Truth before transition: Reimagining anthropology as restorative justice

Abstract

Anthropology is a discipline that is always in a state of transition and becoming, but the current moment has a sense of being a tipping point, a crisis, a sea change. Whether a case for letting anthropology burn (Jobson, 2020) or a call to decolonize anthropology (Gupta & Stoolman, 2022), the conversations happening in the field are coalescing around the need for change at a scale we have rarely faced before. In the current reality, people are desperate for futurities beyond late modernity, beyond the climate crisis, beyond the crush of neoliberal capitalism, beyond the ongoing violences of colonialism, and beyond the limits of Western knowledge. Emerging from the chrysalis of the COVID-19 pandemic, a powerful need for some sense of collective care for humanity as we face an uncertain future has resonated across the discipline (d'Alpoim Guedes et al., 2021). As a discipline that claims the study of humanity and promotion of cross-cultural understanding at our core, this moment should be a time when anthropology can be more relevant and meaningful than ever. But as tides of hate rise around us, we are struggling, sometimes flailing, sometimes failing, to make sense of our role in a different future when faced with necessary change (e.g., Joyce, 2021; Nelson, 2021b). In the face of a cataclysmic climate crisis and increasing global conflict, an insecurity about what a radical reimagining and reorientation of anthropology might mean permeates disciplinary discourse (A. Gupta & Stoolman, 2022; Lewis, 2023; Pierre, 2023).

No accounting of an imagined future is possible without a reflection on how the past influences the present (Pels, 2015). In this paper, I offer my perspective on what this moment means, first by reminding us of our collective disciplinary truths before offering an example of an anthropology of restitution and restorative justice drawn from my own work as an Indigenous archaeologist. My perspective is grounded in my position as a Métis woman, an anthropological archaeologist, a mother, and someone with deep responsibilities to my relatives in the lands we now call Canada (Supernant, 2020a). While I will tell some difficult truths in this paper, it is my sincere hope that when facing down the specter of transition, we see possibilities, not insurmountable barriers. We see different possible futures, not the bleakness of the apocalyptic void. But truth first.

Transition requires a reckoning with the truth. Without a reckoning, the past becomes a tether, tying our collective discipline to a legacy from which we cannot break free. Transition invites a release: a surrender of that which no longer serves our vision of what we wish to become. I am not the first to call for a reckoning, nor will I be the last. Many voices at the margins of anthropology and our allies have been telling difficult truths for generations and calling for disciplinary change (Deloria Jr., 1973, 1969; Gupta & Stoolman, 2022; King, 1997; Magubane & Faris, 1985; Montgomery & Supernant, 2022). I will share my own understanding of the truths of the discipline; I cannot claim to speak for all anthropologists, all Indigenous people, or even all Métis people. However, as an Indigenous woman educated in four-field, Americanist anthropology at the turn of the 21st century, I have a perspective on the transitions necessary for anthropology to be ethical, relevant, and a positive force for change.

In 1969, Vine Deloria Jr. published what many saw as a damning satirical takedown of anthropology, or more specifically, of anthropologists, first in Playboy magazine and then as part of his book Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria, 1969). The reaction was swift; anthropologists went on the defensive, pointing to their long-standing relationships with Indigenous interlocutors as evidence of their relevance (Officer, 1973). At the American Anthropological Association meetings the next year, a symposium was organized entitled “Anthropology and the American Indian” to discuss the relationships between anthropologists and Indigenous peoples in North America (Officer, 1973). Many of the presenters were Native American anthropologists, alongside some luminaries of the field, such as Margaret Mead, with Deloria offering a response (Deloria, 1973; see also Hancock, 2019). The presentations were recorded and transcribed into a short volume for publication (Officer, 1973). While a lot of the language is dated, the issues discussed by the presenters remain fundamentally the same today, over 50 years later.

The heart of Deloria's critique, as well as similar critiques from other Indigenous scholars in that volume, was not about anthropological methods or even the value of anthropology as a discipline (Deloria, 1969, 1973). He was criticizing the reasons why anthropologists were studying Indigenous people, questioning the purpose of anthropological research, which at the time was still largely focused on saving traditional Indigenous culture rather than supporting contemporary Indigenous communities as they grappled with the impacts of colonization and fought for their rights. Rather than studying the ongoing harm of colonization, many early ethnographers in the Americas focused on salvaging what remained of the Indigenous cultures they perceived as being under threat of disappearing forever (Bruchac, 2018, 13; Darnell, 2001). The goal was preservation of a disappearing culture, not ensuring Indigenous survivance, an ethic that was still alive and well in the 1970s. This is best exemplified in Margaret Mead's response to Deloria, where she declares that her generation of anthropologists has said “We value your ancient cultures, we think they are very important for the world, and we will work with those of you who also value them, and we will all belong to a nice, scientific community, where the values are the same” (Mead, 1973, 70; emphasis added).

