseph de St.-Hyacinthe, in Quebec. It included non-disclosure agreements, missed meetings on the part of the church and a lot of run-arounds.

Since the Catholic records were written in French, the OTC research team partnered with French-language scholars Dr. Jérôme Mélançon at the University of Regina and Dr. Anne-Marie Wheeler from the University of Saskatchewan. Four graduate students are currently working under their linguistic direction, with historical context and palaeography provided by Dr. Sheldon Krasowski of the OTC and myself. Each translator is focused on one residential school, and they all adhere to the guide for residential school document transcription and translation workflow that we specifically developed for this project. As part of the MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] between the OTC and NCTR, we agreed to provide the NCTR with copies of the translated documents. English archival research and French translation work will continue until April 2025. By then, we will have also identified as many missing and deceased children as we could find in the church records and government documents, and we will have compared our list with community oral histories. No doubt the community oral histories will identify additional lost ones on whom we will focus the final phase of our research. Final reports, lists and document transcripts will be handed over to the First Nation communities leading the GPR and oral historical research on the four Indian residential schools in this study.

C.W.: Following on Winona’s statement, I can also make a couple of comments based on my research in archives in Alberta. For the most part, I was not specifically looking for information about residential schools. Nevertheless, the sensitivities of residential school legal and political issues have been apparent through the research process. Like Winona’s examples, the archives I found were scattered in several archdiocese offices, Franco-Albertan cultural centres, as well as major archives in Edmonton and Calgary, with differing levels of access. I got access to the archives held by the Archdiocese of Grouard-McLennan and found a rich trove of documents. These are overwhelmingly in French. Until at least the 1970s, French was the lingua franca of the Oblate order, which was the main (male) Catholic missionary order active in Canada. More recently, I tried to pin down some of the documents that I had and to find a good way to reference them. I contacted the archdiocese, and they said the archives had been centralized to a new facility in Grande Prairie. I contacted the archivist there, who was curious about what I was up to, but refused to provide bibliographic information for, or even to confirm the existence of, a document that I already had in my possession. So, this kind of run-around is real. I’m not sure how it fits into the recent commitments made by the Roman Catholic Church to open their archives.

In addition to the access problem, in western Canada, the French issue is big: A lot of researchers don’t have reading knowledge of French, so there’s a necessity for new types of collaboration, as Winona outlines.

Now I’ll begin asking some questions to the panelists, and we’ll have a bit more of an open discussion. The first question I want to ask, and some of the panelists have already touched on it, is the following: In terms of the technical aspects of these studies, looking for the missing children, what are the promises and limitations of GPR and other technologies involved in these searches? In what ways can greater certainty be achieved?

A.M.: I know we’re going to talk about some of the technical issues that Clint raises, and this is a technical subject, but I just wanted to start by observing that it’s not solely a technical issue. I think there’s an interest in turning to technical solutions for a couple of reasons. First, it works to indemnify non-Indigenous Canada by positioning the search for missing children as a technical endeavour. This creates a conversation that contains and restricts the larger issue, which is the colonial history of our country. The reason for residential schools, foundationally, was to facilitate the theft of resources and lands and remove Indigenous peoples from their territories. The temptation to look at it as only technical, I think, serves a colonial purpose of erasing the foundational issues of racism and colonial disenfranchisement that we want to be attentive to. I think it also serves an archaeological purpose in that it allows some of us to have a degree of expertise and accrue privilege in this conversation, which, while valuable, is overstated. The knowledge of the truth of residential schools is already in communities among Survivors. Technical methods provide a degree of clarity to what is already known, but we should be cautious. The landscape is an emotional one. It is one in which non-Indigenous Canada, for generations, has resisted understanding this history and the acts of violence that it perpetuated for its own benefit. Canada has resisted reconciling with itself, its own colonial project and the foundational racism that is built into the fabric of this country: that we as a nation created state-sponsored concentration camps for children, that we embarked upon a police state endeavour to facilitate our wealth. We are a rich country. All of us benefit from the institutional structures that were facilitated and made possible by this original crime. There is a lot of emotional resistance in non-Indigenous Canada. Indigenous communities have been telling this story for generations and have been searching for missing children since the first disappearance. Before Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc’s results, there were, by my count, 17 IRS search projects across the country, largely partnerships between colleagues such as we have here and communities doing this work. In my own experience over the last two decades, I found no support. My institution did not want to support this work; federal research grant funding was not applicable. Nobody in non-Indigenous Canada that I asked was willing to help.

