“What residential school was, and still is, is a nightmare.” For greater than a century, Indigenous kids in Canada had been taken from their houses and despatched to residential colleges to forcibly assimilate them into white society. And hundreds had been by no means seen once more. Now, greater than 20 years after the final faculty shut down, searches for the stays of those misplaced kids are taking place throughout the nation. “There’s nothing on the surface, but once we interpret the data, we can see if we can find these children.” We adopted a crew of archaeologists who got here to the Muskowekwan First Nation to analyze what lies beneath the bottom. “There is unmarked graves there. They’re all over the place. But nothing has been done.” Here, some residential faculty survivors hope that scientific proof will disclose to the remainder of the world a fact they’ve lengthy identified. “These stories are real. I saw something in here. And people have never listened.” Harvey Desjarlais was taken to residential faculty when he was 6 1/2 years previous. “And I remember being locked in the dorm. I cried so much because of the harshness. Small boys’ dorm — this is where we were kept. They shave your head, cut off your braids. Right here, a boy hung himself. I found him hanging. He wasn’ t hanging. He was laying there. He was already —” Generations of Indigenous kids suffered bodily and sexual abuse contained in the boarding colleges. They had been established by the Canadian authorities and initially run by the Catholic Church. “This used to be the chapel over here. This is where we used to pray 10 times a day. They used to call us little savages. ‘You little savage. Your ceremonies, that’s paganism.’ That’s how they spoke to us.” After his years as a pupil, Harvey labored as the college’s caretaker for 22 years. Today, he nonetheless visits the grounds of the previous faculty, although it shut down in 1997. “I come here just about every day. I have a dream of elders. You know, like calling. And I know what they’re calling about. They’re our children.” “You look at your map. And you could just draw a circle so we could find out exactly where these graves are.” The First Nation has invited archaeologists to seek for unmarked graves, and survivor testimony will probably be essential. Elders have lengthy shared tales of what occurred at these colleges however had been hardly ever believed exterior their group. “We lived on top of the graves for many, many years. But we couldn’t do nothing. There’s a big hill over here — all graves, all graves.” “About the researchers coming here, it’s been a long time coming.” Laura Oochoo is Harvey’s longtime associate. She additionally went to the Muskowekwan Residential School. “I’m at a place where I’m trying to understand, what’s this all mean for — for all of us right now? People are angry with the finding of our kids. This horror, it’s living with that. They deserve to be honored and respected, you know? That’s all I think that they would want.” “I’m very confident that there is something there.” The archaeologists Terence Clark and Kisha Supernant are main the search effort. They’re utilizing ground-penetrating radar to find burial websites. The remainder of the crew is made up of graduate college students, together with Micaela Champagne, who, together with Kisha, is Indigenous. “So I’ve been an archaeologist now for about 20 years. And with Indigenous communities, they would prefer, often, to have less destructive methods, so ways to not disturb a lot of earth. So there’s a bunch of them. And that’s a 3-year-old.” “And it’s all in the same year.” “The work that we’re doing with the ground-penetrating radar is to locate children’s graves. And before we really get into that, we need to understand how many children we’re looking for.” Many of the information from this period are incomplete or have been destroyed, however the paperwork that stay include clues to some deaths and abuses. “There’s a couple sort of suspicious-y ones that are, like, 14 years old.” “Babies, it’s babies.” Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated residential colleges, and in a 2015 report, concluded that many kids died from malnourishment, illness and suicide. “This was a deliberate act to colonize, ‘to extinguish the Indian in the child.’ That’s a direct quote.” “The mastery of words.” “This was planned, it was callous, and abuse and death were known about.” “I was gang-raped by a gang in the school, you know? And after I went through all the turmoil of sexual assault, I became suicidal in school. I was 12 years old when I tried to commit suicide. A lot of us that came out of that school had a hard time.” Harvey’s come to the college to indicate researchers the place to look in particular person. “My name’s Harvey.” “I’m Terry.” “I was here since 1949.” “Wow.” “I went to school here 17 years, and I worked here another 22 years. From here, all the way this way, it has to be looked at. There was bodies all along, up to about the bottom, where the line is about there, just maybe past there.” “OK.” “All right, let’s maybe put it all down, and we’ll smudge before I put anything in the ground here.” “Sounds good.” “Archaeology has a very dark past about stealing Indigenous remains. And there was something in me that was telling me that this is something that I have to be a part of. The equipment’s actually quite heavy. It’s kind of representative of helping to shoulder some of that weight from those communities.” “So the ground-penetrating radar basically takes a electromagnetic wave and sends it down to the ground from a sensor at a particular frequency. So the higher the frequency, the tighter the wave. And it sends that down. And it’s basically measuring what’s reflected back.” After scanning the bottom for 4 days, the crew processes the info and stitches it collectively in 3D to see if the ensuing photographs present any indicators of kids’s stays. “From four and a half to seven and a half, there’s just a lot of stuff something going on.” “Something going on there, yeah.” “This is the type of shape that we have found. The color pattern, you can almost imagine a child lying on its side in that pit. We’ve had survivors tell us to look in this spot. There’s no other sort of natural phenomenon to explain why you’d have this oval pit underneath the surface. And then the fact that there are eight to 10 or 12, all of those things together, um, yeah.” “It’s about as certain as we can get. “Yeah.” “That’s heartbreaking.” “This is why we do it. It’s just — it shows the value of what we’re doing.” “And there’s thousands of these across the country. Thousands. People deserve answers, and they deserve justice.” This time, they’ve found two unmarked graves. But researchers say they look forward to finding over 80 extra at Muskowekwan. They nonetheless have massive swaths of land across the faculty left to scan. “It’s in our traditional belief that our ancestors are constantly walking beside us and with us to give us strength. We turned a corner, and there was the boiler room. The boiler room was used as a way to get rid of some of the remains and children. It was difficult, but I also needed to understand, as a granddaughter of a survivor, what she went through.” “We’re supposed to be these objective scientists, but there are these moments of emotion. Sometimes they’re joy, sometimes they’re sorrow, and everything in between.” “Underneath that grief and everything, you can sometimes feel relief.” After the bottom sonar identifies the place our bodies is perhaps buried, the First Nation hopes to have a conventional feast and ceremony to honor the youngsters who died on the faculty. The subsequent step is for the group to determine whether or not they need to unearth the stays. “Do you think that all this is giving closure to the era of residential school? I think so.” “I think so, yeah.” “It’s making the choice to heal away from the trauma, the abuse. We know who we are. We come from this Creator-given land. That’s who we are.”