I read Deloria's critique to be exactly of this paternalistic attitude, something that persists in various anthropological spaces today. What about those Indigenous people who care about their present and their future rather than merely their ancient cultures? What about using the powerful tools of anthropology to resist and critique the colonial policies that were (and are) actively harming Indigenous people while enabling white anthropologists to study them? While the narrative that sometimes emerges now is that the work of early ethnographers can help Indigenous communities reclaim their language and culture, I want to stress that this was not the intention of those ethnographers. They never imagined we would have a future where we would be reclaiming our languages, our rights, our stories, where we would have to deal with non-Indigenous anthropological “experts” gatekeeping our cultural knowledge.

In his closing remarks, Deloria asks the room of anthropologists where they were during the termination policies of the 1950s in the United States (Deloria, 1973, 95). At a time when anthropological knowledge would have been a powerful voice against termination, anthropologists, seemingly resigned to the inevitability of Indigenous assimilation and termination, were saving what they thought could be saved for posterity rather than helping protest termination. Some notable anthropologists during this time, including Julian Steward, actually argued against recognition of tribal nations, as it would harm assimilation (Blackhawk, 1997, 74−75). In the Canadian context, when Indigenous children were being stolen from their families and forced to attend residential schools, where were the anthropologists?

The first residential school was built in Alert Bay on Kwakwaka'wakw territory in 1882.¹ Not long after, Franz Boas came to this area to record stories and study kinship systems (Boas, 1889). He was not there to decry the practices of stealing children; he was there to capture what he could to support his anthropological vision of humanity and to steal ancestors from their graves to put on display in museums, even though he found grave-robbing distasteful (Boas & Rohner, 1969, 88). The foundational ethnographic work Boas carried out with George Hunt among the Kwakwaka'wakw was very influential in shaping Americanist anthropology; however, the invisible backdrop to all this work is the residential school, assimilation, and the assumption of Indigenous disappearance. The knowledge being shared with Boas and Hunt by Indigenous people was not always being passed on within Indigenous communities to the next generations; instead, it was being studied and interpreted for colonial audiences.

Did Boas and all those who came after him have good intentions? Quite possibly. I have no doubt that they were doing what they believed to be necessary given the time and place that they were working. But good intentions are not enough to excuse the harm caused by those intentions or the legacy of those actions, which is the foundation of the discipline of anthropology in North America today. Audra Simpson (2018), Mohawk anthropologist, notes that even with Boas's important work on pushing against race science and eugenics, Indigenous peoples were barely factored in because we were considered too insignificant a part of the population to matter, as we were on our way to irrelevance and assimilation. This is the truth of anthropology.

Beyond intentions, there has been sustained critique of the entitlement of anthropologists. As Pueblo anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz (1973, 88) notes in the same symposium as Mead, “I have met too many members of the field who regarded it as a sacred calling and operated as if they had an inherent and inalienable right to the information they were seeking.” The sense of an inherent and unquestioned right of anthropologists to come into communities and learn whatever they want to learn about other cultures has long been critiqued as problematic. This extends beyond sociocultural anthropology to the other subdisciplines—archaeologists assuming they can dig up the belongings of Indigenous ancestors (McGhee, 2008), linguistic anthropologists recording and analyzing Indigenous languages and then taking those recordings away from communities (Kroskrity & Meek, 2017), or biological anthropologists assuming that they can use ancient DNA of Indigenous ancestors to tell the story of human migration (Cortez et al., 2021).

As anthropologists, we are trained to seek knowledge from other peoples and contexts; cross-cultural understanding is the foundation of our discipline. We learn method and theory in university classrooms, proceeding through academic systems where we gain clearance from our institutional ethics boards (if we are doing ethnographic research) or get permits from regulatory agencies (if we are doing archaeological research) and set out into the field. If we work with living subjects, we ask them to provide consent to the research and we begin gathering data about them. If we are not working with living subjects, we may not even need consent from the living community before we begin our research. For generations, we have taken that information back and written it into academic publications, sharing what we learned with other scholars, but often not with the community, and depositing that knowledge into archives, universities, and other institutions. Why do anthropologists have the right to the knowledge of other peoples?

I want to reflect, for a moment, on how we use concepts such as academic freedom and free inquiry to justify extractive research practices and the right of academics to know. While overall I am supportive of academic freedom, meaning scholars should be able to ask questions and conduct research without government interference or censorship, I do see it being weaponized to claim the right to do research that harms other people. The discipline of anthropology has always collectively decided on what constitutes valid research, for better or for worse. When research does active harm or has been widely disproven using evidence, we consider it to be unethical and invalid. Harm can also only be determined by those being harmed; if a researcher claims their work is not harmful but the community says it is, the community is right. The actively harmful research of past scholars is the very reason we have institutional ethics or review boards and why the first clause of the AAA Statement of Ethics states “Do no harm.”² But those ethics boards reflect the ethics of academics, not the ethics of the communities with whom we work. Imagine if every anthropological project went through an ethics review with the community? How would our work look different?