Now they are, which is an improvement. But we also want to ask ourselves why it took so long. And that’s a question that involves non-Indigenous Canadians – specifically, white Canadians who have been the largest beneficiaries of this – to do some internal work before we externalize the endeavour as a technical one that searches the land. I just wanted to start by observing that it is not the only focus and maybe not the primary focus of the work ahead.

S.H.: I’d like to follow up on Andrew’s comments by making the point that a lot of the public attention into this question has focused upon technological solutions, quite inappropriately, because virtually all these technologies have flaws. They have strengths, but they also have flaws. They generate massive quantities of information that remain quite ambiguous in interpretation. And we need to get the workflow sequence sorted out a bit more effectively. Really, the framing of the question is still a work in progress driven by deliberations within Indigenous communities. Then, once we have a sense of the questions that people want answered, we can start thinking about the most appropriate sequence of investigative activities. Almost universally, the most important part of that process is the collection and integration of lived experience with the records that are residing in many archives. Once we have that interpretive frame, then we need to start thinking strategically about how to appropriately use the right technologies to answer the specific questions that are being asked, in the pieces of ground that are the highest probability. We don’t have enough time, resources or money to address the magnitude – the enormous magnitude – of landscapes that may contain these unmarked graves. We need to think about this process as a phased, very strategic and well-thought-through process.

T.C.: I think it’s important to note that we’re talking about a number of different technologies – all of us that do this work understand that – and we try to layer these technologies. I know that GPR is the one that people talk about the most. It is probably the most useful and mainstream, but as Scott said, it has some fatal flaws. It does not find human remains; it finds a burial pit. It finds the hole that was dug to bury the child. In fact, all these technologies, for the most part, look for that. And so, if historic disturbance comes through and disturbs that stratigraphy – the field is plowed, for instance – the remains are still there, but they’re mixed up and invisible to GPR in the plow zone. This is why we are constantly suggesting multiple lines of evidence. We use historic-remains-recovery dogs; they can smell the presence of remains after a century or more, and they aren’t impeded by historic disturbance. They can still find locations, but they’re not as exact as GPR or as magnetometry or others.

We heard that Survivor testimony is probably the number one line of evidence. We hear from Survivors that, when they were kids, they saw this, or they were actively digging burials. In many of these cases, they had children dig graves for their friends. We trust that testimony. All that our technologies are doing is helping narrow down exactly where that is, so that it can be protected and is not subject to the future disturbance of putting in a waterline or something else. Again, the children have been disturbed enough. What we are doing now is figuring out how to layer these technologies – the right workflow, the one that makes the most sense – so that we can narrow down, as Scott said, a smaller subject area. Many of these schools have fields that are several football fields in size, and would take months with traditional GPR to do, and cost millions of dollars. If we can focus and get results more quickly, we can help communities more quickly.

L.M.M.: This is less of a comment about the technical limitations because I think Kisha’s talk yesterday pointed out some of the major issues with things like GPR. This is more a comment on how these technologies are creating a shift in the conversation, in the United States context, towards truth and reconciliation. Until very recently, there has been no government-led efforts in the United States to compile facts about boarding schools and day schools. But there have been 40 years of independent historical research documenting the stories, oral histories and archival residues of these boarding schools. Over the past 5 or 10 years, there has been a move towards more systematic Indigenous-led investigations of the boarding school era through organizations like the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, who have identified missing death records and unmarked graves and who have facilitated the repatriation of Indigenous ancestors. This marks a shift in the types of questions people are asking. They are starting to move beyond ‘What was life in these schools actually like?’ to think about ‘How do we, as scholars and activists, address this history?’ ‘How do we start responding to long-standing requests from Indigenous people to return their children and work towards reconciliation?’

