Join the AIA for a fascinating evening as Kisha Supernant (University of Alberta) presents Finding the Children: Using Archaeology to Search for Unmarked Graves at Indian Residential School Sites in Canada.

This presentation will be given at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central/6pm Mountain/5pm Pacific.

In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, announced that 215 potential unmarked graves were located near the Kamloops Indian Residential School using ground-penetrating radar conducted by archaeologists. While this was not the first announcement of unmarked graves associated with Indian Residential Schools, it garnered national and international attention. The subsequent months saw significant commitments of funding from the government to support Indigenous communities who wanted to conduct their own searches. Many Indigenous communities turned to archaeologists to assist them in designing an approach to finding potential unmarked graves of their relatives. In this talk, Supernant provides an overview of how archaeologists have been working with Indigenous communities in Canada to locate potential grave sites and discuss the opportunities and challenges in this highly sensitive, deeply emotional work.