I do not tell these truths to condemn those who came before or to denounce anthropology as a discipline. I am not here to call out individual anthropologists—our field has a diversity of practices and many individual people who have done work in a good way for decades—but I also want to caution against a “bad actors” argument. The very structure of our discipline was built with specific purposes and has never been, following Gupta and Stoolman (2022), a decolonizing project. I share these truths to remind us that we can be more than the legacy of our most hallowed intellectual ancestors and the structures they created. I share these truths to remind us that we do not have an inherent right to tell other people's stories just because we are curious about them. We do have the responsibility to do better. Deloria himself makes this point: he states that “it is time for Indian organizations and the American Anthropological Association to sit down and discuss what issues are relevant in the Indian community; what studies you have that are relevant to the things we are doing; what needs we have that would be relevant to future research that you might want to undertake on a professional basis. . . . Let's do better this time” (Deloria, 1973, 97−98).

Deloria's critique, and my own, is an invitation to reflect on the process of anthropological research and who that research ultimately serves. Where do the questions you ask come from? What gives you the right to ask them? Who initiates and drives the research? Who does the research serve? How do we do better this time?

In the wake of the critiques of Deloria and other Indigenous activists, there was a standstill on ethnographic research with North American Indigenous peoples for about 20 years (Cattelino & Simpson, 2022; Strong, 2005), and when it began again, work has generally become more collaborative (Cattelino & Simpson, 2022). More Indigenous anthropologists have engaged with the discipline, both from a position of refusal (Simpson, 2014) and of using the tools of anthropology to study scientists and scholars who build their careers on extracting knowledge from Indigenous ancestors (TallBear, 2013). The scholarship over the past couple of decades demonstrates that the discipline is already in transition, but the question is how to continue moving through the process of transformation to arrive at a place where anthropology is not extractive but restorative. I conceive of anthropology as an agent of restorative justice, a concept not original to me but one that has great meaning in my work (Baker, 2021; Colwell, 2016; d'Alpoim Guedes et al., 2021; Flewellen et al., 2021; Hamilakis, 2018; Laluk et al., 2022; Lau-Ozawa, 2018; Spencer-Wood, 2021). If anthropology has a history of extracting, how can it transition to restoration? It is no longer sufficient to say anthropology should do no more harm; rather, it should be working to redress those past harms for which it is directly responsible or in which it is complicit (Laluk et al., 2022; Montgomery & Supernant, 2022; Supernant & Warrick, 2014).

Anthropology possesses powerful tools and techniques that can be mobilized; the challenge is to harness these for the benefit of community needs, as defined by that community, and the pursuit of justice (Hamilakis, 2018; Laluk et al., 2022; Montgomery & Supernant, 2022; Montgomery et al., 2023). This transition toward restorative anthropology becomes most evident in my work with unmarked graves, which is inherently about seeking justice using the tools of archaeology to support Indigenous communities, but there are many other pathways where anthropology can move toward restitution. Archaeology has a uniquely problematic history as a subdiscipline of anthropology, as archaeologists have been complicit in the literal removal of Indigenous ancestors from their graves (Thomas, 2001) and the telling of Indigenous histories through Western frameworks (Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al., 2010; McGhee, 2008; Wilcox, 2010). Archaeology has been extractive, both in the literal sense of digging out material remains from the earth and in the epistemological sense of taking away knowledge and history from the people whose ancestors left that record. This is related to the colonial origins of archaeology and its adherence to Western frameworks of knowledge production, based on empiricism, objectivity, and free inquiry (Trigger, 1984, 2006).

Archaeological practice in North America has been in transition for several decades in response to a sustained critique from Indigenous people and others who have been harmed by archaeology (Cipolla et al., 2019; Marek-Martinez, 2021; Martinez, 2014; Montgomery & Fryer, 2023; Nicholas & Watkins, 2014; Panich & Gonzalez, 2021; Schneider & Hayes, 2020; Supernant, 2020b; Watkins & Nicholas, 2014; Wylie, 2019). Even with changing relationships between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples, many ancestors and belongings remain incarcerated in institutions where archaeologists work and study (Lippert, 2021; Montgomery & Fryer, 2023). Many projects still happen without the consent of Indigenous peoples. In our year-in-review article for American Anthropologist, Lindsay Montgomery and I noted that in many academic publications about archaeology in Indigenous lands in 2021, there was little to no mention of collaborations or involvement of community members in the research (Montgomery & Supernant, 2022). There remains much work to do to move archaeology toward restorative justice, where we use archaeology's tools and techniques to serve the needs and recognize the inherent rights of descendant and ancestral communities to their own heritage (Flewellen et al., 2021; Franklin et al., 2020; Laluk et al., 2022; Montgomery & Fryer, 2023; Montgomery & Supernant, 2022; Montgomery et al., 2023).