M.C.: From the technical perspective of a scientist, we have strict methods to go through with these different technologies, such as GPR or soil spectroscopy. But also, coming from an Indigenous worldview is the understanding that Survivor truths are some of those layers of evidence, although non-Indigenous people may not consider them something that is as hard-hitting as GPR. From my worldview, it was always understood that these are truths, and these are ways to support the evidence. And the technological side isn’t really, for Indigenous people, the way that we know where many of these burials and graves are. This is just a way to confirm for non-Indigenous people, to validate the experiences of Indigenous people at these residential schools. Y’all should be believing the Survivors anyway! But I think that there’s just so much to consider when we’re in the field, and an Elder will come up to me and pull me away from the group with my colleagues. Sometimes I’m the only Indigenous person there, and we’re working with a new community, and people will see an Indigenous face and feel more comfortable. They’ll point to an area; they’re like, ‘You should go look over there.’ And when we take that technology over there, almost instantly, we’ll start picking up things on GPR. This technology is just validation for non-Indigenous people; we’ve always known the truth.

K.S.: I have only a couple of things to add because a lot has already been shared. We are losing Survivors. While it is not my job to tell communities what to do, I do remind them that, while GPR will be here in the future, Survivors might not. Survivor testimonies are essential for this work, and there needs to be attention paid to gathering those testimonies. The other challenge I see, on the technical side, is that, while these technologies have been used in Canada in a variety of places, it is not extensive compared with other parts of the world. There aren’t as many practitioners here, and we are still learning about what the different types of technology can do. I’m currently working with our team to bring in new equipment. We need to build our knowledge, but residential schools are not – and cannot become – experimental landscapes. We need to find solutions to improve our technical capacity because communities are asking us to use technology to help them. We need to be able to do the best we can and layer these technologies in ways that make sense in the various landscapes in which we work. But we can’t do this as experiments on residential school landscapes; there’s already been enough experiments done at residential schools that have caused a huge amount of harm. So, trying to find other ways to test the technology, we’re exploring a partnership with the Archdiocese of Edmonton to use old Catholic cemeteries in the city as places where we can refine the application of different technologies. This would allow us to see how they layer together so that we can do a better job of giving communities the best possible outcome when they want science, when they want technology. We have all seen some negative outcomes from problematic approaches to GPR, including how it is being used and how the results are being announced. Communities need the information to make informed decisions, so we need to do our best to provide reliable information about the scientific applications of these technologies.

One final comment is that this is really focused on the act of searching the land to try to find. We also get questions, at least I do, when I go into the community, about how we identify. This raises a whole other set of questions that touch on additional issues and technologies, but communities are looking for answers in that as well. What can DNA do? Can we learn who these children are? These are extremely complex questions that are not necessarily the expertise of this panel. However, there are others in the discipline of anthropology who have relevant expertise, and communities need access to that expertise as well.

T.C.: Unfortunately, our work is not in a vacuum. The communities want to know where their burials are. Funding has been announced, and lots of companies have GPR. It’s principally used in construction; it finds underground pipes; it can look through concrete or road surfaces. If we don’t step in and help with our expertise on finding graves, then people with expertise on finding construction utility pipes step in and get huge contracts and do the work – and yet they’re looking for something completely different. They don’t have the experience in finding very small, discrete, shallow, difficult-to-identify burial features. They’re looking for obvious things, and so they bring the wrong tool or the wrong operator. We’ve seen enough of this: Money that goes to First Nations gets extracted to big companies. This is why we’re trying to get up to speed and work with as many communities as possible. It’s not like we have any free time – we’re all working off the sides of our desks – but we’re worried that communities will be taken advantage of if we don’t do this work.

C.W.: Changing directions a bit – and this question has been anticipated by the panelists – I want to ask about the impact of the recent findings, and particularly at Kamloops. I’ve been working with Indigenous communities since the 1990s. After the findings from the Kamloops Indian Residential School were announced, many people I know from different aspects of my life expressed sadness, anger, outrage and shame – and some even offered their condolences to me. I think it was a moment for many Canadians to grapple with things they maybe already knew but were trying to process. I’d like to hear reflections on why we’re seeing this upsurge in discourse and activism around residential schools at this time, despite this having been known for decades by Survivors and increasingly documented by commissions of inquiry and by researchers over the years. I think awareness of the true enormity of residential schools is still settling into the non-Indigenous Canadian population, and now is known worldwide since the Kamloops findings. I would like the panelists to comment on why it crystallized in this way. Is it the number, with hundreds of graves being found in one site? Or is there something else going on? I’ve seen the amount of media coverage, just to take one example, that Terry has been getting for his work, including international media. So, I’m wondering why, and why it took this issue to force Canadians, or at least many non-Indigenous Canadians, to grapple with this topic.

A.M.: We might ask the question, ‘Why did it take so long?’ rather than, ‘Why recently?’ The evidence was ample for generations. And really, it is a question that non-Indigenous Canada needs to ask itself. This was an active effort of erasure, an active effort of denial for generations, that had benefits to the non-Indigenous population. And that is, I think, a long-standing challenge. The answer will, I hope, help us chart a vision for this country. We are not the country that many non-Indigenous peoples believed we were, or that we were taught as children. We are a very different country. To arrive at that truth is part of the process, and then to imagine a future that might help us build a country that could have existed had it not been for residential schools: that’s the larger endeavour.

Why now? Hopefully, it is a generational transition, perhaps one that draws on parallel forms of reckoning for abuses of power in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. I have no great insight, other than it came as a great surprise to many of us, that it happened so quickly, and that there was such a widespread epiphany. On August 2, 2021, the Penelakut Tribe hosted a march, a walk for the children in Chemainus, and the expectation was that there would be about 200 people. Four thousand people showed up – most of them non-Indigenous, all wearing orange shirts. It was very emotional, very powerful. Something happened, the nature of which is challenging to understand, but I fear that, as quickly as it appeared, it might disappear.

L.M.M.: To me, the growing attention around residential and boarding schools is situated within growing grassroots activism through social media and hashtag campaigns that elevate Indigenous concerns in the public eye. This kind of activism is emerging alongside policy efforts like UNDRIP – the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People – and the adoption of UNDRIP by government entities (e.g. royal assent following passage by the Canadian parliament in 2021) and organizations (e.g. adoption by the Society of American Archaeology in 2021). The appointment of Secretary Deb Haaland and her Federal Indian Boarding School initiative have also helped to bring more institutional attention to residential schools as well as the related issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. I think that these kinds of institutional efforts have been amplified by social media movements that have accelerated in the past five years.

T.C.: When Kisha and I worked at Muscowequan in 2018, we did some press, we did some national news, but it only lasted the regular media cycle – it didn’t get legs, as they say, like Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. And in that time period from 2018 to 2021, we had Black Lives Matter, we had the Me Too movement. I think that people in North America were becoming a little more self-analytical; they were looking inward and seeing that maybe the historical narratives of living in great countries had real systematic problems. I think that really helped. And, also, Tk’emlúps had a number. I know that the media loves numbers; they always beg, ‘What’s the number? What’s the number?’ And we say, ‘The number’s not important. We didn’t find them all. We know that there are disturbances, and we know that there’s at least this many anomalies that we think are likely burials.’ We have never tried to promote numbers. I feel like it was a problem that our first work had no number to give. But when you think of 215 children, or 215 pairs of shoes, that can spread like wildfire, especially when people are also coming to realize that maybe their society isn’t perfect.

K.S.: I think that there is definitely a danger in numbers. The numbers, however, are what resonated in the moment. I also think that the grassroots social media awareness is really important, and we cannot discount the impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC and its calls to action resonated with many non-Indigenous Canadians. You saw more people thinking about how we might implement those calls to action. There are some calls to action around the missing children that laid the groundwork for some of the response. The biggest factor was the media coverage and the way it spread. Like Terry, I have done an extraordinary amount of media interviews over the past two years, and in places that this conversation would have never been previously, such as 60 Minutes in the United States, in which they interviewed Survivors, in which Anderson Cooper goes to Muscowequan. These are platforms that reach a much broader audience and bring awareness to issues that I think are resonating in a different way.