Indigenous rights, as outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, includes several articles of which recognize and affirm Indigenous rights to our own cultural heritage and intellectual property. Upholding Indigenous rights as human rights, including rights to cultural heritage, requires us to change the way we approach anthropology that engages with Indigenous peoples and knowledges. Stories, songs, belongings, lands, languages, and knowledges belong to the community, not to anthropologists. Upholding Indigenous rights means imagining different ways of doing archaeology that focus on redress and restorative justice, rather than reproducing colonial structures. Restorative justice involves seeking to undo histories of extraction (Laluk et al., 2022), including returning belongings, returning ancestors, and returning knowledge, opening conversations about what we do with the giant amount of data that has already been extracted. This is just as relevant to all parts of anthropology; it is not just archaeologists who have taken knowledge from communities that remains incarcerated in institutions throughout the world.

In archaeology, restorative justice focuses on telling the truth about historical and ongoing wrongs through the design of new projects to explore places where these wrongs were perpetuated and to expose difficult truths. It invites an expansion in the different ways in which we narrate the past, because when we make space for multiple narratives, we create a much richer understanding of the lives of ancestors. One of the ways that we can move toward a different way of doing archaeology is through heart-centered practice, where instead of doing archaeology as a primarily intellectual exercise, we start from the heart (Supernant et al., 2020).

In 2020, I coedited a volume titled Archaeologies of the Heart, a project that was a labor of love with three other amazing scholars Jane Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay (Supernant et al., 2020). It provided a platform for diverse scholars from various backgrounds to convene and explore the essence of heart-centered practice. Natasha Lyons and I, in the introduction, defined the four chambers encapsulating the core of heart-centered archaeology: care, emotion, relation, and rigor (Lyons & Supernant, 2020). The first chamber is care. We have a multifaceted engagement on the meaning of care, encompassing care for the ancestors’ belongings and archaeological sites, along with caring for one another as human beings and whole people. We acknowledge that archaeology is not always a safe space, and this chamber is fundamentally about opening different spaces where we can bring our hearts and authentic selves to our archaeological practice, centering an ethic of care while acknowledging that care means different things in different cultural contexts. Supporting diverse voices in archaeology necessitates an ethic of care, developing principles of community while recognizing and upholding power dynamics and boundaries.

The second chamber is emotion. Previous research often omitted or diminished the validity of emotions in archaeological interpretation, yet we are inherently emotional beings (Tarlow, 2012; Tarlow et al., 2000). Many of us hold deep emotional connections to the places and materials we engage with; emotion can be a powerful source of knowledge. Ancient peoples also were emotional and made decisions for emotional reasons, not merely biological ones, but we have not yet explored the full range of human emotional expression in the past. Recognizing the emotional aspects in both past and present individuals expands our knowledge. It also shapes a more nuanced understanding of decisions and actions made in ancient lives.

The third chamber, closely linked to Indigenous archaeologies, is relation. This chamber revolves around building healthy relationships within the discipline, among practitioners, and with ancestral communities, and extending the understanding of relationships beyond human-to-human connections. Numerous knowledge systems globally perceive relationships with animals, plants, land, and water as kinship, carrying certain reciprocal responsibilities (Atalay, 2020; Kimmerer, 2013; Supernant, 2021; Tynan, 2021; Wildcat & Voth, 2023). Understanding the flow of knowledge derived from relationships is a core principle of heart-centered practice.

The fourth chamber is rigor, included to counter the misconception that heart-centered practice lacks scientific rigor. We emphasize that all systems of knowledge possess internal rigor. Indigenous knowledge systems, for instance, uphold specific protocols governing the acquisition, transfer, and maintenance of knowledge (Kimmerer, 2013). Rigor also applies to the careful and deliberate use of scientific techniques in archaeological practice. If we are going to be using technology to try to find unmarked graves, for example, we must do the best possible science we can.

These chambers form the foundation of how I conduct archaeology, collaborating with my students, community partners, and envisioning the future of the discipline. Archaeologies of the Heart is intended as an invitation to all archaeologists, regardless of their specialized fields, to embrace heart-centered practice across diverse settings and times (Atalay, 2020; Supernant et al., 2020). It is a place to dwell that is not about intellectual pursuits alone but about care, emotion, relation, and rigor for a more just, more equitable, more restorative practice.