I also want to talk a little bit about the impact this is having on community members. The news from Kamloops brought up so much trauma for Survivors, intergenerational Survivors and communities. While Survivors have been telling this truth for decades, that moment in 2021 was important for our Survivors and for our communities because they felt the pain of it in a very real way. Coming back to what Andrew was setting up with the last question: The search for missing children is fundamentally an emotional endeavour. There is a lot of potential for harm to communities in being taken advantage of by these companies. But there’s also just a lot of harm in this retraumatization and in not providing supports for Survivors, which are needed because they’re reading the news and they’re seeing the numbers rise. Some of them are learning about numbers from the schools they attended through the news, which is not an ideal situation for anyone. So, it’s important to think about, ‘Why now? Why the impact? Why did non-Indigenous Canadians finally listen after decades?’ This news is reverberating in our communities, and there’s a lot more support needed for our Survivors, intergenerational Survivors and families.

M.C.: I remember when the announcement came from Tk’emlúps. Initially, my family’s reaction was of anger because this is what it took for people to listen to Survivors. I remember spending a week with my kookum. During that week, I remember us crying together, and that’s when she told me, ‘My girl, I’m ready to tell my story.’ I always get emotional thinking about it, that this was the push for her to tell her experience of residential schools. So, although like Kisha touched on, it can be retraumatizing for our communities, there’s also the opportunity for us as Indigenous people to hear the stories from Survivors and to record and preserve those truths. Having the media attention finally reach a wider audience, even though we hold on to anger and sorrow from hearing about those missing and murdered children, we now can move forward with that healing with everyone else because you are finally joining us.

C.W.: Kisha had mentioned something in her talk last night that I thought was interesting. Kisha, you said that, for the academy, this is not really research per se, but it’s using the tools of research for communities. And so, I’m wondering: How is this kind of work being valued in the academy for tenure track scholars, for students? It may not be something that will produce a conventional research project or product, so how do we strategize around that as individual researchers? But, also, how do we push for change in our systems and our standards?

K.S.: I’m happy to start this conversation because I think it’s a really important point, especially for anthropologists, because many of us are connected to academic institutions. While, overall, I get support from my institution, people are not quite sure how to grapple with the fact that this is not going to produce traditional academic outputs. I continue to remind them that I will not be publishing papers that have results from school searches. There are cases where we’ve worked in other historic contexts in which communities were enthusiastic about us publishing results, but that cannot be an expectation, or even a question, here. It can’t even be part of the conversation when we go into a community, from my perspective. So, how does that impact what we do as academics? For me, it means I have to keep the other work I do going. I work a lot with my own community – with Métis folks doing Métis archaeology – and they’re super enthusiastic. It is therefore important for me to maintain that work just to be a good relation, and it is also a place where they want me to publish as much as I can, which helps in terms of being able to continue a career. Also, I’m a full Professor, so I don’t need publications to advance my career, and that’s a privileged position. I don’t need to worry about promotion. I will add that I don’t encourage my graduate students to do work in this area as part of a thesis or dissertation, because they will have to produce products of some kind (unless there’s a methodological piece that could contribute, in which we can go and apply technologies in another, less sensitive space). I’ve had a lot of students reach out saying, ‘I want to help.’ I respond by telling them that I understand, but if they want to get a degree, they must write a thesis. Embargoes and other restrictions can sometimes be placed on it, but it is going to be accessible someday. If they want to advance in a career in academia, they have to publish, but we can’t ask communities to give students permission to do that around these projects. I have a number of students who support the searches but don’t write dissertations or theses about the work. That is a temporary solution, but it is not a structural change.

A couple of things that I’ve tried to do broadly at my institution are (1) to help write guidelines about how to assess the type of scholarship that might come out of this more service-oriented work, because there are things that we can talk about around the search process broadly, and (2) to refine the technical aspects. Some communities want to share their stories in different kinds of ways, which we can support, but the scholarly expectations have to change, and we need to be supported too. There’s a pretty significant gap right now that I have experienced, and colleagues who lead this work at academic institutions are encountering also: While communities want us to do work, we don’t have the funding to do that work for them, and we don’t want to enter into a transactional relationship with them around this work. We’re not going to take the money that the government has been allocating towards communities. But our institutions aren’t necessarily stepping up to support us either, and it’s not something that we can write a research grant for easily – because, again, that expects certain types of knowledge mobilization and certain types of information being shared, and there are long timelines for applications. This is not a situation in which we can put grant expectations onto communities; they have to control all the data, they have to be able to uphold data sovereignty and they can’t put it into repositories to which other people have access. I don’t necessarily have solutions, but there are a number of very significant structural issues that need to be addressed. If we can start to address them collectively, I think there’s actually a lot of potential for opening up space for more of this type of service-orientation work to occur and not just be siloed into applied anthropology. All of our work should be applied, all the time. We just need to find better ways to recognize and uphold that.

AM: I want to build on what Kisha said and also reference some of her talk from last night. I think most of us in our discipline recognize the challenges of academic professionalism and career advancement in the context of a residential school framework, but really our discipline faces this more broadly. We are an extractive endeavour that relies on the scholarship of people who are marginalized by the power imbalances of modern society. It becomes acutely visible in a search for missing children that there should be boundaries to our consumption and extraction of information. The processes of scholarship replicate the inequalities that the residential school system served and perpetuated. I hope that there’s a revolution at hand, or at least a desire to reframe what we do from this stance of extraction and exploitations, to use Kisha’s language from last night, ‘in service of and in partnership with.’ We see this approach in residential school landscapes, but it should be a model for all of our endeavours, not just in the search for missing children.

SH: The issue that Andrew and Kisha have talked about is a very complex and thorny question that ties back to that emerging question of Indigenous data sovereignty and control, and also to how many of the communities asking for input are intensely suspicious of the discipline and the institutions that many of us are part of. This often comes down to the painful situation where work partners will say, ‘We want what’s inside your brain and the skills you’ve learned, but we don’t want to involve your place of work, because we don’t trust them. We want to retain control, and we don’t trust the institution to respect that wish.’ And that puts the researcher who seeks to be helping in a very, very difficult place. You know, as Kisha half-laughingly, half-seriously said, you pretty much have to get your career as far as it’s ever going to go before you can risk this kind of work. This has been particularly the case when we start seeing this groundswell of denialist-resistance to these truths – that has an impact. I make a point of not telling my vice-presidents what I’m up to, because there will be pushback. So, we are in an uncomfortable place: one foot in a community-based research endeavour while still trying to maintain the expectations of academic archaeology.

T.C.: I think, across the board, after Tk’emlúps, all of the archaeologists on the working group were essentially doing two full-time jobs. We were doing our day job of teaching and primary research, and then working off the sides of our desks on these many projects trying to help communities. Since that time, some universities have recognized this effort and given support to those scholars in terms of teaching release, financial support or administrative help. Others have been slow to do that. And that’s difficult. I think that academia needs to better respect the work that we’re doing. I know that, when I was going up for tenure and promotion a couple of years ago, I was cautioned not to do too much of this work, as it was not going to lead to peer-reviewed journal articles, and it may affect my ability to get tenure and promotion. I didn’t stop doing the work, and I’m not going to stop. So, I think there’s lots left for academia to do, but I think archaeologists, for whatever reason, fell into this central node on this network; communities were working with us collaboratively. But we need to do a better job of bringing in others. We’re doing historical research, we’re doing oral history research, we’re doing mapping and we have colleagues across academia that would love to help – they just need some direction. And so, we’re working with geographers, geophysicists, historians, archivists and translators to spread the load out on us as faculty members – and grad students. You get your grad students to do a lot of the leg work; that’s the only way we’re going to survive this project.

C.W.: Now, I’ll introduce Sarah Shulist (S.S.), a member of the Executive Program Committee for this conference. Sarah has been collecting written questions from the audience.

S.S.: Thank you to this wonderful panel. I really enjoyed listening to what you were all saying. This is a good one to start with.Footnote ¹ The question says: ‘This is deeply mournful work,’ which is something that resonated with me as well. ‘How do you take care of yourself while doing this work, and what kinds of healing have you seen in yourself as well as in the people that you work with?’