I now want to turn to a situation where the skills and tools of anthropologists, specifically archaeologists, are being mobilized to serve a pressing and devastating issue facing Indigenous communities in Canada: the search for unmarked graves of children who died at or disappeared from Indian Residential Schools. This is a circumstance where heart-centered practice is essential. I offer this example of an anthropology that reorients the purpose of research from gaining knowledge of past Indigenous cultures to restorative justice—telling the truth of the genocide of Indigenous peoples. In their paper emerging from the 2021 AAA presidential address, Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman (Gupta & Stoolman, 2022, 782) note that “The premise of a decolonizing project is that one begins with the issues that emerge from the power asymmetries of colonization that are most important to the people and communities where we study.” The first topic they suggest as part of a decolonizing agenda is the study of genocide and mass killings. In 2022, the Government of Canada unanimously recognized Indian Residential Schools as genocide (Raycraft, 2022).

For over a century, Indigenous children were forced to attend Indian Residential Schools across Canada (Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015b). These institutions were part of a colonial policy of genocide that aimed to erase Indigenous languages, cultures, and identities (Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015b). Church-run schools began in Canada in the early 1800s, but in 1883 the Government of Canada established three large schools that were federally funded, church-run institutions (Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015b). Over the next several decades, the program rapidly expanded, resulting in a total of 140 recognized residential schools where over 150,000 children were incarcerated. The federal government made it mandatory for children who had Indian status under the Indian Act to be taken to these institutions; when parents failed to comply, they were arrested. Many of these children never came home due to abuse, neglect, malnutrition, and disease; in some cases, their parents only learned of their child's death when they did not return home for the summer (Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015a). Survivors and family members have long talked about finding the graves of these children and bringing them home, but the support and capacity to do so has been limited.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was established in 2007 with a mandate to document the history and legacy of residential schools and to promote reconciliation among Indigenous peoples, Canadians, and the government (Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015c). The focus was to listen to the testimony of survivors, witness the truth about what happened, investigate claims of abuses to provide compensation, and raise awareness of these institutions in the public. The goals of the TRC were not to find missing children, but because so many survivors and families shared testimony about children who never came home, the commissioners included a chapter on “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials” in the final report (Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015a). Their preliminary research revealed that at least 3200 children died at residential schools, many of them buried in unmarked graves, but they recognized that many more student deaths likely occurred than they were able to investigate as part of the commission. The TRC also issued 94 calls to action to address the ongoing impacts of residential schools and advance the process of reconciliation (Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015d).

Among the calls to action, numbers 71 to 76 specifically addressed the issue of missing children and burial information. These calls urged the government, churches, and Indigenous communities to work together to identify, document, maintain, commemorate, and protect residential school cemeteries or other sites where children were buried. Some Indigenous communities have been actively searching for potential graves for many years (Nichols, 2015; Snowdon, 2019). Others have been working on ways to commemorate and preserve the history of residential schools, so the world does not forget what happened (Cooper-Bolam, 2018).

While some projects were already underway, the announcement by Tk'emlups Te Secwepemc of potential unmarked graves of 200 children from the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021 sparked national and international outrage (Secwépemc, 2021). Flags were lowered to half-mast; memorials with children's shoes and teddy bears were established across the country. The government declared September 30 as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Non-Indigenous Canadians expressed their shock and horror at the number of children who never came home. These results were not a surprise to survivors and communities, but the geophysical work did provide another line of evidence to support what survivors had been saying for decades: that thousands of children never returned from residential schools and that their families and communities were never told what happened to them.

There has been an undue focus on numbers since the announcement, but the most reliable source of information regarding student deaths remains the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), an independent, Indigenous-led organization established after the TRC to ensure the legacy of residential schools is remembered for the future. One of the initiatives of the NCTR was the development of a memorial register that maintains a list of students (4139 at time of writing) who are recorded as having died in or as a direct result of residential schools³, although this is not a complete record of all children. After the announcement from Kamloops, trauma of the loss of so many children resurfaced for many survivors and their families. Following the media coverage and an increased promise of funding from federal and provincial governments, many Indigenous Nations began the process of searching for their children using remote sensing and near-surface geophysics to locate potential burial locations. Many of them turned to archaeologists for help.

Why archaeologists? Archaeology has a long-standing reputation as a discipline complicit in incarceration of Indigenous ancestors and belongings, but archaeologists are now being asked to support communities to conduct ground searches to locate potential unmarked graves (Martindale et al., 2023; Simons et al., 2020). Over the past 25 years, many archaeologists have responded to sustained critique and challenge from Indigenous communities throughout North America by building better relations and develop collaborative projects (Atalay, 2012, 2006; Martinez, 2014; Nicholas, 2008; Nicholas & Andrews, 1997; Nicholas et al., 2008; Watkins, 2005; Watkins & Nicholas, 2014). Emerging from these relationships has meant that some Indigenous communities have been asking archaeologists to use their skills to locate unmarked graves in various settings. For example, after years of communities asking if I could help find unmarked graves, I was involved in a survey at the Muskowekwan Indian Residential School back in 2018 (Snowdon, 2019). Other colleagues commenced this work at the request of communities in the first decade of this century (Nichols, 2015; Simons et al., 2020). It also helps that archaeological applications of geophysics are the most directly useful to search large areas for potential unmarked graves (Hansen et al., 2014; Nelson, 2021a; Wadsworth et al., 2021). Therefore, we were one of the groups of people that Indigenous communities turned to for help when they began actively searching residential schools for their children.

Within a few weeks after the announcement of the results from Kamloops, the Canadian Archaeological Association formed a working group on unmarked graves, bringing together archaeologists who had been working with Indigenous communities using relevant technologies over the past two decades.⁴ We came together because we realized there was great need for support in ground searches, as well as significant danger of causing further harm if Indigenous Nations were not able to access reliable, independent advice about best practices so they could make informed decisions about how to find their children. We were also concerned about misinformation that was circulating in the media about the use of ground-penetrating radar in the searches (Wadsworth et al., 2023) and wanted to provide clarity about the possibilities of such technologies for finding unmarked graves.

The initial media coverage was overly focused on ground-penetrating radar as a solution to the challenge of finding the missing children, so we began with the creation of an overview document that outlined what we saw as all the necessary aspects of the work, where ground searches were not the first step, or the last, in helping find the children.⁵ One of the most important steps is to listen to survivors and communities; they already know a lot about missing children and where searches might need to be undertaken. Working with community can help narrow down priority areas for using various technologies, as there are a number of possible approaches that mobilize remote-sensing and near-surface geophysical techniques to search the grounds for potential unmarked graves (Berezowski et al., 2021; Bigman, 2012; Dick et al., 2017; Fiedler et al., 2009; Hansen et al., 2014; Molina et al., 2016; Nobes, 1999; Wadsworth et al., 2020; Wadsworth et al., 2021).

In addition to the overview document, we have developed resources about the various technologies that are useful in helping provide information about the specific locations where children might be buried. Each community will need to figure out the process that makes sense for them, but there are some core messages we hoped to convey, including: (1) the knowledge of survivors and communities must guide the process, and (2) that there are many forms of data that can provide information about the potential location of children's graves. This document has been further expanded upon by the National Advisory Committee on Residential School Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, which was formally established about a year after the announcement from Kamloops (Burials, 2023).

In addition to our work in creating accessible and reliable resources, many members of the working group were being asked by communities to conduct new ground searches in light of the results from Kamloops. The Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology, which I direct, has been involved in ground searches at many schools since May 2021 and has been providing advice to many additional Indigenous communities and organizations. While I will not be discussing any individual communities or results, as that would be inappropriate, I do want to share with you some aspects of the process that help illustrate how archaeology is contributing to the search for missing children and the journey toward justice and healing.

Our work to support Indigenous communities in the sacred task of finding the children 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. When I do work with communities, I center a set of respectful practices and principles that guide all my work, but especially when it concerns locating potential unmarked graves. Our starting point is acknowledging the emotional weight of looking for missing children; there is a grief and a heaviness when seeking lost relatives (Snowdon, 2019). As a result, our approach is entirely community-centric and community-driven, where we only initiate a project on burials when directly invited by the community. It is crucial that communities decide upon the necessary ceremonies and community support; without these, there is a risk of perpetuating harm, both for the survivors and for the team doing the searching.

Upholding Indigenous data sovereignty is a critical aspect of our work. Unlike broader archaeological practices where there are barriers to data sovereignty (Gupta et al., 2023), in this context we can ensure that all newly generated information belongs to the Indigenous community, not the research or the institution. The community has complete control and ownership of any data collected through our work. This fundamental principle remains at the core of our approach.

When determining where to search, survivor and community input strongly inform our decisions. Sometimes a survivor or community member will have an experience that informs where we might have to look; they also have knowledge about the history of the land since the school was closed. When survivors or other community members indicate a specific area that needs to be searched, we assess which techniques might be useful depending on the time of information shared, as not all geophysical techniques work in all areas, then work to plan a phased approach to ground searching.