M.C.: Right now, because the momentum of this work is so fast, there’s not much time for thinking about what we’re doing. And I know that, the moment I slow down, it’s really going to hit home. But I’ve prepared for that. I see a therapist, and that’s helpful. Initially, I was going to a non-Indigenous therapist, but they couldn’t fully understand. So, I found an Indigenous therapist, and they helped me to be able to talk about these issues. They could understand what I was talking about and the emotions that I was going through. Another thing is that we are supported by the communities that we do the work for. They provide ceremonies and Elders for us to talk to, and we’ve been invited to go to closed ceremonies. Having the opportunity for them to take care of us when we’re supposed to be taking care of them is something that I appreciate, and I understand that this doesn’t always happen. My family and I are currently brain-tanning a moose hide, and that’s my self-care this week. Having to whack a moose hide helps to get some of that anger out. It’s kind of nice, too, that I’m reclaiming practices that were once stolen from my family. So, there’s a few ways to do it, and I’m sure other panelists have others.

K.S.: This is deeply mournful work. I like that word because it captures a lot of what this is. It’s been really hard: hard for me, hard for the people who work with me, hard for those who stand with me to do this work. The pressure and the expectations of a community are hard because, while we’re doing the best we can, I’m also the person who has to tell them that we can’t find some of their children because the technology is not there yet. A couple of things that I’ve noticed: Ceremony is, for me, the number one thing that helps. When a community reaches out to us, I say, ‘If it’s appropriate, as much as the team can be included in ceremony, it makes it safer for us, culturally safer; it helps lift our own spirits when we’re doing very difficult work.’ I’ll also say that, in my own experience, you know when you’re in a place where you’re finding things because you can feel it. The spirit is present there, and we make sure that we’re not taking that home with us. We take the grief – we have to – but not bringing the spirit, not leaving our spirits there, are some of the teachings that have been shared. Ceremony has been really important. Having boundaries is also crucial, where I acknowledge that I can’t help everyone who asks me in the ways that they might want. Instead, I try to have a sense of, ‘Where is my role? How can I best support as many communities as I can without hurting myself too much or stretching myself too thin?’ I need to be able to continue to do this work; it’s going to take the rest of my career at least. And then, also, I’ve had Elders who are not necessarily in communities that I work with, but are in my own circle, who are constantly holding me in their prayers and ceremonies and helping me along. But, at the same time, I’ve had some health issues emerge, which, to me, have been directly connected to the work I’ve been asked to do. I’m 42, and I had heart problems last year. For me, this was because of the heart-heavy work that I’m doing. I broke my foot in March because I was walking on graves and not smudging my feet. I’m learning as I go, and my body and my spirit are telling me when I need to do more ceremony. I also have to respect the fact that we work in communities that aren’t really connected to my own ceremonial practice. I have to respect their ceremonies, but I also need to continue to do my own practices because these are connected to my own sense of spirit. Finding that balance has been important. I’ve also been lucky to have some wonderful colleagues. Having that sense of solidarity has made a big difference, knowing that we’re not alone in this and that we all are trying to work together to support each other and do the best that we can.

T.C.: Obviously, ceremony is important, and we follow protocol. As said, communities are very interested in our safety; they don’t want us to bring anything home. That heaviness is not ours to bear, and so, we do cedar brushings, juniper brushings, we wear ochre for protection where appropriate, smudges. I think all of that’s important and helpful. I want to give one example, and I think that it’s appropriate. Kisha and I were working on a project at Muscowequan. The first day, the whole community came out. The news was there; everyone was telling us ‘this, this, this.’ But we started in an area that had been disturbed, and so, we weren’t getting any results. And the next day, when we came back, it was the rodeo, and so everyone in the community was at the rodeo, and it was really just us. We moved to an area that had definitive hits that we could see in the field. We could feel it. It was a completely different feeling that day. And then, a truck pulled up, and a woman brought her mother out, and she just looked at us and said, ‘I think you guys need a hug.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh my god, we do.’ And she hugged us, and we were all crying, and it was really emotional. And, after we did that, we smudged again, and then I asked her, ‘Do you know anyone at this school?’ And she said, ‘Yes, my brother is missing here.’ But she didn’t come out for herself, she came out for us, because she was worried about us: We were left alone, we were in a very precarious position. Even though she had suffered this tremendous loss, we were visitors in her community who were doing work for her community, and she wanted to make sure that we were safe. And that’s how we feel in all the communities where we work.