We are often approached to conduct searches in contexts that are technically challenging, as there can be great variation in the types of features that could be related to burials in any given area. Different burial practices, such as the use of coffins or shrouds, matter for detecting possible graves (Conyers, 2006b; Gaffney et al., 2015; Martindale et al., 2023). The orientation of graves may also vary, making patterns easier to detect in formal burial grounds but making grave detection much more complex in informal contexts. Grave preservation is contingent on factors like the environment, land history, and the original burial methods (Dick et al., 2017; Gaffney et al., 2015; Hansen et al., 2014; Martindale et al., 2023; Molina et al., 2016; Nichols, 2015; Wadsworth et al., 2021). In many Indian residential school areas, development and other impacts can further complicate the detection of graves as the land has been plowed, developed, flattened, or otherwise disturbed. The work related to the locations of children's graves within communities is also highly sensitive, requiring ceremonies and protocols as guided by Elders and knowledge holders (Simons et al., 2020).

Different technologies offer different possibilities when looking for potential unmarked graves. We generally recommend that communities start from the air, drawing upon historical data and collecting new data. Historic aerial photos can provide information about what may have occurred at the site over time and the areas that are most suitable for ground searching. Many residential schools had cemeteries where children and other members of the communities were buried, so learning information about those cemeteries can be useful depending on the questions that communities are trying to answer about the missing children. Relatively simple drone photography can reveal mounds or depressions in these historic cemetery contexts that may indicate possible grave locations (Hazell et al., 2023). Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is another valuable aerial technology that employs laser pulses to create detailed three-dimensional models of the terrain (Casana et al., 2021; Opitz & Limp, 2015). This technique can be particularly useful in detecting changes in the landscape that might indicate unmarked graves underneath forest cover. By analyzing LiDAR data, archaeologists can identify possible surface features that could signify grave sites or help map the landscape to narrow down areas for further investigation.

Other potential aerial methods include multispectral or hyperspectral imaging graves (Cerra et al., 2018; Chenoweth et al., 2021) and thermal imaging (Agudo et al., 2018), although these are less well tested in the search for potential unmarked graves (Alawadhi et al., 2023; Leblanc et al., 2014; Rocke & Ruffell, 2022). These aerial techniques can significantly aid the understanding and mapping of residential school sites, offering insights into the potential presence of unmarked graves. They are quick when compared to ground-based methods and help to narrow down places for more intensive searching. However, aerial methods only map the surface and often do not provide a direct view of the subsurface. While they offer hints about subsurface conditions, they may not uncover all necessary information or reliably locate unmarked graves. For comprehensive subsurface investigations, ground-based near-surface geophysics methods are usually more effective. These methods involve exploring the ground directly and have demonstrated success in locating buried features in other contexts (Berezowski et al., 2021; Dick et al., 2017; Hazell et al., 2023; Molina et al., 2016; Wadsworth et al., 2021).

Several ground-based techniques are useful for detecting potential unmarked graves, including ground-penetrating radar (Fiedler et al., 2009; Martindale et al., 2023; Wadsworth et al., 2021), various forms of magnetics, conductivity, and resistivity. While all of these have been demonstrated to work in other contexts, the most common and established method is ground-penetrating radar, or GPR. This technology involves sending electromagnetic waves into the ground and detecting changes in how that wave reflects (Conyers, 2006a). By analyzing the reflections of these waves, we can gain details about depth, size, and characteristics of various features, allowing for identification of potential buried objects, change in the soil, or disturbance.

GPR works most effectively in formal cemeteries where there is organization and structure to the burial pattern and when the soil is suitable (Dick et al., 2017; Fiedler et al., 2009). However, this technology requires clear ground surfaces with short vegetation, making it less effective in wooded or overgrown areas. We recommend testing GPR in the area of interest before committing to a full-scale survey, as it does not work as well in certain areas, particularly clay-rich environments (Conyers, 2016). Regardless of the conditions, it is not possible to identify a grave from GPR alone, or from any single geophysical technique. There are ways to eliminate other subsurface features or objects, but not to prove that a grave is present, or whether there is anything in that potential grave (Martindale et al., 2023). In general, we recommend multiple lines of evidence to increase confidence in the likelihood of a reflection being a grave—this might include a depression in the ground, a headstone, the presence of a grave-like anomaly in a cemetery, or results from a second scientific technique (Martindale et al., 2023).

While aerial methods and ground-based geophysics can provide specific locational information about potential unmarked graves, the evidence for children dying at Indian Residential Schools is already extensive. However, the result of the 2021 announcement is that archaeologists are being asked to help with the task of applying technology to the search for missing children at an unanticipated scale and pace. Finding unmarked graves remains very challenging due to limits in the technology, limits in capacity, and pressures of time and resources. First, interpreting GPR data for detecting unmarked graves needs further refinement, as there is so much variability across the country and the various residential school landscapes (Martindale et al., 2023). While GPR has been used for many years in this work, the other possible geophysical techniques are less established in Canada for this task. There is an urgency to search that has led to some less-than-ideal outcomes for communities in part because there is a shortage of people skilled in this specific type of work, demanding an urgent need to enhance capacity within the communities. Another significant challenge stems from the diverse nature of the schools—140 recognized schools across the country, each with multiple nations whose children were affected. Consequently, fostering connections among these communities before initiating work becomes crucial to ensure everyone is informed and engaged in the search for missing children. Communication of geophysical results is also an issue, exacerbated by inaccurate media reporting from T'kemlpus te Sewepmec and inconsistencies in how results are reported by various communities (Wadsworth et al., 2023).

Archaeologists have spent a lot of time over the past several years clarifying to communities and the general public what we can and cannot learn from geophysical techniques to ensure communities can make informed decisions and counter denialism (Wadsworth et al., 2023). There is a rising trend of denialism seeking to undermine our efforts (Carleton, 2021; Supernant & Carleton, 2022). Some people are attempting to downplay the severity or even deny the presence of bodies, prompting a need to counteract such false narratives (Supernant & Carleton, 2022). We are not trying to prove that children died. We know they did. Communities and survivors know they did. The NCTR records thousands of names of children who died. What archaeologists are trying to do is provide some sense of the location of these children's graves and add another line of evidence to support the truth that survivors have been sharing for decades. We are using our skills as archaeologists to try to help the calls for justice and accountability. Our focus is on respecting the values Indigenous communities hold about their own past, ultimately working toward justice. Archaeology has a role to play in addressing these critical issues, helping gather evidence to support communities in their search for restitution (Montgomery & Supernant, 2022).

Archaeology is not the only part of anthropology that can support communities in this sacred and difficult work. Many communities want to collect testimony from their survivors but do not have experience conducting oral history interviews. My team has been asked by many of our community partners about how to conduct interviews, and we do our best to connect them with anthropologists, but there could certainly be more resources to support this community work. There is also an ongoing question about what happens after geophysical results detect potential unmarked graves. Some communities are considering forensic investigations, but that remains fraught for a variety of reasons. If communities decide this is the path to take, there will be a role for biological anthropologists to support Indigenous communities in this painful task.

In my community, the role of helper is an important one. Elders, when conducting ceremonies, always have assigned helpers to ease the task. I see archaeologists, and really all anthropologists, as potential helpers. However, this is not a situation where you can show up at a community and tell them you are going to help. You need to build relations of respect and trust to see if your skills can be of service. I am heartened by the upcoming generation of students who are eager to engage in this kind of work. It is not merely an academic pursuit for them; they are driven to effect meaningful change, to contribute positively to diverse communities.

I have spent the last several years helping find the graves of children who died in a genocide (Raycraft, 2022). Throughout that process, it has become clear to me that I am also a survivor of genocide. The fact that my father survived the foster care system and my great-grandmother survived residential school is a miracle. It has allowed me to be here and to continue to tell the painful and difficult truth of what happened to my community and to ensure it does not happen again. As someone who survived colonial violence of genocide, I can tell you that meeting violence with violence only causes more harm. As anthropologists, we must uphold our collective and shared humanity and condemn genocide in all its forms.

Even in this time when a sense of existential dread and impending doom pervades our society, I remain hopeful about the future because I believe in our collective power and resilience. The mere fact that I am standing here to speak to you today already reflects a different future than any that would have been conceived of by early anthropologists. They would not have thought that more than a hundred years after they were “saving” knowledge about our culture because we were doomed to disappear that we would still be here as Indigenous people, that we would still have many of our songs, ceremonies, dances, and traditions, that we would still have deep connections to the land and to each other. The architects of residential schools and similar policies also believed we were doomed to disappear, to become like them, and that we would be better off if we just succumbed to colonialism and genocide. But we did not. We survived. We are resilient. We are still here.

It is time for anthropologists to join us in seeking redress for the harms caused by the discipline and by colonization. You are uniquely positioned to be helpers if you can do the work of building good relations. You can assist in returning the knowledge stolen and researching the hidden truths of the past and present. You can work to change the discipline, so our voices are not dismissed or marginalized. You can help us build the future that humanity desperately needs.

The people who stole my father from his Métis mother and put him in foster care could not have imagined me today, speaking my truth, reweaving relations, and using the skills I have to support my community to heal. They never would have imagined my daughter, proud to be Métis, wearing her sash and ribbon skirt as she jigs. I am grateful to my ancestors who survived. I am also grateful to those who have provided this platform for me to share my perspectives. I could not be here without all those who work alongside me in my journey and are standing with me today. There is much work to be done to build a different, more hopeful future for my daughter's generation and those who come after her. Anthropology has a lot to give, but first, redress and accountability. First, restorative justice. First, truth. Then transition.

Let's do better this time.